Revision as of 07:40, 27 June 2021

YEAR-WISE DEVELOPMENTS

2021

Sister Lucy Kalapura

Disney Tom, June 26, 2021: The Times of India 
 A recently retired maths teacher, she is a familiar face for the residents of Karakamala in Wayanad district of Kerala as she zips around town in a car, popping into homes to provide people assistance, care or, sometimes, just company.

But for the Church, she is not even a nun anymore but just ‘Lucy Kalapura’ who no longer has the right to wear the religious habit of the Franciscan Clarist Congregation (FCC) and use the suffix FCC to her name as she has been dismissed from her congregation.

Her list of ‘crimes’, according to the FCC which she joined at the age of 17, is long and bizarre. They insist that the 56-year-old ‘broke her vows’ by owning a car and publishing poems without permission. But what seems to have really galled is Sister Lucy’s vocal support for the nuns who held a public demonstration in September 2018 in Kochi leading to the arrest of Bishop Franco Mulakkal, who had been accused of rape by another nun.

Soon after, she was served summons but the feisty nun refused to be cowed down. In 2019, at the historic women’s wall for gender equality, she shed her nun’s habit for a simple salwar kurta. This, she said, was in protest against the fact that priests are allowed regular attire while nuns are not. She also wrote a memoir that hinted at sexual abuse within the clergy.

A year earlier, she went ahead and bought herself a car after her request seeking permission to learn driving was denied. She then asked a woman who ran a driving school to teach her. “Sisters travel day and night in hired cars with male drivers. Wouldn’t it be safer for nuns to drive,” she asks.

In fact, the car came in handy during the pandemic. “During the first lockdown, I was on duty to assist the police in managing the lockdown as I was a government teacher. Later, whenever someone reached out to me to help them with a medical emergency, I did. Having a car was useful,” she points out.

But her logic hasn’t worked with the FCC which proceeded to give her the marching orders. Her third appeal against the dismissal was rejected last week by Apostolica Signatura, the highest judicial authority in the Catholic Church in the Vatican.

The nun, however, is still unwilling to give up even as she faces extreme isolation even from her own fellow sisters. “Other than my room, they have denied me access to all the other areas in the convent. They don’t talk to me. Still, I will continue my fight and I won’t be leaving this convent,” she says.

Kennedy Karimbinkalayil, a laity activist, insists she has no right to stay at the convent. “She is posing as a victim after smearing the name of several nuns and priests through unfounded allegations in a book she wrote. She is connecting her indiscipline with the Franco issue to politicise it. She was given several show-cause notices before the said protest and what has happened now is only a natural conclusion to this process.”

Riju Kanjookkaran, joint-convenor of the Save our Sisters forum which was formed to support the nuns involved in the Franco case, says there is huge support for Sr Lucy among the laity and the general public. “The Vow of Obedience doesn’t mean that one should obey anything and everything. There is a difference between obedience and slavery. Action against her was sped up only after she attended the nuns’ protest. The irony is that the Franco Mulakkal, who was arrested for rape, and Sr Sephy and Fr Thomas Kottoor, who were sentenced to life imprisonment in the Abhaya murder case by a CBI court, are all still Bishop, nun and priest respectively,” he says.

Indulekha Joseph, an activist working for reformation in the Church, says that not many nuns have had the courage to fight the system the way she did. “If a nun decides to come out of convent life or if she is expelled, she is not eligible for any benefits though her service lasted for years. Also, there is a lot of stigma associated with nuns leaving monastic lives,” says Joseph.