Joy for the release of the nuns, who “share the suffering of the people”

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AFRICA/ETHIOPIA - Joy for the release of the nuns, who “share the suffering of the people”

Addis Ababa (Agenzia Fides) - “I spoke to her directly and found her to be very calm and generally in good shape. She still does not know the reasons why she was arrested, nor why they released her. After so much fear and concern, now is the time for happiness, there will be time to understand what happened and why our sister was imprisoned. This is what Mother Raffaella Pedrini, Superior General of the Ursuline Sisters of Gandino, tells Agenzia Fides of the good news, received on the afternoon of Sunday, January 16, of the release of Sister Abrehet Teserma. The nun had been arrested in Addis Ababa on November 30 by government police forces, along with five other sisters of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent (also released) and two deacons.

Mother Pedrini tells Agenzia Fides: “Having heard her directly, I can say with certainty that she is well and in good general condition. It follows that the sister and the people who shared her captivity were treated well. Sister Abrehet was imprisoned first in a courtyard of a police building and then she was transferred to a large room where she lived with a hundred people, all of them women, arrested in the same period. Our sister was the only nun, the others were very young girls”. The release comes at a time of possible change of scenery in the great country of the Horn of Africa, immersed for 14 months in a terrible war that began in the Tigray region and has spread to other areas. Since the days before Christmas, there have been timid signs of a partial cessation of hostilities and brutalities. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) rebels declared a unilateral ceasefire and unconditional withdrawal from the Amhara and Afar regions at the end of 2021. Meanwhile, the Nobel Prize Committee has clearly called on Prime Minister Abyi, winner of the coveted award in 2019, who “works to end the conflict, taking into account the special responsibilities that a Nobel laureate has”. “After moments of anguish and so much suffering - adds the Superior of the Ursulines of Gandino - we were finally able to thank the Lord for the liberation of our sister and of the other nuns. In the conversations that I had with our community in Ethiopia, we always felt the hope and, at the same time, the conviction of being part of a people and of sharing their sufferings, of living in full solidarity with so many brothers and sisters. In the next few days I will try to hear from our delegate, Sister Abrehet Cahasai, to try to get more information. We cannot accept that everything happens without an explanation of the reasons. According to what our nuns tell us, it will be difficult to obtain information, but we will insist because the affair cannot remain suspended: we demand answers”. (LA) (Agenzia Fides, 18/1/2022)

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Tamil Nadu, nun arrested on (false) charges of inciting suicide and conversion

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by Nirmala Carvalho

62-year-old Sister Sahaya Mary, in charge of a student hostel linked to the Sacred Heart Higher Secondary School in Michaelpatti, was arrested. Behind the arrest was the death by poisoning of a 17-year-old student. Social media have amplified and distorted the story. The young girl had lost her mother eight years ago and was the victim of harassment by her stepmother, a BJP supporter.

Delhi (AsiaNews) - Indian authorities have arrested a nun in charge of a hostel on charges of forced conversion, which culminated in the suicide of a minor student at the Sacred Heart Higher Secondary School in Michaelpatti, a village in the Thanjavur district (Kumbakonam diocese, Tamil Nadu).

The 17-year-old girl was a guest at the centre, whose management falls under the school administration. She poisoned herself in her room on 9 January last, dying after 10 days, despite attempts at treatment.

Because of the death, investigators detained 62-year-old Sister Sahaya Mary and charged her under sections 305 of the criminal code (aiding and abetting suicide of a minor), 511, 75 and 82 paragraph 1.

However, in the First Information Report drawn up by police officers who managed to speak with the victim before her death, there is no mention of her attempt to convert, a story that was allegedly circulated by local Hindu radical elements in order to stir up anger.

The nun belongs to the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, whose headquarters are in Pondicherry. The young woman took the poison on 9 January, but concealed the act and was hospitalised for continuous vomiting. The police registered the complaint on January 16, three days before her death on January 19. The officers arrested the nun, who lived in the compound and suffers from pronounced deafness among other things.

The police also committed a blatant irregularity by revealing the victim’s name [which we prefer to keep secret because she is a minor], which began to circulate in the media and on social networks. The girl did not want to return home because of the harassment suffered by her stepmother, a strong supporter of the BJP (the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, in power since 2014). In a moment of deep distress, she decided to poison herself in her room.

From a private affair, the story has become viral on social media and on the Internet, taking on a political drift with exploitation on several fronts, including the (unfounded) accusation of forced conversion.

Speaking to AsiaNews, Mgr Francis Anthonysamy, Bishop of Kumbakonam, expressed “great sorrow for the tragic death” of the girl, hoping that “justice will be done” for the nun who is currently in custody. Fr John Zacharias, legal representative of the diocese of Thanjavur, speaks of “false and prefabricated accusations” based on conversion attempts that never took place, because “she had only given hospitality” to a girl in difficulty. But the truth is emerging because “there is no proof whatsoever” of the minor’s attempt at forced conversion.

Santhanam SJ, a Jesuit lawyer with the National Lawyers Forum of Religious and Priests, recalls that “the victim lost her mother eight years ago” and her father “married another woman” who “harassed” the girl. For this reason, he concludes, “the young girl chose to stay with the nuns, even during the lockdown for Covid she did not want to go home for fear of being abused by her stepmother”.

Tale of two nuns: Strange coincidences of Abhaya and Kuravilangad nun trials

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The Sister Abhaya murder case and the alleged abuse of a nun of the Missionaries of Jesus congregation have many things in common.

In both the cases, the victims are nuns. The alleged crimes had taken place inside convents. The accused in both cases are people sworn to a life of celibacy. And forbidden desires were at the heart of both the crimes. The accused in both the cases had a common lawyer, too: B Raman Pillai.

The special judges trying the cases also demonstrated similar inclinations. Both – CBI Special Court judge K Sanilkumar and Additional Sessions Judge-I Gopakumar G – hung on to the flimsiest shred of evidence to deliver their verdicts.

The only point of difference was the side they chose to punish. Sanilkumar (in Abhaya case) punished the accused. Gopakumar, on the other hand, crushed the claims of the victim.

Thief’s honesty and nun’s consent

In the Abhaya case, virtually all the prosecution witnesses had turned hostile or died. The judge had only the testimony of a thief, Adacka Raju, to rely on. The judge called him an “unusual” witness but still he took the thief’s word at face value.

Adacka Raju, a witness in the Abhaya murder case. File photo: Manorama

Raju was the only person who had seen the accused Fr Kottoor sneak into St Pius X Convent on the night of Abhaya’s death (March 27, 1992). The Judge gave him a near mythical aura. “Raju may have been a thief, but he was and is an honest man, a simple person without the need to dissemble, a human being who became a professional thief by the force of circumstances, but a speaker of truth nonetheless,” the judge said in his 229-page order that sentenced Father Thomas M Kottoor and Sister Sephy to life imprisonment.

In the Kuravilangad case, where Bishop Mulakkal was accused of raping a nun 13 times, a profound aspect of law that would favour the victim, and that the Additional Sessions Judge himself was convinced would apply in the case, was inexplicably ignored.

Bishop Franco Mulakkal. File photo: Manorama

“As far as this case is concerned there are ample documentary and oral evidence to conclude that the accused was exercising real authority over the congregation and the nuns. He is definitely a person in authority,” the judge says in his 289-page order. Still, the judge ignored the legal significance of his own observation.

If sexual intercourse between such a “person in authority” and a nun under him is established, Indian Evidence Act (Section 114 A) says it is presumed there is no consent. “In such relationships, because of the high dependence of the woman on the person in power, it is easy to induce non-violent submission that can be misread as consent,” advocate B Joshi said. “This is why the law wanted the automatic application of the no-consent rule in such cases,” he said.

Therefore, after acknowledging that the Bishop had absolute authority over the nun, the question of consent does not arise in this case. Yet, Joshi said, the judge works to build up a case for consensual relationship. Observing that false accusations are on the rise in rape cases, the judge says: “Consensual sexual relationship sometimes takes the shape of sexual violence, when the relationship takes a beating.” the judge says in the order.

Sister Sephy and Fr Thomas Kottoor. File photo: Manorama

According to lawyer J Sandhya, this was a needless remark. “The defense has no such case. The defense argument is that the victim’s allegations are entirely false,” she said. However, she feels that the judge was right in not pursuing the consent question in a relationship between a figure of authority and a woman he has dominion over. “When the defense has not admitted to any sort of physical relationship, there is no need to invoke the presumption of no consent clause,” she said.

Photographer and a reporter

A major puzzle in the Sister Abhaya trial was whether the injuries found on Abhaya’s body were inflicted before her fall into the well or during the fall. The judge said at least two of them, nail marks on either side of the novice’s neck, were made before she fell into the well.

Problem was, these marks were seen only by a local photographer, Varghese Chacko, who was called by the police to take pictures of Abhaya’s body. The doctor, C Radhakrishnan, who did the autopsy has not recorded these marks. The judge, in his wisdom, found the photographer more reliable.

“The evidence of the photographer will prevail over the evidence of the doctor as the photographer was specifically deputed for capturing the close-up photographs of Sister Abhaya and his chance of noticing such injuries is more than that of the doctor,” the judgment said.

If the judge in the Abhaya case relied on a photographer, the judge in the nun rape case took the help of a journalist. The judge used a 2018 television interview of Sister Anupama, who is one of the nuns who supported the victim in her fight for justice, by Abhilash Mohan of Reporter TV to question the motives of the complainant.

Sisters Anupama, Josephine, Alphy, Neena Rose and Ancita take part in an agitation in Kochi on Sept 22, 2018. File photo: Manorama

The judge suggests that the hidden agenda behind the complaint is revealed in one of Sr Anupama’s sentences. “In answer to a question as to what gain the accused would get by provoking the sisters and thereby making the matter public, PW4 (Sr Anupama) answers that if he had settled the matter at the right time they would not have gone for the case,” the judge observes.

Sr Anupama is in fact referring to the Catholic Church and not the Bishop. She has not used the pronoun “he”. The nuns had by then taken their complaint not just to the Major Archbishop of the Syro-Malabar Church, Mar George Alencherry, but also to the Vatican. The settlement she alluded to was permission to shift a section of their St Francis Mission to the Bihar diocese where they could be free of Franco Mulakkal’s harassment. “After giving the letter to the Church, we waited in the hope that we would get some form of justice from some quarters,” Anupama says in the interview.

But the judge insinuates that the nuns were using the sexual abuse charge as a threat to force Mulakkal to concede some undue favours.

Unlikely confession and a fake charge

In the Abhaya case, the only evidence that remotely linked Fr Kottoor to Abhaya’s death was a confession he is said to have made to Kalarcode Venugopalan, a rights activist and a serial litigant.

Kalarcode had told the court that Kottoor had confided to him in the Kottayam Bishop’s House that he and Sr Sephy were like husband and wife. This sharing of an explosive secret seemed highly unlikely as Kalarcode was an absolute stranger to the priest. The confession was also made very late, 16 years after Abhaya’s death. Even the CBI had not included the confession in its remand application. The Bishop’s House, too, had no records of Kalarcode’s visit.

Fr Thomas Kottoor leaving a CBI Court after the verdict. Taken on Dec 23, 2020. File photo: Manorama

Even if there was such an affair, it did not mean anything either. But the judge found in this unverified confession of an affair the seeds of Abhaya’s murder. “The alleged sexual act of Sephy A3 (Sephy) and A1 (Kottoor) was the cause of the murder and the murder was the effect of the sexual act. It is in the light of this analysis that I have to appreciate the evidence of PW6 (Kalarcode),” the order said.

Sister Abhaya, a resident of Pius X convent in Kottayam, was found dead in the well of the convent on March 27, 1992.

In the Bishop Franco case, too, considerable value was given to a fake claim, but this time to undermine the victim’s character. The victim’s first cousin, Jaya, had filed a complaint alleging that the victim was having an affair with her husband. But later she conceded that she was lying, that she did it out of vendetta. It was on the basis of this false charge that Mulakkal had dictated action against the victim.

Jaya retracted her complaint in front of the judge, too. “It is true that PW16 (Jaya) had stuck to her stand that the allegations were false and concocted, aimed at taking revenge against PW1 (the victim),” the judge said in his order. While the judge in the Abhaya case willingly believed an unreliable witness, the judge in the Franco case exhibited a strong unwillingness to sympathetically respond to even information that favoured the victim.

“It is doubtful whether a lady of the stature of PW16 (Jaya) who is a teacher by profession would malign the reputation of her own husband, who is a lawyer practising at the Supreme Court of India, for a silly verbal brawl with PW1 (victim) and her family members,” the judge said.

Bishop Franco, however, is not subjected to such intense scrutiny. Another nun had also complained about Franco’s behaviour. She had said that the Bishop had put his hands on her shoulder and pulled her close to him. Given the court’s tendency to consider alleged transgressions in unrelated incidents as proof of general bad behaviour (for instance, the victim’s supposed fling with the husband of her first cousin), the second nun’s charge should have counted as evidence of Franco’s serial abuse.

Instead, the court just brushes it away. “The behaviour of the accused to PW8 (the second nun) is not a relevant issue in this trial,” the order says.

Hymenoplasty and accessory nipple

In both the cases, the judges seemed inclined to suspect the morals of the women involved. In one case, it was the accused (Sr Sephy) and in the other, the victim.

Sephy’s admission during interrogation that she had “shared a bed with a relative” was considered proof of her admission of guilt. The judgment endorsed the prosecution evidence that Sr Sephy had undergone hymenoplasty (the reconstitution of hymen) right before she was arrested by the CBI in 2008.

“It is clear that A3 (Sephy) made an attempt, and a very successful attempt at that, to give the fact of the case an appearance favourable to herself,” the judge noted.

Sr Sephy. File photo: Manorama

In the Franco trial, even after Jaya said she had twisted facts, the judge just could not shake off the belief that the victim had an “accessory nipple”. Even the examining doctor’s testimony was not enough to disabuse the judge of the notion.

The doctor, a Professor in Obstetrics Gynecologist at the Kottayam Medical College Hospital, had said she did not find any accessory nipple on the victim. So she was asked whether the extra nipples can be removed easily by a surgical procedure without leaving any marks.

The doctor said she had “not heard about super accessory nipple surgery or third nipple surgery being done by plastic surgeons for removing the third nipple without leaving any mark”.

The judge was not satisfied. “The evidence of PW21 (doctor) is inconclusive as to whether PW1 had undergone any surgical procedure for removing her accessory nipple.”

(Onmanorama had talked to senior lawyers J Sandhya, B Joshi, Ninan John and Ramaswamy Pillai for this report)

TV: Sausage rolls and life as a nun? All in the line of duty for Vicky McClure in new show Trigger Point

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Vicky McClure familiarised herself with the job of being a bomb disposal expert for the Metropolitan Police.She now knows how much pressure is involved: it’s almost up there with being responsible for an entire TV series.

Line Of Duty star McClure filmed new ITV thriller series Trigger Point during the pandemic, when a Covid diagnosis would have shut down filming for weeks.

“I was determined not to shut the show down or disrupt filming,” she says. “It’s impossible to avoid coronavirus as we all know, so basically my weekends were spent indoors. I really missed that time in the industry when we’d go out for drinks after a big week – that’s all gone now because you just can’t take that Covid risk.

“I was really careful to not be out and about, but I did go to the GQ Awards, because I had to have one night out while I was in London. That was followed by five days of anxiety worrying I had caught it, but I hadn’t.

“I felt very lucky to hold down a show like this, it’s what you dream of as a young actor. I wanted to do them all proud but I didn’t want to affect people’s jobs or health. It’s a lot of responsibility when you can’t be replaced, so I lived like a nun!”

The filming of Trigger Point may have been difficult but that only served to bring the cast and crew closer together. And to celebrate her dream roll, McClure awarded workers on the set with… sausage rolls!

“It was amazing because I really felt like a crew member,” she adds. “I organised a big Greggs delivery at the end of the shoot for everyone, that’s how much I loved them! I had such a special time with everyone.”

As part of the action-packed show McClure plays Lana Washington, a bomb disposal operative, or “expo”, who is in a race against time to stop a campaign of terror in London.

Those involve some difficult car chases, which McClure was keen to do herself, thanks to her previous driving experience on another iconic show.

“I was really keen to do the action scenes that come with the show, and I knew that playing an expo would be quite a challenge physically. I didn’t actually expect it to be quite as challenging as it was, but I got through it and I did most of it myself.

“I was really game. The few things that I didn’t do are mainly scenes with erratic driving because of Covid restrictions, even though I always say, ‘Didn’t you see me in Top Gear? I know what I’m doing!’”

Trigger Point, ITV, tonight, 9pm

Pope Francis Praises Mount Rainier Nun Who Started LGBTQ+ Ministry

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Courtesy of Branislav Wáclav/Aktuality.sk

A nun who started a long-running Catholic ministry in Mount Rainier that focuses on LGBTQ+ outreach has received historic praise from Pope Francis.

Founded in 1977, New Ways Ministry has long advocated for equal treatment of LGBTQ+ Catholics and a reconciliation between the church and the community.

In a handwritten letter sent in December, Pope Francis thanked co-founder Sister Jeannine Gramick for her 50 years of “closeness, compassion and tenderness.”

“You have not been afraid of ‘closeness,’ and in getting close you did it ‘suffering with’ [compassion] and without condemning anyone, but with the ‘tenderness’ of a sister and a mother,” he wrote.

The letter, written in the pope’s native Spanish, represents a shift for the Catholic Church, which holds that LGBTQ+ people are “objectively disordered.” In an extremely rare move, the Vatican publicly barred Sister Jeannine and co-founder Father Robert Nugent from ministry in 1999, calling their LGBTQ+ friendly teachings “erroneous and dangerous.”

Gramick told the Hyattsville Wire she was surprised when she received the letter from Pope Francis although she had recently written to him about celebrating 50 years being an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community within the Catholic Church.

Born and raised in Philadelphia where she attended Catholic school, Gramick said the nuns at her school had a big influence on her because they were kind and loving and she wanted to emulate that and be a channel for god’s love to others.

Gramick entered the convent in Baltimore in 1960 and later attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. Her friendship with a gay man there inspired her to become an advocate for gay rights in the Catholic Church.

In 1976, she moved to Mount Rainier to work with the Quixote Center, a Catholic peace and justice center, now located in Greenbelt. Gramick began workshops on gay rights for the Catholic community, as well as working on causes for the poor and marginalized. A year later she founded New Ways Ministry and has been a resident of Mount Rainier ever since.

“I like the area because it’s eco-friendly, we are a nuclear-free zone, we have lots of trees, and the city encourages us to plant trees,” Gramick told the Wire. “I like it because of the people. They are people who are really attuned to justice. It’s a wonderful community to live in.”

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