VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Cinema Daily US [New York NY]
September 10, 2025
By Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi
Cinema, television and media have been exposing more and more the shady business inside the Catholic Church, whether it was through the Paramount+ series Murder of God’s Banker, Netflix’s miniseries Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi or the Academy Award-winning filmSpotlight. Through the years several dark sides of the Vatican have been exposed. For instance, the pedophile priest scandal broke about twenty years ago. But the question that rises is where were the nuns in all of this? The first reports of rapes by clergy and of secret abortions within the Catholic Church emerged in the early 1990s, but they were always kept hidden. Their story remained untold for decades.
Emmy-Award Winning filmmaker Lorena Luciano sets the record straight with her documentary Nuns vs. The Vatican, presented at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival. With her husband Filippo Piscopo — who has produced the film — she has dedicated her craft to investigative documentaries, tackling impactful topics such as environmental wrongdoing (Coal Rush) and the European refugee crisis (It Will Be Chaos). Nuns vs. The Vatican — executive produced by Mariska Hargitay and Trish Adlesic — adopts the same courageous style of reporting, to trigger a thunderous wake-up call on the violence perpetuated against consecrated women.
The figure that gets exposed for the horrors inflicted on the nuns is that of Marko Rupnik, a Slovenian Catholic priest and Jesuit theologian, who co-founded the Loyola Community with Sister Ivanka Hosta in Ljubljana. He was excommunicated in 2019, but Pope Francis lifted this penalty after Rupnik repented. This seemed to clash with the way the Holy Father was the first leader of the Catholic Church to publicly admit that nuns were sexually abused by priests and bishops. Eventually Pope Francis lifted the statute of limitations in the case of Fr. Marko Rupnik, to allow a canonical procedure to take place, which is still ongoing.
Rupnik’s rise to power in the Vatican goes back to the Papacy of John Paul II, who wanted to bring Eastern and Western Europe together, and a priest from Slovenia served the purpose. In parallel with the theological path, Rupnik is also a mosaic artist whose works have adorned churches, private mansions and family tombs. This has brought him millions of euros and the esteem of clerics who still take the side of the “Michelangelo” of the modern Catholic Church.
Rupnik is just one of the many men in power inside the ecclesiastical institution, that have brought hell on Earth to the women who innocently followed their evangelical calling and found themselves entangled in a harrowing experience. Some abusive priests were eventually sent to Treatment Centers, for prayer and penance. But Fr. Jesmond — a survivor of abuse, who ended up there as a victim rather than as a predator — defined them as residential centers. He claimed not to have seen any remorse from these sexual persecutors.
A key figure in the exposé against Marko Rupnik is the former nun Gloria, who broke 30 years of silence to bring allegations against the priest-artist. She met him in 1985 and recalls how he would subtly use his expertise on art history to lure his victims, explaining that the spiritual calling had to have also a physical expression. The abuse he inflicted on Gloria was carried out for almost 10 years and drove her to the brink of suicide. Another former nun, who has been influential in the investigation, is Mirjam. She recalls how she had joined the Loyola Community full of ideals, before Father Marko Rupnik forced her to embrace her sensuality against her will. Rupnik had the habit of manipulating the young and gullible minds of novices, pushing them into orgies, explaining that threesomes were Earthly expressions of the Holy Trinity. The Kamasutra became the new Scripture to be followed. If nuns got pregnant they were forced into carrying out abortions, in dangerous conditions, to keep the entire matter under wraps.
Besides Gloria and Mirjam, other interviewees in Nuns vs. The Vatican include Vatican commentator John Allen, investigative journalist Federica Tourn, nun Mary Lembo, psychologist Hans Zollner, American activist Barbara Dorris and Attorney advocate for the survivors of clergy abuse Laura Sgrò. There are also the testimonies of a former nun who uses the pseudonym of Klara, Vatican correspondent Nicole Winfield and Lucetta Scaraffia, who resigned from the Vatican’s women’s magazine over pushback to her coverage of nun abuse.
The cinéma vérité style of the film — that mixes observational footage, on-camera interviews, and archival material — leads spectators into a perturbing abyss that will stir feelings of rage, shock, repugnance and even numbness. Lorena Luciano’s documentary smashes double patriarchy, i.e. the system under which sexism and its various manifestations oppress women twice over. Not only does the filmmaker expose the sexual abuses carried out on the nuns, denouncing the male-domination inside the Vatican, but she also points the finger at how abuse within the Church has often been framed as an homosexual issue, in a way that women victims are made to disappear.
In this manner, Nuns vs. The Vatican becomes a sociological inquiry that unveils the psychology of nuns living in a covent. They are bound by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Speaking up would mean breaking all three. In the past, those who tried to vent and confide these issues to their superiors were punished, whilst letters of complaints sent to various archbishops were burnt to remove any future evidence. One of the victims reported the abuse to the archbishop of Ljubljana at the time, Alojzij Šuštar and to Tomáš Špidlík, a Jesuit priest who was later made a cardinal. But everything was kept mum.
These nuns besides experiencing physical turmoil, have been left psychologically damaged because they were betrayed by a community they considered their family, who did not protect them and humiliated them. The years of denial carried out by the Vatican have propagated the message that it was more important to safeguard the institution, rather than the lives of those who had been harmed by it.
Nuns vs. The Vatican is an exposition on society’s warped attribution of guilt. We witness how the victims and their families feel at fault, but the executors of abuse and those who kept silent do not feel accountable. Lorena Luciano’s documentary adjusts the perspective on the matter.
Final Grade: A
Photo Credits: Film2 Productions