Today, different media in Spain echoed the story of the former Sister Fidelis, thus joining many victims around the world who denounce exactly the same thing. Without going any further, in Mendoza, Argentina, the SSVM are on trial for abandonment of person and moral damages of the former Sr. Piaghe, who was also more than 25 years and got sick inside. Today she must face the courts without her superiors having the slightest charity to face the damages they caused. In Spain they interviewed the former Sister Fidelis who had the courage to tell us her story. Here we replicate that of the media “La voz de Galicia”, although the news has been published in different media in Spain.
A woman who was in the “servants” of the congregation of the Incarnate Word denounces the precariousness faced by those who leave the habit
She left her name and began to call herself Esposa Fidelis, within the congregation she entered when she was just 18 years old. A year earlier, when he went to Mass for the youth group where he had made friends, he had confessed to the priest of his parish that “I wanted to serve Christ but I didn’t know how.” From then on, “the priests of the Incarnate Word began to look at you as the chosen girl. Not only with me, with a lot. The father looks at you, calls you, closes the door of the office and tells you: I see something in you, you are ready to make a retreat. I had made communion and confirmation, I went to Mass from time to time but at that time I did not feel called by God, far from it, but I thought it was important.”
Wife Fidelis, as she prefers to be called in this report, recounts how she entered the “female branch of the religious family” of the Institute of the Incarnate Word, called Servants of the Lord and of the Virgin of Matará. Founded in 1988 in Argentina and already spread to 44 countries, according to its own data, they are dedicated to serving Catholic priests in different destinations. In Spain, Wife Fidelis, originally from Brazil, was in the Canary Islands and Catalonia, before leaving the order, twenty years later.
After breaking off the relationship with her parents, who were opposed to her choosing the life of a nun, she entered the convent. “For us, the first act of courage, the greatest you can do before God, is against your own blood parents, your own family,” says who, since then, has repeated a daily routine. “All the years of religious that I have lived, from the first moment, I got up at six in the morning, and after Mass and adoration, I had to clean, cook, sew, iron. Whatever the priest asked. On weekends I gave catechesis to the children.”
Slavery of Love
According to the Institute of the Incarnate Word, which this newspaper contacted without obtaining a response, “the sisters dedicate their whole lives to prayer, penance and contemplation” and to “slavery of will and love” with “the offering of all our goods and ourselves.” “Your whole world is there, with a very rigid schedule, established to do all the same thing, at the same time. Every day is the same and you are obliged to go to confession once a week.”
Until the age of 38, Wife Fidelis served within the convents. At that age he managed to make his renunciation of religious life effective. “I left when I was 38 years old, I never worked in my life, I have no studies, only theological studies that, at least if they were valid, if I had a valid degree, I could start from there, but for the world I have not studied anything,” he explains. “It was like I was being transported from one planet to another. I left without knowing how to open a bank account, without friendships, without relationships with anyone.” Little by little he understood that he had never contributed to social security, that he did not have the right to unemployment or even a health card. When she was dismissed from the convent, she recalls, she was given only 500 euros.
“There was nothing else to do. Just wait for death, because death would take me to heaven.”
“This case is similar to that of seven other people who belonged to that congregation,” says Juantxo Domínguez, president of the Network for the Prevention of Sectarianism and Abuse of Weakness (Redune), which advises Esposa Fidelis and the other people to take their cases to court. “Those who come cannot report because they stay on the street. In the end they work, work and work without social security and they will be like that until they die. It is a situation that happens in the ecclesiastical sphere, whether Catholic or Evangelical, and institutional.” The lawsuit “focuses, on the one hand, on the aspect of not having contributed to Social Security and, on the other, on the coercion not to abandon the order”.
“It was horrible, horrible. I never imagined that I would be hungry, cold and stay until three in the morning without knowing where to sleep. I took care of the grandmother of an acquaintance and in the pandemic I was welcomed by another religious congregation that let me live in a room without paying. But I didn’t have money for food either, or anything,” he recalls. “I have not wanted to have any more contact with the Incarnate Word. Now I am trying to sue them for denying that there was an employment relationship and then saying, without my consent, that I had been self-employed for the last few years, when I was still a nun. And all the years that I have not contributed? I have nothing from these years, what did I earn, I haven’t won anything. A few years ago I tried to sue for damages and moral damages, with a court-appointed lawyer, but I have no answer. I will do what I can.”
Resignation and silence
The first time he tried to resign happened before he made his first vows. The superior of the convent sent her on a retreat, she says, from where she left convinced that “I was paying for my sins and there was nothing else to do. Just wait for death because death would take me to heaven.” He made his first vows at the age of 19 and renewed them annually. In 2004, in Tenerife, she did not want to make her perpetual vows, Wife Fidelis maintains, and she was assigned to a monastery of silence, “so that God would show me that I had a vocation”.
“We did not have a public health card. They treated us in a private mutual insurance company, to prevent us from going to a hospital”
For several years the resignation before the superior, the confinement in monasteries and the reunion in the convent were repeated, even if it was in different convents. “I was getting sadder and sadder, I stopped eating and sleeping. I had seizures during the nights. I said to myself: this is the result of living a life that is not yours.” Her state of health continued to deteriorate and she was sent to the “provincial house of the congregation in Barcelona, where the major superior was. They made me leave with what I was wearing.” He was given three months’ sabbatical to recover. “They said to me, ‘Did Jesus Christ abandon you when he was on the cross?’ He died for you, and you, because you are sad, are you going to abandon him?” By then he was “just over thirty years old”. The reiteration of this conduct is what could serve, in a lawsuit, to demonstrate the “coercion” pointed out by RedUne.
His health worsened and he began to see a psychiatrist in a private practice. “More depressive sisters went to the same psychiatrist,” she says. “We did not have a public health card. They treated us in a private mutual, to prevent us from going to a public hospital and to have us more controlled. I had been suffering from depression since 2009 and it was only in 2014 that they decided to take me to a psychiatrist. She was already surrendered, without the desire to speak, without the strength to fight. I’m talking only about my case.” After going to a hospital, where she said she had ingested enough pills to take her own life and being classified as a possible suicide, Wife Fidelis managed, but not before going through solitary confinement in monasteries again, that the superior allowed her to leave.
“It’s hard to remain a believer, but I’m not going to deny the existence of God because I’m too smart for that. It is not a question of denying, but the relationship with God is wounded. She is totally injured. The spiritual sounds like the Incarnate Word to me and entering a church is like reliving a trauma. Every time I try to enter a church, I end up in a crisis of rage, and I prefer to leave it,” says Wife Fidelis. “When I think back to my youth, I see that I have lost my life. The only dream I had clear was to have a family, to have children”
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