Stop the slander, abused Kerala nun deserves dignity and justice

The church would do well to take a cue from the Holy See and defrock the rape-accused until he is proven not guilty in a court of law

The Nun. With its creepy, spooky atmospherics good enough to terrify audiences, the Warner Bros movie is minting money at the box office worldwide. Parallel to the netherworld nun story, there is a real-life nun drama unfolding in India's religio-political theatre. The OMG! reaction it has evoked among the public is good enough to leave a permanent scar in the minds of the Christian faithful.
For the uninitiated, here is a playback of the events that have taken the Catholic Church in Kerala by storm. The Church teaches that all nuns are mystically betrothed to Jesus Christ, so they are courteously referred to as Brides of Christ. One such bride from Kerala recently turned a telltale, accusing Franco Mulakkal, the powerful Roman Catholic Bishop of Jalandhar, of sexually abusing her 13 times between 2014 and 2016. It was in June 2013 Pope Francis appointed him Bishop of Jalandhar to oversees the Missionaries of Jesus congregation, which also has a convent in the Diocese of Palai in Kerala.
According to the nun's statement to the police on June 29, the bishop first raped her on May 5, 2014, at a guesthouse when he visited Kerala to attend a programme. The nun is part of the Kerala-based Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, an Eastern Catholic Church in union with Rome. 
Bishop Mulakkal maintains he is innocent and is being targeted by the nun, who was posted at the Mission of Jesus Sisters house in Jalandhar in 2016, because he had ordered an investigation into her alleged affair with the husband of her own cousin. However, a police team investigating the case says the nun's testimony is credible. In a report filed to the Kerala High Court, the police team says Bishop Mulakkal committed unnatural offence and rape repeatedly on the nun against her will and confined her to the guest room in the St Francis Mission Home in Kuravilangad.
In her 72-page police complaint, the nun says that when she tried to resist further rape attempts, she was tortured mentally. As the persecution became unbearable, she knocked on various doors, including the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church's head, Cardinal Mar George Alencherry. In January 2018 in Bengaluru, she handed over a letter to the Apostolic Nuncio of India, or Ambassador to the Pope, Giambattista Diquattro, explaining her predicament, but received no reply. In May 2018, she couriered letters to three church officials in Rome, including Pope Francis. In June 2018, she wrote to the Vatican State Secretary, Cardinal Pietro Parolin Segretario, but none of the officials acknowledged her letters.
What followed is an alleged church conspiracy to hush up the matter. Cardinal Alencherry vehemently denied knowledge of the alleged rape, but an audio recording later indicated the cardinal was in the know. When all attempts to silence the accuser through coercion failed, the bishop and diocese resorted to character assassination. Father Peter Kavumkal, the vicar-general of the Jalandhar diocese, said the congregation had planned to dismiss her on July 2 for sexual misconduct.
The case, however, took a curious turn when a prime witness for the bishop's complaint reportedly told investigating officials that Mulakkal intimidated him into writing the threatening letter. Meanwhile, Father James Erthayil of the congregation Carmelites of Mary Immaculate tried to intervene, telephoning the nun to offer land, building and safety if she dropped the case. The nun recorded the conversation and handed over the tape to the police. The nun says she has also received several death threats over the phone. She says an attempt was made on her life by a migrant worker, who disabled the brakes of her motorbike at the behest of a Mulakkal supporter.
A rape case filed under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code demands an immediate arrest and presenting of the accused in court. That has not happened in the nun's case. The investigation team has questioned the nun half-a-dozen times but dilly-dallied for months before hesitantly travelling to Jalandhar to question the accused just once. In a land of minority vote banks, political parties are known to suck up to religious leaders, especially in Kerala where the church plays a crucial role in deciding the fortunes of political parties. The media and people are aghast that the leftist dispensation, which claims to stand by the victims of atrocities against women, is dragging its feet on the bishop's arrest. But then what more do you expect from the Marxist-led government which is busy hushing up sexual charges against its own legislator? The opposition United Democratic Front is also under fire for maintaining a studied silence for fear of religious fallout. Religion and politics are in the same pickle in the state.
But I am not so naive to believe that the Christians of Kerala, who introduced the religion to India in AD52, would raise a banner of revolt against the arrest of a rape-accused priest, and would abandon any political party based on pastoral letters read out in churches. The protests against the accused bishop is snowballing with the aggrieved nuns and their supporters hitting the streets with an indefinite hunger strike. More nuns have come out with accusations and revelations that at least 20 nuns, fed up with the bishop's alleged sexual advances, have left the Missionaries of Jesus in the last five years. At the same time, the faithful are finding it difficult to explain to fellow humans why the church leaders, who raised an unprecedented nationwide outcry against the rape of two nuns by robbers in St Mary's Convent in Gajraula in Uttar Pradesh in 1990, remain mute spectators to the tears of another traumatised nun. Why have political parties conveniently forgotten their tall electoral commitments to empower women and fight for their rights? Do they fear a religious backlash?
"From childhood we have been taught to believe that the Church is our mother. But in the light of my experience I am beginning to think that the Church is a stepmother to women and laity," writes the devastated nun in a letter to the nuncio, a last-ditch attempt at seeking justice.
On his recent visit to Ireland, Pope Francis said the failure of ecclesiastical authorities to address sexual crimes remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community. The pontiff makes sense. The church in Kerala would do well to take a cue from the Holy See and defrock the rape-accused until he is proven not guilty in a court of law. The procrastination of political popes in the ruling left front is already hurting the diocese. 
-suresh@khaleejtimes.com

• India