Film Review - Nuns vs. the Vatican

Lorena Luciano’s deeply unsettling documentary centers the testimony of former nuns confronting alleged abuse by celebrated priest and artist Marko Rupnik, exposing not merely the actions of one powerful man but an institutional culture in which obedience, spirituality and silence can become instruments of control.

The most disturbing thing about Nuns vs. the Vatican is not simply the abuse its subjects describe. It is the language through which that abuse was allegedly made possible. Faith. Obedience. Sacrifice. Spiritual surrender. Words that, within religious life, can represent devotion and profound personal conviction become something altogether more frightening when placed in the hands of a person capable of exploiting them. Director Lorena Luciano’s documentary understands that the central horror of this story lies precisely there: in the transformation of the sacred into a mechanism of power, and in what happens when women who have devoted themselves completely to God discover that the institution surrounding that devotion may be considerably more invested in protecting itself than protecting them.

At the center of the film is Gloria Branciani, a former nun who remained silent for roughly three decades before publicly accusing Slovenian Jesuit priest and internationally renowned religious artist Marko Rupnik of sexual, spiritual and psychological abuse. Rupnik was not an obscure cleric hidden on the margins of the Church. His mosaics adorn prominent Catholic sites around the world, including spaces closely associated with the Vatican, and his reputation as an artist brought him proximity to some of the Church’s highest circles. That stature hangs heavily over Luciano’s film because it raises a question that extends far beyond this individual case: what happens when spiritual authority, institutional prestige and artistic celebrity converge around someone accused of abusing the very people taught to trust him?

Luciano approaches that question by refusing to allow institutional procedure to overwhelm individual testimony. Gloria is not presented as evidence inside somebody else’s argument. She is the emotional center of the documentary, and the film gives her the time required to explain not only what she says occurred, but how a religious environment could make resisting it extraordinarily difficult. Her testimony describes a world in which the boundaries between spiritual guidance, personal obedience and coercion became dangerously blurred. What emerges is not the simplistic portrait of a woman who somehow failed to recognize wrongdoing, but a much more troubling examination of how systems of belief can be manipulated precisely because the believer takes those systems seriously.

That distinction is essential. Nuns vs. the Vatican does not position faith itself as the villain. Indeed, one of the documentary’s most affecting qualities is how carefully it distinguishes between religious conviction and the institutions or individuals capable of exploiting it. For Gloria and the other women who speak, faith was not incidental to their lives. It shaped their identity, their vocation, their understanding of sacrifice and their relationship to authority. The alleged violation therefore exists on more than a physical level. It is also spiritual. When someone uses the language of God, obedience or religious calling to manipulate another person, the damage reaches directly into the place where that person has located meaning.

The film becomes even stronger when Gloria reconnects with fellow former nun Mirjam Kovač. Their shared history transforms what might initially appear to be one woman’s isolated allegation into a larger pattern demanding scrutiny. There is something profoundly moving in watching women who were once made to feel alone discover that their experiences were not theirs alone to carry. Silence depends upon isolation. The moment two people begin comparing stories, the architecture sustaining that silence starts to weaken.

Luciano recognizes the dramatic importance of that shift and does not oversell it. There is no artificial triumph attached to disclosure. Speaking publicly does not erase decades of pain, restore lost years or immediately compel the institution being challenged to provide satisfying accountability. Instead, the documentary presents testimony as the beginning of another difficult process. Once silence is broken, the person speaking must contend with disbelief, bureaucracy, legal questions, institutional defensiveness and the immense psychological burden of repeatedly explaining experiences they may have spent years trying simply to survive.

Investigative journalist Federica Tourn becomes an important figure in that transition from private experience to public reckoning. Journalism functions here as a counterweight to institutional secrecy. The survivors possess testimony; the journalist begins connecting it to patterns, documentation and a broader structure of accountability. Luciano allows us to see how revelations that may eventually appear in headlines begin far less dramatically, with individuals deciding whether they can trust someone enough to tell the truth as they understand it.

The documentary is particularly effective when it examines the structures surrounding the allegations rather than treating them solely as the acts of one man. That broader view is where Nuns vs. the Vatican becomes more than a profile of a scandal. The film considers a hierarchical religious environment in which priests historically possess

enormous spiritual authority while women religious may simultaneously be expected to embrace obedience, humility and institutional loyalty. None of those concepts inherently produce abuse. But when power is distributed unequally and mechanisms for challenging it are weak, those values can become vulnerabilities.

Luciano repeatedly returns to the devastating possibility that the same qualities that make someone a committed religious sister — trust, discipline, sacrifice, obedience and willingness to place spiritual authority above personal desire — can also make her susceptible to someone determined to weaponize those virtues against her.

That insight separates Nuns vs. the Vatican from more conventional exposés of clerical abuse. The film is not simply asking why an accused perpetrator was allegedly protected. It is asking how the particular structure of female religious life can make abuse uniquely difficult to identify, name and report. A nun accusing a priest may not experience the conflict merely as one individual challenging another. She may experience it as challenging spiritual authority itself, her community, her vocation and perhaps even the understanding of God she has spent years building.

The consequences of that psychological collision are difficult to overstate, and Luciano wisely allows the women themselves to convey them rather than relying on sensational reconstruction. The film gains power from faces, pauses and memories. It does not need to dramatize what testimony already makes unbearable.

Filippo Piscopo’s cinematography reflects that restraint. Religious spaces, mosaics and ecclesiastical environments carry an unavoidable visual grandeur, and the documentary understands the unsettling contradiction between that beauty and the suffering being described. Rupnik’s religious artwork becomes particularly potent within that framework. These are images designed to communicate transcendence, holiness and communion. Once allegations against their creator become part of the viewer’s awareness, however, their presence becomes morally complicated.

That tension raises one of the documentary’s most provocative questions without requiring Luciano to state it explicitly: what happens to sacred art when the person who created it becomes the subject of serious allegations? Can the image be separated from the artist? Should institutions continue displaying work associated with someone accused of violating those same communities? And what does it communicate to survivors when those images remain in prominent religious spaces?

There is no simple answer, and the film is more compelling for resisting one.

The juxtaposition between sacred imagery and testimony creates some of the documentary’s strongest visual moments because it captures the contradiction at the heart of the entire story. An institution may speak beautifully about dignity, mercy and the protection of the vulnerable while behaving very differently when protecting those values becomes inconvenient.

Nuns vs. the Vatican is also careful about the difference between sin and crime, institutional discipline and external accountability. That distinction becomes increasingly important as the documentary explores how allegations of abuse can be handled within Church structures. Religious institutions possess their own laws, procedures and disciplinary mechanisms, yet survivors do not necessarily experience internal processes as equivalent to justice.

The title itself is deliberately confrontational. “Nuns vs. the Vatican” suggests an almost impossible imbalance: individual women standing against one of the oldest and most powerful religious institutions on Earth. Yet Luciano gradually complicates that framing. These women are not necessarily fighting Christianity, Catholicism or even the concept of religious life. Their challenge is directed toward systems they believe have failed to embody the moral principles they profess.

That makes their confrontation more painful, not less.

It is easy to criticize an institution one never loved. Far harder is demanding accountability from something that once gave your life meaning.

Gloria’s story therefore carries a particular form of grief. She is not simply describing something that was allegedly done to her. She is describing the collapse of trust in a world she entered precisely because she believed it to be sacred.

That betrayal gives the documentary emotional depth beyond investigative outrage.

Luciano’s editorial approach remains comparatively sober. There are moments when the density of institutional detail threatens to pull the film away from the immediacy of its subjects, and viewers already familiar with the long history of clerical abuse scandals may recognize some of the documentary’s broader conclusions. The patterns of institutional self-protection, secrecy and delayed accountability have unfortunately become familiar territory in nonfiction filmmaking.

But Nuns vs. the Vatican contributes something significant by focusing specifically on women religious, a group whose experiences of clerical abuse have received less mainstream attention than those involving children. These women occupy an unusual position within Catholic structures: adults, but adults operating under vows and spiritual hierarchies capable of creating profound power imbalances. That complexity deserves examination on its own terms.

The film is strongest whenever it remembers that institutional corruption is not ultimately an abstract concept. Institutions do not suffer.

People do.

A procedure can take years. A statement can be carefully worded. A canonical investigation can move slowly through layers of authority. Meanwhile, a person has to wake up every morning carrying what happened.

That disparity between institutional time and human time becomes one of the documentary’s quietest sources of anger.

The Vatican can wait.

Survivors already have.

And yet Nuns vs. the Vatican never becomes simply an exercise in rage. What ultimately gives the film its emotional force is the resilience of the women at its center. Their decision to speak is not portrayed as effortless empowerment. Courage here is neither glamorous nor clean. It arrives after fear, damage and decades of silence. It requires revisiting experiences that would be easier to bury. It means allowing strangers to examine the most painful pieces of a life.

Luciano understands that there is something profoundly radical in the simple act of naming what happened.

Silence isolates.

Testimony connects.

And once survivors begin finding one another, institutions built upon the expectation that each will remain alone face a fundamentally different kind of threat.

The film’s larger implications reach beyond Catholicism. Any organization that concentrates authority, prizes loyalty and possesses mechanisms for protecting its reputation can become vulnerable to similar failures. Religious language makes this particular case especially painful because the authority being invoked is not simply professional or social. It is divine.

When someone claims spiritual power over another person, resistance can feel like rebellion against God rather than against a human being.

Nuns vs. the Vatican exposes how dangerous that confusion can become.

What lingers after the documentary is not simply outrage at the allegations surrounding Marko Rupnik or frustration with Vatican bureaucracy. It is the voices of women who were taught obedience and eventually discovered that speaking might be the more faithful act.

There is a profound irony in that transformation. Institutions frequently treat dissent as disloyalty. Yet there are circumstances in which challenging an institution may be the clearest expression of loyalty to the values that institution claims to represent.

If the Church teaches that human beings possess inherent dignity, then demanding that it protect that dignity is not necessarily an attack upon the Church.

It may be an insistence that the Church become what it says it is.

That is the moral weight Luciano’s documentary carries into its final passages. Nuns vs. the Vatican does not offer the comforting closure of a scandal resolved and justice completed. The story remains unfinished, as stories involving large institutions so often do. Accountability moves slowly. Survivors continue living with consequences long after headlines move elsewhere.

But something irreversible has occurred.

The women have spoken.

Their stories now exist outside the walls that once contained them.

And however powerful an institution may be, silence becomes considerably harder to maintain once the people expected to keep it decide they no longer will.