http://romancatholicvocations.blogspot.com...se-to-evil.html

"I am Lucy, one of the young nuns raped by the Serbian soldiers. I am writing to you, Mother, after what happened to my sisters Tatiana, Sandria, and me.

Allow me not to go into the details of the act. There are some experiences in life so atrocious that you cannot tell them to anyone but God, in whose service I had consecrated my life nearly a year ago.

My drama is not so much the humiliation that I suffered as a woman, not the incurable offense committed against my vocation as a religious, but the difficulty of having to incorporate into my faith an event that certainly forms part of the mysterious will of Him whom I have always considered my Divine Spouse.

Read it all at the link.

Oh my.

This made me cry as I read it

Poor darling. God bless her

Something about this story is fishy.

It's all over the internet and has been for some time. I couldn't find out any more about it.

The Serbians are Orthodox. Lucy must have been Catholic, therefore Croatian, but she is reported to have been in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is Moslem. The denominations don't mix much--each area has its characteristic religion.

The nuns at most risk for rape, were Serbian, therefore orthodox. I can't tell what 'type' of Christian Lucy was.

The bit at the end about gathering resin with her mother sounded very artificial.

No doubt there were Serbian rape camps, tho'.

We'll never know.

Things are nowhere near as simple as you state - I served in Bosnia during the first summer of the war as a military nurse and I find this story absolutely and very sadly believable. We were told of these things happening frequently!!!
The religious and ethnic groups are not totally separate - one of the sadest things is that there has been a lot of intermarriage and people of different faiths were living happily as neighbours in Bosnia - I was in Vitex. Locals would forcably enlisted which meant one day they were often facing a son in law, a friend , a neighbour and we expected to shoot him, one man I cared for shot his own toes off so that he didn't have to do this.
There were many Catholics (as well as Serbs and Muslims ) in Bosnia - above our camp on the hill there was a Catholic church and one of our soldiers married one of the local Catholic girls who worked for us - the Bosnian Catholic Priest held the ceremony in her house which backed onto our camp.

All women - of any faith, and in any area were at risk from rape!!! No- one was safe.

The bit about gathering resin is totally believable too - the country was very advanced in some areas - women routinely became engineers and had high positions in so called male-dominated jobs - but at the same time women were gathering crops in the fields by hand and using horse and cart to transport it. I have a picture of a woman harvesing in a field as a hay cart with horse goes past and a high speed jet flies overhead. It is a strange contrast.

Your statements are harsh and sadly very misinformed though I have no doubt this was not intended and I mean harm in correcting your misconceptions.
Please let us just accept that these things and many more terrible things happened and take the stance of this heroic and loving lady and pray for her and those like her, as i am sure she is not alone. Atrocities were committed by all sides. Pax.

I do not have adequate knowledge to speak about events in Bosnia....I'm sorry to say that I am woefully uninformed...the events you speak of are indeed tragic. Factual or not this is a tragic, sad letter. The most tragic thing in this young women's letter is that she seems to ascribe the shame of rape to herself and other women who were raped. This may be cultural or it may be that she wrote the letter before she had the opportunity for healing. Very, very often shame is the first response of a rape victim. It can take a lot of work, prayer and courage to ascribe the shame to the right person.

The shame in rape belongs to the perpetrator alone. It broke my heart to read (and I don't THINK I was misreading the letter) that Lucy wrote as if the shame is "on" her. I do not mean to minimize Lucy's (or anyone else's) feelings, the sense of shame is quite real but it is not just and it is not true. Rape victims often need a lot of help in sorting out their feelings of shame and leaving them behind - "attached" (in a sense) to the rapist alone.

The letter makes me very sad and I wish that we could read the response of her Superior....I would certainly hope that the response would strongly encourage Lucy to seek the help she needed to heal. I would hope as well that the letter would have included a strong and definitive statement that there was (is) no shame to be ascribed to her.

It may be naive to believe that psychological help would be available in a war torn country, but spiritual help is another story and a wise priest, religious or lay person could do a lot for the victims of such atrocities - provided he or she is able to help the victim to properly assess and place "blame" on the responsible party. This is NOT to say that we do not forigive our enemies (of any kind) it is to say that before we can forgive we must realize that there is something TO forgive...if we are blaming only ourselves or taking on shame that is not ours, we will not forigve another because we do not place any responsbility on that "other".

I don't know if I've articulated this so well....suffice it to say that reading this letter has made me sad...not just because a woman's life was forever impatcted by evil but because that woman has taken that evil and made it "hers". That's a very serious and, unfortunately, all too common tragedy.

Peace
Pat

*edited for type

I have to say that in reading her letter I didn't get the impression that she places the blame for her rape upon herself. Let's first understand that this is a translation into English of the Italian original (seeing as it was published in an Italian newspaper), and that even that original would not have been Lucy's first language, assuming that she is not Italian. Those with multi-lingual backgrounds can testify to the hassles that translation brings.

If I had any impression along these lines from reading her letter, I would say that because of the wrong done to her she is even more aware of sin and guilt in the world and that she has found yet more heart in her heart to take on the work involved in expiating that, even though she has been wronged.

It's very easy to laud her in her imitation of Christ, and I'm not saying we shouldn't. But let's laud her with an terrifying awareness of that task, which is all the greater for those who have been violated.

Hmm...I don't think she places the blame for rape on herself (I should have been more clear in stating that...I do think it is common for many rape victims to do so) but I do think she indicates that she takes the shame of the act upon herself...and that's sad to me.

I do think her compassion for her compatriots and her capacity for love is remarkable.

Ok...I think! I'm not sure on the difference between "blame" and "shame" here though. Do you mean "shame" as in feeling ashamed about something in a similar way that you might feel ashamed at seeing a naked person just walking down the street?

(Just in case my tone is coming over wrong: I'm genuinely seeking after what you're saying. I'm not trying to be a smartalec )

I don't think you're being a smartalec...I think I'm having a hard time articulating this because I understand the kind of shame I mean, personally and I now that I think about it I may be "connecting too personally" to the letter. Is it OK to PM you? I think I'd be freer to explain myself privately.

A PM is fine, but please don't feel obliged to share anything you're not comfortable with. My curiosity as to what people exactly mean by their words sometimes goes too far and I'm happy to bash down my ego.

The rapes I have heard the most about were the rapes of Muslim women. These women were often detained in "camps," from what I understand from new reports, and suffered in unbelievable ways. The rapes were part of a tactic by those in charge because of what it did. Many were unable to return to their families or their husbands because they had been "dishonored" and/or were also pregnant from the rapes. So they became the unwanted. All of this is just info I gathered from print and TV news. It's probably not the whole terrible story.

Rape is used as a weapon in many wars-this one seems to have exposed the shame. ( though I believe in Sudan it is very common now) I'm not real sure about Sister Lucy or her circumstances. I reserve any belief/non-belief of this story because I have to consider the source of the story-which is just the internet right now. The moral of the story-Lucy's survivial, her faith, and her determination- is very uplifiting-- so I take from it all of these amazing things.

A book would be wonderful. Perhaps in time.