A woman who spent 20 years in the IVE tells IDEAL her story and how they “manipulate” the devotees to obtain donations
Aurora, not her real name, was only 16 years old when a priest at the Institute of the Incarnate Word urged her to run away from her parents’ home in Brazil to start the novitiate. His family did not want him to make such a drastic decision at that young age, but one night he fled to Argentina with the priest.
“If God calls you, it’s okay to disobey,” he told me. I believed that I was special, that I had a vocation and that the Lord loved me. She was completely abducted”
, he tells IDEAL.
She soon found herself alone, vulnerable and without economic resources in a country where she did not speak the same language. I had doubts and every doubt was followed by a justification. “Satan tests God’s best warriors so that they fall” and a series of excuses that made this former nun bury part of her life and mental health in the religious order. The novitiate was very short, less than a year. Something unusual in the heart of the Church.
He soon began his missionary adventure in multiple destinations, including Spain. “I was Catholic and a parish girl, but not to wear a habit. If you said otherwise, they told you that you did not have enough experience to know if God is calling you, they see the vocation in you. Year after year the same story,” he adds.
She asked to leave three times officially, but ended up “coerced”. Until he became seriously ill. She fell into an episode of depression and she requested psychological assistance, choosing her own doctor. The request was rejected, the sister superior referred her to a psychiatrist, linked to another religious order with controversy for sectarian behavior. “I was not professional. I filtered our conversations to order and they overmedicated me. They told me to offer my suffering to God and I asked for a change of doctor, they denied it. They said that I was very bad and I was not able to make any decision for myself,” she says through tears on the other end of the phone.
“They sent me to a private clinic linked to that religious order and I was in treatment for three years. The sisters tried to initiate my incapacitation without telling me, behind my back. They called my brother to tell him that I was a violent person and that I had tried to commit suicide. It was not true. They didn’t let me talk to my family,” he says. Fortunately, his brother refused.
In between, she was transferred to a cloistered monastery to limit her contact with the outside world despite the fact that she was a missionary nun.
“They watched my calls, but after a lot of insistence I was able to talk to my brother and he told me what they told him”
Designates.
In 2020 she discovered that many of the psychological reports that the IVE assured did not exist and that she did not have disabling diseases. She managed to be expelled from the congregation and, recently, she has denounced the events in the autonomous community where she resides.
The woman, aware of what she has experienced, says that they are prepared and trained to “get money from the devotees” and attract people, young women for the female branch, the servants of the Lord and of the Virgin of Matará. “They forced us to ask for excessive donations, to beg and to lie that we had no resources. They manipulate them when the reality is that all our salary is administered by the order and to survive we have to get things by exploiting the parishioners,” he says.
She recovers psychologically from what she has experienced and, “disappointed”, has completely disassociated herself from the Church.
“I have lost many years of my life. When I leave there I find myself with nothing because I have no studies and I have contributed little. I have given my life to a cause that was a fraud”
Concludes.
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