Back in 2017 when Mariska Hargitay and her producing partner Trish Adlesic (along with co-director Geeta Gandbhir) made “I Am Evidence,” it wasn’t what one might’ve expected of an issue-driven documentary with a celebrity endorsement. The “Law and Order: SVU” star took what she had picked up over the years from playing Olivia Benson, being approached by both real cops and survivors of sexual abuse, to shed light on a particularly dark corner of the criminal justice system, an ever-growing pile of rape kits that were collected and never investigated at police stations across the country. The film was eye-opening not only because of the horrific nature of the cases themselves or the lack of urgency felt around them at an administrative level, but the approach that took a good hard look at the process of bringing such cases forward with all the potential systemic obstacles that prevent justice from being served.
Hargitay and Adlesic don’t appear to be as overtly involved in Lorena Luciano’s “Nuns Vs. the Vatican,” but it does bear their strong imprimatur beyond lending their names for support as executive producers when it takes such a sharp angle on sexual abuse jurisprudence that would’ve been likely overlooked otherwise. Given all the attention to cases of clergy abusing young boys in their purview the past few years, it is natural to assume from the film’s title that the film might concern the sisters’ role in bringing those crimes to light, but Luciano suggests that the scandal overshadowed an equally insidious practice of priests using their position as men of God to abuse nuns to the point that it could be more easily swept under the rug.
Although the film nods to incidents around the world – enough for an international coalition to form to confront the crimes – Luciano hones in on Marko Rupnik, a Jesuit priest in Slovenia who was ultimately disgraced but not entirely dismissed by the Catholic Church even after several nuns testified to being abused as part of his flock. However, to even get to the point of reporting Rupnik’s crimes, let alone applying the pressure publicly and privately to knock him from his perch, the film impressively illustrates how difficult it is for people to trust one another and everything to properly align when there’s such a cloak of secrecy over the Church’s procedures in general, not to mention the accompanying feeling of shame or disillusionment that any survivors might have. Simply setting up a meeting between Gloria, a former nun at Rupnik’s Loyola Community, and reporter Federica Tourn, who had doggedly pursued coverage of the case, after the two clearly share a common cause appears next to impossible, and the practical challenges to mounting a response that can’t be ignored by the Church are treated as importantly as the emotional considerations for the nuns.
Luciano has an unusually cinematic central figure to build a nonfiction legal drama around when there may be no trial to observe and the process may be slow-moving, but Rupnik was an artist in addition to being a priest and his mosaics lined walls of various churches including the Vatican itself. The film does well to express what a singular figure Rupnik was to become untouchable within the Church, perfectly placed geographically to become a symbol of Pope John Paul II’s push to bridge Eastern and Western strands of Catholicism and quite literally leaving his mark around the world with his ornate art meant to last for an eternity. It doesn’t need to ever be articulated explicitly that his image is chipped away at by a growing coalition of survivors that come to understand they were not alone, not necessarily of himself within the Church where in a literal sense his mosaics remain even after the allegations against him become undeniable and professionally an eventual expulsion only ever seems to extend so far and he finds refuge in smaller regional convents, but instead one propagated over centuries that equates men of the cloth with the god they claim to serve and presumes that to go against them is to take on the Almighty and amongst all that “Nuns Vs. the Vatican” exposes, it’s that those made to feel marginalized have power too.
“Nuns Vs. The Vatican” will be available to stream on the DOC NYC virtual platform through November 30th.