NEW YORK (NY)
America [New York NY]
January 9, 2026
By Brigid McCabe
Making a film that details accusations of the sexual and spiritual abuse of nuns in the Catholic Church while maintaining a message of hope is no easy feat. Yet this is the very challenge that the Italian filmmaker Lorena Luciano took on with her new documentary “Nuns vs. the Vatican.”
Making its worldwide debut in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, the documentary focuses on the abuse of women religious in the Catholic Church at the hands of male clergy. The film features testimonies and commentary from a variety of women who are raising awareness about clerical abuse in the Catholic Church. These voices include journalists Federica Tourn and Lucetta Scaraffia, activist Barbara Dorris and attorney Laura Sgrò. Mariska Hargitay, famous for her role as Detective Olivia Benson on the NBC show “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” serves as an executive producer.
“Nuns vs. the Vatican” prominently features Gloria Branciani, the former nun who publicly accused Father Marko Rupnik, a former Jesuit, of sexual and spiritual abuse. On Dec. 8, 2025, America spoke with Ms. Branciani along with Ms. Luciano, the director, who also served as a translator for Ms. Branciani in the interview.
When asked about her motivation for the project, Ms. Luciano discussed her journey toward identifying a pervasive and systemic abuse problem in the Catholic Church that was affecting women religious in a particularly damaging way. Growing up in Italy, she was surrounded by the influence of the Catholic Church. She described having an “epiphany” while reading an article by Ms. Scaraffia, who was the founder and editor-in-chief of the Vatican publication Women, Church, World from 2012 to 2019.
Ms. Scaraffia’s attempts to expose clerical abuse prompted Ms. Luciano to engage in her own investigation, especially as an Italian woman herself. “This is Italy, home to the Vatican… The idea that our culture is so referential to an institution that is the oldest and the most revered, especially in our country, pushed me to dig into it,” she said. But despite having noted Ms. Scaraffia’s alarm bells, what Ms. Luciano found still shocked her. “I couldn’t expect to find such a humanity that had been oppressed—systematically silenced.”
Ms. Luciano described encountering a great many survivors who “felt like silos,” isolated by their trauma and the lack of response from the church. It was this dynamic that motivated her to make the film: “It became…a mission to do something that could speak for everyone, to say …nobody is alone in this terrible trauma. And that was really the idea…to create a platform so that people can recognize themselves in someone else’s story.”
When discussing her decision to be featured in the film, Ms. Branciani also spoke about the loneliness of victimhood, and explained how the film became an empowering opportunity to “walk a path that would allow [her] to step out of the role of being a victim.”
Ms. Branciani developed a relationship with Father Rupnik while serving as a religious sister in the Loyola Community in Ljubljana, Slovenia—a Catholic congregation co-founded by Father Rupnik. According to Ms. Branciani, she reported Father Rupnik for sexual abuse in the 1990s but was dismissed and belittled by her mother superior and other church leaders at the time.
Before accusations of abuse exposed Father Rupnik to controversy and public shame, he had enjoyed widespread attention and acclaim for his tile mosaics. In the documentary, Ms. Branciani claims the creation of this artwork was directly tied to the sexual and spiritual abuse she endured. She alleges that Father Rupnik asked her to pose as a model for his artwork—a request that resulted in unwanted sexual advances. Ms. Branciani also claims that Father Rupnik forced her and another sister to engage in three-way sexual acts, justified by him as embodying the “image of the holy trinity.”
Ms. Branciani’s discussions with Federica Tourn, the journalist, empowered her to revisit the past after several decades, and in late 2023, she went public with her identity. The film covers the highly publicized press conference in early 2024 in which Ms. Branciani spoke openly about the abuse she says she endured as a religious sister.
This decision to go public with her story is explored with care and compassion in “Nuns v. the Vatican.” Throughout the film, Ms. Branciani is clearly struggling with the immense emotional weight of the abuse, even decades after she was reportedly urged by other religious to leave the Sisters of the Loyola Community in 1994.
Yet Ms. Branciani spoke to America about how participating in the documentary allowed her to find new identity and strength. “When…you’re confined to be a victim, you only see yourself in relation…to the perpetrator. And this way, you keep giving power to the abuser,” she said. But sharing her story on her own terms transformed her into her own advocate, thus allowing her to reclaim a sense of self-ownership. “[O]nce you step out of the role of being a victim, something melts, so you’re not trapped anymore…. You become alive again.”
This process of becoming “alive again” has been aided by the support system of women who have rallied around Ms. Branciani. The film shows her reuniting with Mirjam Kovac, another former nun and alleged victim of Father Rupnik from the Loyola Community. Given that Ms. Branciani’s decision to leave the community alienated her from the other sisters, the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and find strength in new relationships was critical in her journey toward healing. As she put it, “abuse cannot be overcome by yourself.”
While Ms. Branciani spoke about the film as a personal journey, she also emphasized the extent to which the purpose of the documentary was bigger than sharing one person’s story. Both she and Ms. Luciano discussed clerical abuse as a pervasive and systemic issue that leaves women in the church particularly vulnerable to mistreatment. Though her trauma resulted from one individual’s actions, she experienced “the church as a context where abuse can happen.”
The women expressed frustration with the current system of investigation and accountability. Ms. Luciano in particular criticized the current process of church leaders holding “ecclesiastical trials dealing with abuse” without “allowing all victims to be part of the trial.” Similarly, Ms. Luciano identified the “bystander” problem, claiming that Catholics should be more attuned to how faithful members of the church can become complicit in the cover-up of abuse through their own ignorance and denial.
But despite their criticisms of the current accountability process, the women made it clear that they are not trying to destroy or undermine the church. Rather, Ms. Luciano insisted that “the church will not be able to save itself” by denying the pain it has been capable of inflicting. The only way for the Catholic Church to move forward, in her perspective, is by acknowledging the pain it has inflicted and working to prevent this damage from happening again.
In the case of Ms. Branciani and Father Rupnik, there has been a lack of definitive resolution. The priest was expelled from the Society of Jesus in 2023 but was then incardinated as a priest in the Diocese of Koper, Slovenia, later that year. In a public statement addressing the acceptance of Father Rupnik into the Diocese of Koper, the diocese’s vicar general Slavko Rebec explained that this decision was due to “the fact that no judicial sentence had been passed on Father Rupnik.”
During his extensive career as an artist, Father Rupnik’s tile mosaics were featured in churches around the world. Though some places, like the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary in Lourdes, France, have chosen to cover these mosaics, they are still openly on display in the Redemptoris Mater Chapel in the Vatican, and a number of churches and religious buildings in various countries and cities.
The ongoing controversy regarding Father Rupnik’s status in the Catholic Church has not prevented Ms. Branciani from attempting to move forward with her life. Though the abuse she suffered was particularly painful because it preyed on her faith, she said she has worked to maintain a strong sense of spirituality and a personal connection with God. “The relationship with the divine is within us,” she said. “[I have] a direct relationship with God, and nobody else can take that away.”
“Nuns vs. the Vatican” is currently being screened for select audiences.