‘You just feel so defeated’ - Women await Vatican to investigate religious community

Women say they experienced abuse during formation with the Sister Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus

Vatican officials will investigate allegations of psychological and spiritual abuse in the Sisters Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus, women formerly in formation with the religious community say they’ve been told.

A formation house for the Sister Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus. Courtesy photo.

The community is connected to the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, a society of priests known for its use and promotion of preconciliar liturgical texts.

While a number of former postulants of the women’s group allege a culture of intimidation and fear, manipulative spiritual practices, and disordered governance in their community, the community’s superior says that women who have raised complaints about the community “were unable to adapt” to religious life, and that their concerns were “exaggerations or misunderstandings of our rules and of different situations.”

But an expert on abuses in religious life and the Church told The Pillar that the women flagged issues that could constitute “spiritual abuse,” and which merit more examination from Church officials.

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The Sisters Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus Christ Sovereign Priest was founded in 2001, as an outgrowth of the male Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, founded 11 years earlier by French clerics.

The women’s community has 71 sisters, according to its website, and was reportedly given in 2008 recognition as an association of pontifical right, meaning that its internal governance and life is overseen directly by the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life at the Vatican.

The community has houses in several European countries, with its motherhouse and novitiate in Italy, and one house in Wisconsin.

The Pillar spoke with several women who lived in formation houses of the community as postulants, entering with hopes to find an expression of traditional religious life in the community, with the experience of contemplative prayer, worship, and religious community among sisters.

The women say they knew adjustment to religious life would be difficult, but they did not expect to experience psychological and physical harm in the community, which they say is the result of an unhealthy leadership culture and disordered notions of obedience.

Several women who lived in formation with the community told The Pillar that they experienced and witnessed inadequate living conditions, psychologically manipulative exercises of authority, a pattern of isolation between sisters, hazardous and unsanitary working conditions, and a culture of fear and intimidation during their time in the community.

The women said that formation in the community seemed designed to defeat them psychologically, to rid them of self-confidence, or to condition them to distrust themselves and place an unhealthy reliance on religious superiors. They added that they could not approach superiors about concerns, and that voicing their experiences was not welcome in the community.

And in a letter written in 2024 to the community’s superior, one woman said that she and another postulant who lived with the community experienced “precipitous psychological decline during our time in the Community, developing problems that we had not experienced before.”

“At various points, with varying intensity, one or the other of us experienced …. frequent crying, panic attacks, insomnia, nightmares, self-harm (that once occasioned a doctor’s visit), suicidal feelings,” the woman wrote.

“While one might expect weaknesses to be revealed in religious life, it is worrisome that in our case new wounds were inflicted.”

A formation house for the Sister Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus. Courtesy photo.

One woman told The Pillar that when she entered postulancy with the community in 2022, she first experienced uninhabitable living conditions, with little heat, no hot water, and insect infestations in the house where postulants lived. She recalled finding a worm in her breakfast bread one morning, and being instructed to clean, cook, and eat rotting vegetables — even while “the canons and the superiors were always served the freshest food.”

When they drew attention to things in need of repair or raised concerns, the women said, they were chastised for complaining.

Several women attested to similar conditions in conversation with The Pillar, saying that problems began soon after they entered the community, even because of the language of the house.

“Before entering, we were told that we’d learn French in the community. But some weeks after arrival we were expected to conduct ourselves entirely in French, and were scolded by the novice mistress” if they did not, one said.

And they said that while they were issued French grammar texts for self-study, their language limitations often were treated as moral failures, or used as occasions for public humiliation.

“We were supposed to be learning French during this time,” one woman recalled, “but the only words that the sisters taught me were the words for ‘dust’ and the words for ‘wash by hand.’”

“While every single sister I interacted with could speak English,” she said, “there was just no effort made [to teach].”

When postulants were uncertain how to say something in French, they say, their formator, the community’s novice mistress, would pretend she couldn’t understand. Eventually, the language barrier would become a source of shame.

“You just feel so defeated,” one woman recalled.

Another told The Pillar that insistence on the French language was “a sick play of power and submission,” recalling that superiors would give instructions or directives in quickly-spoken French, and then punish or scold women who failed to understand and comply.

In one formator’s “twisted mind, she thought that would help all of us learn faster,” a woman recalled.

Though there were English-speaking priests in the vicinity, “my spiritual director didn’t even speak English,” one woman recalled, “I had a very, very hard time. The two meetings we had together …he didn’t speak more than three words of English.”

Another woman remembered that “all of my meetings with my spiritual director [a priest of the Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest] were trying to express the fact that we were being mistreated, but he could barely understand what I was saying.”

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Alongside insistence on French language, the women say, they experienced isolation in their formation — being rarely allowed to speak or confer with other postulants, unable to seek guidance from outside of their community, and even struggling to schedule meetings with priests.

One woman recalled that when she talked with a priest who spoke English for confession — the postulants’ chaplain — he encouraged her to meet for further conversation, because the experience of the community was leading to spiritual scrupulosity and confusion. She was, she recalled, in a crisis, and the priest had offered her pastoral counseling.

“He offered to speak to me, and that day I requested verbally and in writing that I wanted an appointment with him. But it took 23 days to actually get that appointment scheduled.”

“They asked me, ‘Are you actually sure you have to talk to him? This is kind of irregular. Do you really need to bother [the priest]? You know he can’t be your spiritual director, right?’”

“And yet,” she told The Pillar, “he was the only canon who spoke English.”

Another woman recalled that postulants were, in principle, permitted to write letters to immediate family members for two hours per month, though a time was actually allocated for correspondence only every six weeks or so — “and never during Advent or Lent.”

And — she said — correspondence came with strict regulation.

Postulants were told, she said, that letters home could not disclose interior difficulties or struggles, discuss other sisters, “cast the community in a bad light,” or disclose any details about the community’s life. Instead, she said, postulants were instructed that letters were meant to “spiritually edify” recipients, and considered “a concession to the weakness and worldliness of our families.”

Photographs could not be requested from family members, she recalled, and if photographs were sent, they could be kept for a week and then turned in to superiors.

Communication inside the community was also restricted, women told The Pillar — with the Sister Adorers observing a “rule of three” which meant that women “could never speak to another woman of the community without it being a group of three. The only exceptions were the novice mistress and (exceedingly rarely) the mother superior.”

“We could never confide in another sister,” one woman recalled, leaving her isolated and without trust in companions.

The women said those norms came alongside ever-shifting, exacting, and sometimes ambiguous disciplinary norms, and even strict rationing of personal supplies like toilet paper and hygiene items. They also came with sharp criticism from superiors, they said, in a pattern which seemed to suggest not issues for correction, but deficiencies in their identity.

“We were always told over and over again that we have to spiritualize everything, and that every word that comes from them is coming from God actually. We were told that whatever [a superior] says, it’s God telling us. So when she told me that I was awkward, or clumsy, or dirty, or irreligious, I heard God telling me that.”

Women recalled unsafe working conditions — among them, using ladders improperly, without securing them and women instructed to stand at a ladder’s apex, well above its highest permitted standing rung, in order to clean. Another woman recalled being instructed to clean calcium buildup inside a toilet bowl using a pin, and being denied gloves when she asked for them.

One woman recalled that shortly before she left, she was charged with mopping the kitchen at night. She noticed some cockroaches, and told another postulant. Word of the insects got to the novice mistress, she said, and she was identified in a community meeting as “lazy” and as failing to properly clean the kitchen area.

The superior said in the community meeting that “the sister who is not cleaning the kitchen well would make the whole community sick because of the cockroaches,” she said.

One woman recalled providing a personal hygiene item to a young woman who was visiting the community and was suddenly in need of a feminine pad — which were kept under lock and key in a supply closet, and doled out to each woman by a superior. She was later privately scolded, she said, because she did not have permission to distribute the community’s property, and it was not her responsibility to care for the visitor.

Because she wasn’t given any additional feminine pads to make up for the one she provided, the woman said, she eventually bled through her clothing.

Another woman, who wrote a letter to the community’s superior after her departure, attested that such instances — “being scolded for common-sense decision making” — in the community were “commonplace.”

The woman’s letter said that when she was eventually permitted to raise concerns with her novice mistress, she was made to feel that her difficulties in religious life were her fault, and that any sense of isolation she had experienced was caused by her own faults in relating to sisters and others in formation.

She said the conversation reflected a kind of moral spiritualization of her concerns — that any difficulty she had must be the consequence of vice.

“I was also concerned by a recurring tone that assumed that incoming postulants were incompetent, selfish, and immature – as opposed to being the intelligent, generous, and integrous women I know my peers to have been,” the woman wrote in 2024.

“Morally neutral human weaknesses were often given an inappropriate moral spin. For example, we were told that poor singing indicated pride; using our limited free time for something other than completing chores was a lack of charity; leaving hair in the bathroom was a lack of zeal.”

“The negative effect of this cannot be overstated,” the woman wrote, recalling that she and another postulant “both often overheard sobbing in the cells of the novitiate at night, and we ourselves frequently cried during the night.”

Another woman offered a similar recollection, telling The Pillar that “the rule specifically said that we could not ask questions or seek to know things that were not openly presented to us, because this would be the vice of curiosity. We were told to never ask why we were ordered to do something or to seek information.”

Because of that, one woman recalled, “women who left the community,” or were reassigned, “simply disappeared overnight. Usually there were no goodbyes — except in the case of some postulants.”

Women recalled “chronic exhaustion,” and “fatigue” in their formation period, noting the work assignments often occupied the whole of the daily 30-minute recreation period. They said if they made mistakes because they were tired, they would be sanctioned for failing to put in their full effort. They said they were not provided opportunities to see physicians and dentists, even when health problems required it, or medical providers required follow up appointments. That, they said, compounded health problems.

The women added concern about what one called an “an almost superstitious and legalistic ban on criticism” of superiors or common life.

That element of the sisters’ life, one woman said, means that “when trying to talk about things that are dysfunctional at best and abusive,” women might be silenced “by people telling you ‘Well, you’re not allowed to criticize, so you can’t say that.’”

Another recalled that the “prohibition [on] all critique [and] criticism” was emphasized frequently to women in formation, being told that criticism of the community or of a particular practice would be a violation of charity.

Several women told The Pillar that the abbreviated rule they were given was explicit on that front, referring to internal criticism as “a slow poison that kills the community.”

The Pillar requested a copy of that text, but was told that it is currently under revision and not available for public review.

The effect of those experiences, the women said, was to give them a sense that they were inadequate, too weak, or too craven to be good religious — or even, in some cases, to be loved by God — a situation which left them disoriented, discouraged, and confused.

But one woman said they also realized that what they were experiencing was “very wrong.” For some women that led to departure — others said they left to tend to visa or health issues, and decided not to return.

“In my mind, I was always asking ‘how does that compare to the Gospel, and the epistles of St. John?’”

“I would think about St. John saying that ‘whoever does not love the brother before him can not love God.’ And so there was this set of core beliefs that kept me grounded, but I was still pretty thoroughly scandalized by my experience,” one woman recalled.

One told The Pillar that when she departed to attend to a health issue, she planned to return as soon as possible. But eventually, her perspective changed.

“For me, it was like an abusive relationship; when you’re in it you’re madly in love. Once you get out of the situation, you see yourself, what you have become, what’s been done to you,” she told The Pillar.

One woman wrote the community’s superior after departing that “religious life ought to be a school of charity, but we did not feel confident that we could learn such a lesson but rather felt we were in danger of being humanly and spiritually crippled.”

The women also raised questions about the structure of the Sisters Adorers — which is organized as a public association of the faithful, recognized and approved by the Holy See — which might eventually be approved formally as an institute of consecrated life.

They noted that members do not take perpetual vows, instead taking temporary private vows for one year at a time — a relatively uncommon circumstance in contemporary religious life — in a situation which leaves women subject to the prospect of dismissal at any time. They noted that instability may have contributed to the departure of some of the earliest sisters in the community, and to regular turnover among the community’s professed sisters.

The women also noted that the community’s superior is not chosen by the sisters themselves, but appointed by the superior of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest — a situation which they say reflects their broader experience that the women’s community is positioned often in roles of servitude and deference toward the Institute, its priests and seminarians, even regarding its own internal life.

Members of the Sister Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus profess temporary vows, renewed on an annual basis. Credit: Sister Adorers.

Mother Madeline-Marie, superior of the community, told The Pillar that she has heard criticism of the community, and was aware of a testimony published in September by women who spent time with the community in formation as postulants.

But she told The Pillar by email that the women raising concerns “left for various reasons, but it was obvious that they couldn’t stay because they were unable to adapt.”

That came as a surprise to the women, who emphasized that they were not dismissed from the community, and that some were explicitly told they were free to return if they chose.

Noting that “these young women had great difficulties from the moment they arrived,” the superior added, without specifying particular concerns, that “some of their behavior was even unacceptable in a convent, but patience must be practiced if one is a disciple of Saint Francis de Sales.”

Mother Madeline-Marie said the community “did our best to help them adapt and to answer their questions and respond to their needs.”

“Leaving one’s family and the world to embrace a more secluded life, a life in silence, a more regulated life, giving up some of the comforts and conveniences of today’s life is very difficult, even for those who do it out of love for God.”

She added that when she received a letter expressing concern about the experience of some postulants, she “took it very seriously. I visited our other houses to investigate. What I came to see was that there were exaggerations and misunderstandings of our rules and of different situations. All one had to do was to ask the Mistress of Novices or the Superior for an explanation. I could see that there was a clear lack of understanding on their part regarding communication with the superiors, exposing one’s difficulties and asking for help.”

Despite her own satisfaction, Mother Madeleine-Marie said that she asked for a review from the Institute of Christ the King.

She explained that “I asked the Institute [of Christ the King]’s prior general if a canonical visitation could be carried out in each of our houses. During the visit, each sister was free to say what she wanted: her concerns, her worries, her difficulties, how things were going, whether she was eating well, sleeping well, being treated well, and so on. All this was done, and Rome, with whom we work closely and regularly, received this information.”

The Pillar requested the results of the visitation conducted by the Institute of Christ the King, but Mother Madeleine-Marie told The Pillar that the report “must remain confidential, as has always been the case.”

”I can tell you that the results were positive, and that has helped us,” she told The Pillar.

Mother Madeleine-Marie pushed back on claims of rigidity in the life of her community, telling The Pillar that “our rule of life is based on the Rule of Saint Augustine. Our community is Salesian, which allows great flexibility and adaptation according to individuals and circumstances.”

Still, she did emphasize that obedience is important, explaining by email that “a religious community is a family where paternal/maternal and filial love must reign. Superiors in particular exercise this paternity/maternity.”

But the “exercise of authority,” she insisted, “is rooted in mutual trust, in the image of the love between God and us, his children.”

She also pushed back on charges that criticism is not welcome in the community, telling The Pillar that she and other formators “regularly encourage all our sisters and postulants to tell us about the difficulties they encounter so that we can help them.”

“We gladly invite such constructive criticism, as the Rule of St. Benedict asks, because everyone sees things differently, which brings a richness and diverse perspectives on different circumstances and situations,” Mother Madeleine-Marie said. “This allows us to better adapt in order to facilitate the religious life of our sisters and the formation of our novices and postulants.”

Mother Madeleine-Marie declined to provide a copy of her community’s constitutions or governing documents, saying that they are “being revised” and not available for public review.

But, she said, “as soon as these deliberations, accompanied by Rome, have come to an end, the final form of the constitutions can be made available.”

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Fr. Thomas Berg is a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life, and an expert on abuse in religious life.

Fr. Thomas Berg. Credit: University of Notre Dame.

Berg told The Pillar that the women’s description of their formation in the Sisters Adorers community could indicate numerous “red flags” for the prospect of “serious spiritual abuse.”

The priest offered a definition of spiritual abuse from Samuel Fernández, a scholar at the Catholic University of Chile:

“Spiritual abuse in the Catholic context is the misuse of spiritual authority that controls the victim to the point that the abuser, taking the place of God, obstructs or nullifies the victim’s spiritual freedom. This type of abuse is perpetrated by an individual or a system supported by the Church as trustworthy. Hence, it always has an ecclesial dimension. This kind of abuse can harm the person at the spiritual, psychological, and physical levels.”

Berg flagged the women’s account of the community’s approach toward obedience — the use of shame in correction, and any rhetoric which might equate the superior’s direction to God’s own will.

He quoted from “Abuses in religious life,” a 2023 book by Carthusian superior general Fr. Dysmas de Lassus: “What God is asking of her is not the same as what the superior asked. This clarification is so important that it should be chiseled over the entrance to the novice’s quarters.”

Those issues, he said, constitute “hallmarks of unhealthy obedience, where the exercise of authority because authoritarianism — ‘you’re going to do this because I say so.’”

That approach “could be appropriate for 10-year-olds,” Berg said, “because maybe they don’t have the wherewithal to act responsibly, but it’s never appropriate in religious life, nor in any exercise of authority in the Church.”

Further, the priest said, while developing the virtue of obedience is important in a period of formation, that sense of obedience should be ordered toward making good judgments with some degree of autonomy, rather than obeying rules without freedom for discernment. Any notion of “blind obedience” in religious life should be “abandoned altogether,” Berg said.

On that front, he flagged accounts of correction for the use of judgment as potentially indicative of problems in the community’s sense of obedience.

Berg also commented on reports that access to spiritual directors and confessors was generally limited to one hour per month, and especially about a woman’s account of facing questions about why she wanted to meet with a priest.

“Absolutely red flag, absolute red flag. That to me sounds like an isolationism, a cutting off,” he said.

And he raised concern about their account of being directed to limit information in letters to family.

“That,” he said, “is a huge red flag.” In ordinary religious life, he said, “if a religious feels in conscience that they need to share a concern with a family member, that freedom needs to be respected. Even if that means the family will want to come and talk with the superior, you might have to deal with that, but you do not restrict the freedom in conscience of the individual to say whatever they want.”

The priest also noted the women’s report that criticism within the community is not accepted — a report disputed by Mother Madeleine-Marie.

To the extent that exists in the community, Berg said, “the resistance to criticism is a sign of dysfunction, and almost always abuse.”

He noted other religious communities — including the Legion of Christ, to which he formerly belonged as a priest — in which an aversion to internal criticism “was devastating…. And meant to protect superiors from necessary correction.”

The priest said that a culture of complaints is not the goal of religious life. But there can be a balance in a “culture of evaluation.”

In a “culture of evaluation,” Berg said, “any religious, postulant or novice should be able to approach her superior at any time, on any topic, and say, ‘I wonder about this,’ or’ I’m really struggling with this,’ or ‘I have to say I just find it troubling when you do X, Y, or Z.’”

“And that conversation is going to be a difficult conversation, but it has to be had. And maybe it will be that the postulate, or novice, or religious is objectively overreacting to something, but maybe it won’t be.”

Considering the women’s reports, Berg concluded that several issues reported by them “are already red flags which could easily be indicators that spiritual abuse is actually happening.”

Berg said spiritual abuse “is not just a dysfunction” in a religious community: “It’s actually abusive behavior.”

The priest said it’s important to note that spiritual abuse can occur without malicious intent on the part of superiors.

“Something that’s more common is negligence, the failure to care for people appropriately. It may be there may be no malice whatsoever, it’s just a superior has a blind spot and that impacts community life: A failure to get a sister the medical care that she needs, a failure when it’s clear that sister really is struggling, that she could really benefit from a therapist, but the superior never gets around to doing that, or a blind spot in the way the superior treats Sister So-and-so.”

A superior might think that younger women in religious life seem to have different needs than she did during formation, and might reflexively discount those needs as frivolous, Berg said.

But, “she has to adapt to the reality of the subjects that have become a part of the community.”

“There doesn’t necessarily have to be malice” to perpetrate abuse, Berg said, “but I think the malice comes in when there’s not a culture of openness to critiquing our community and how we’re living.”

“If you have a culture of evaluation,” Berg said, “there have to be internal reviews, including the provincial and major superiors, there have to be internal reviews, there have to be regular intervals of visitation of a community from an independent body of visitators.”

In a culture of evaluation, “there are community conversations where there’s time to share openly concerns about the community.”

For a healthy religious community, Berg said, “that has to be the internal culture.”

And, the priest said, when such a culture exists, “you can obviate a lot of the unhealthy criticism.” In religious life, “bickering, negativity, and unhealthy criticism can develop because you don’t have the opportunities to actually talk about stuff.”

“But if a religious doesn’t feel free to speak of what troubles them, or if they feel that they have nowhere to turn, or they’re afraid to be open about something in confidence or to even open up with another sister, then that’s what you have there, is a culture of secrecy, and that’s definitely unhealthy. And that can easily be a red flag too.”

The priest noted that it can also be a sign of problems if several people raising concerns are characterized as struggling to adapt to religious life. That response, Berg said, can reflect a failure to appreciate “the kinds of abuses which can unfold in religious life,” or can be an attempt to deflect from the issues raised.

Berg said he understood that issues in the Sister Adorers community might be defended as traditional expressions of religious life from other periods in the Church’s history — especially because of the community’s preconciliar liturgical praxis — and seen even as a counterbalance to a perception of laxity in some contemporary religious communities.

But the priest cautioned against a tendency to spiritualize harmful practices in religious life.

“I think a lot of what we look back on as traditional religious life was actually abusive, and perhaps by God’s mercy saints still emerged from that.”

“God does not call anyone to religious life, [in order] to drive them to psychological illness because of an abusive superior. That is not the kind of gift of self or the annihilation of self that our Lord calls to.”

“We’re not trying to psychologize religious life,” Berg said, of those urging a focus on mental health in religious life.

“We’re trying to get people to live consecration in a healthy way, to live obedience. You can’t live radical obedience if you’re not healthy. So we need to honestly identify what is abusive [in religious communities], and correct that, so that going forward, consecrated religious will actually be in a place to rise to the degree of holiness and self-emptying to which our Lord calls them.”

“The aspiration to a life of total self-gift is not at odds with making sure we’re living religious life in a healthy way. But the aspirations to a life of total self-gift should never be understood to be a life of kind of self-annihilation by allowing myself to suffer all kinds of psychological and spiritual harm. So God does not call us to that.”

Berg said he believes the accounts raised by the women should be independently investigated, under careful watch of the Dicastery for Consecrated Life. He said if major issues are confirmed in the community — or in any religious community — reform “is possible, but there has to be a very concerted effort, and it usually requires intervention from the outside to make sure that the reforms actually happen.”

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For their part, one woman in October 2024 raised concern to the Diocese of Trier in Germany — where one house of formation is located. She was told that her concerns — and a letter she wrote to the Trier bishop — was sent to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Consecrated Life.

The women say they were also in touch with Mother Madeline-Marie, but most did not hear back directly from her.

And after their time in formation, the women say they connected with each other, and have connected now with a community of women, from different countries, who all experienced abuses in the Sisters Adorers community.

In December 2025, two of the women — Natalia and Belen —- met with senior officials at the Dicastery for Consecrated Life.

There, they were told that the dicastery was planning to conduct a visitation of the Sister Adorers, to investigate the allegations of problems in the community.

But it is not clear whether any investigation is yet underway. For her part, Mother Madeleine-Marie did not respond to direct questions about the prospect of a visitation, or whether she has been informed that one might be conducted.

But the women say they hope the Vatican will take their concerns seriously, both because they hope the Sisters Adorers can be reformed, and so that women considering a vocation in the community are aware of the challenges they might face.

“The thing is, not all the sisters were evil,” one woman told The Pillar. “Obviously there were a lot of sisters that we loved and that we still love. And so we’re worried for them. I remember some of the sisters … leaving the office of the novice mistress in tears. And it’s difficult to think about them being stuck there with no recourse.”

One woman said the trauma she faced left her with profound spiritual consequences.

At the Vatican, she said, an official “asked me if I still believed that God loved me. And I said I knew it, but I don’t feel it anymore.”

Another said that when she left the community, she did so with deep wounds.

“I feel like I’ve recovered enough to be resilient, but it was such a long journey and lots of work in spiritual direction, and in the psychological field, because the experience … was very confusing in a way. It really made me feel almost like I was hopelessly …cursed,” she said.

“I left feeling like you have to suffer horribly to be agreeable to God. That’s what I learned … and even that I was being ungrateful, for not loving the suffering that was supposedly coming from God,” she added.

“But now you see… it takes time, but then you see that God’s will is not always suffering.”

Another woman put it this way: “We gave up everything, we went to another country, we couldn’t really talk to our family, we gave up our language and our culture. But we were taught that whatever we did, it wasn’t enough.”

Mother Madeleine-Marie had a different view.

“Sometimes, unfortunately, those who leave a community can harbor bad feelings because they’re disappointed that it didn’t work out, that it wasn’t as they had imagined, and they want to blame someone. And it’s easy to misrepresent circumstances in a negative light. Some of these young women were very sensitive to correction, which could lead to a certain lack of confidence in their superiors,” she said.

“But that’s the small number, because the vast majority of young women who eventually discerned that they had no religious vocation have remained very close to the community. They visit us, invite us to their weddings and the baptisms of their children. They often express their gratitude to the community for all it has given them, and we remain very good friends.”

The women told The Pillar that while they were told in December that the dicastery would begin the process of a formal evaluation of the community, they have not since received notification that it is underway.