VATICAN CITY (RNS) — A former nun in Slovenia, one of five witnesses in the sex abuse trial of the Rev. Marko Rupnik, an ex-Jesuit priest and artist, recently detailed what she claims was sexual and psychological abuse that Rupnik subjected her to for years.
The woman, who spoke to Religion News Service on the condition that she would be identified as Klara, belonged to the Loyola community of Mengeš, which Rupnik co-founded. The allegations against Rupnik, an influential figure in the church whose artwork is displayed in more than 200 sacred sites around the world, has prompted complaints from Catholics about the continued lack of accountability in the church, as well as the underreporting of sexual, psychological and physical abuse of religious sisters.
While Rupnik’s trial continues at the Vatican, the Jesuit order expelled Rupnik in 2023.
Klara said she met Rupnik in 1980, when she was a 16-year-old intern at a clinic in Slovenia where Rupnik was being treated. The two started talking about her Catholic faith, and he invited her to join meetings of the Christian Life Community, a lay association that follows the spiritual principles of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order.
She said Rupnik took an active role in the meetings, instructing its two dozen members — mostly young people from the Slovenian countryside — on the Catholic faith and theology. “He was a man who knew how to draw people in,” Klara said, “and he knew that he had a great power even when it came to influencing people’s psychology.”
Klara said Rupnik’s teaching sometimes strayed from official Catholic doctrine and that he would instill doubts about her vocation with Ignatian approaches to decision-making and discernment. Despite the doubt he nurtured, she said, Rupnik encouraged her to begin the process of becoming a nun.
“The year before joining the community I had an engagement proposal from a man whom I had known for a few years,” Klara said. In 1987, the nuns of the community urged her to go to Rome, where Rupnik sometimes lived, to talk to him about her doubts. She claimed that Rupnik told her sternly as they walked in a Roman park that if she didn’t choose to be a part of the community, she was choosing to not have Christ in her life.
Saying she “was already so subjugated at that time,” she said she accepted that becoming a nun was her only choice. She stayed at a house in Ljubljana with another novice not far from the Jesuit house. Klara said that Rupnik would sometimes visit for dinner. “He started telling me that I was missing something, that he was — so to speak — my savior, that he would give me what I was missing,” she said.
She alleged that Rupnik repeatedly invited her into the bathroom where he was masturbating and asked her to perform oral sex on him, Klara said. “He would always say that he only did this for me,” she said, but Klara believed that other women had also had the same advances. After the abuse, “he would always repeat to me: ‘you must never speak of this with anyone,’” Klara said. “From that very first moment I was overtaken by fear, and I didn’t dare to speak.”
In September 1987, Klara said, she joined the community. She was invited to help Rupnik guide the spiritual exercises for youth groups, and she claimed he would often invite her into his room where, she said, he would abuse her sexually. One day, while hearing the sisters’ confessions, Rupnik told Klara he would like to have another woman join for sex, Klara told RNS.
“He spoke to me about threesomes, and he said he had had experiences with other women,” Klara said. Two years after she joined the community, Klara said she was told to go to Rome to visit a woman who lived in southern Italy and was a close friend of Rupnik, who. when Klara visited fantasized about the two women sharing Rupnik’s sperm. “I was so shocked when she told me these things, and I imagined them … it was a complete horror within me and I froze. I later understood that Rupnik sent me there to convince me to have a threesome with him.”
Klara said that her stunned reaction made it clear that she was not interested. “From that moment on, I was worthless to him,” she said.
Marko Rupnik in a video from 2022. (Video screen grab)
During the spiritual exercises at the community, believers are asked to look deep within themselves and into their motivations. Klara said she began to ponder everything that had happened to her. “During that time everything emerged, and I felt that I no longer knew what was wrong and what was right, what is moral and what is immoral, what church teaching is valid and what isn’t,” she said. Klara said she asked to meet with Rupnik and confront him about the alleged physical and psychological abuse.
“After saying all of this, he looked at me and said: ‘I don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t know anything, it’s your problem.’ I was so pained and stunned at that moment, that someone could play with you, use you and then pretend it never happened,” Klara said.
When she returned to the community, Klara said she felt as if she were an outcast. She described the community as a place where obtaining the favor of the mother superior, Sr. Ivanka Hosta, was the only way to have access to education or basic necessities. For the next five years, Klara worked in schools and hospitals, eventually rising to head nurse in a hospital in Jerusalem, despite her lack of experience in the field.
When she returned to Slovenia, she confessed her sense of being disoriented and unhappy in the community to a priest, who suggested she should leave. In 1999, she left the community and wrote a letter to Hosta stating, “I had entered the community because of Rupnik, and I left it for me, for my life.”
On Oct. 20, 2023, the diocese of Ljubljana announced the community was being shut down “due to grave issues regarding the exercise of authority and coexistence in the community.” That same year, Pope Francis lifted the statute of limitations on the crimes Rupnik was accused of, allowing Vatican prosecutors to begin an investigation and trial. Rupnik has not made a public statement responding to the charges; the Vatican has said that it considers him innocent until proved guilty
Klara joined other witnesses, Gloria Branciani, Mirjam Kovac and Sr. Samuelle (who has not made her last name public), in denouncing Rupnik and the culture of abuse in the Loyola community. The women have been interviewed by the Vatican about the case, but they are not informed about the current state of the trial.
In a letter sent on March 25 to 20 women who suffered alleged abuse by Rupnik, the Jesuit order offered to start “a process of healing.” Holy sites around the world are considering whether to cover or remove the mosaics of the disgraced artist, but so far only the Marian shrine at Lourdes and the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C., have complied.