By PETER POPHAM in Rome
"A mystical crisis," said the mother superior, "that has obliged the nun to remove herself for an imprecise period and stay for a while with her familiars."
This was the explanation for the disappearance of Sister Pompea, a 40-year-old nun, from her convent on the slopes
of Montevergine, east of Naples.
Her absence was noticed by the local community when she failed to show up for teaching duties at a local nursery school for the start of the academic year this week.
But the local rumour mill tells a very different story: Sister Pompea, they say, has run off with a monk from the nearby Abbey of Montevergine who is about ten years her junior.
The monk, who has not been named, is said to be the only moderately youthful member of his abbey, a recent arrival and nice looking into the bargain.
"A strike of lightning or a summer passion," speculated Ottopagine, the local paper that broke the story.
"The two religious people seem to have chosen to live this urgent and overwhelming love affair without subterfuge and without secrecy...on holiday, like two ordinary lovers."
The eccliastical authorities, however, are having none of it.
Mother Ildegarde, mother superior of the Convent di Loreto from which Sister Pompea vanished, told Corriere della Sera newspaper, "I want to deny in the most categorical fashion this infamy, which insults a person who is pure as very few are...I spoke to Sister Pompea this morning and I found her worn out. She is still one of us, a sister with all that entails, and waiting to give us her decision. She still wears the habit and belongs to our congregation. And in the face of these nasty rumours she has all our solidarity."
It must be something in the air on Montevergine. The last time the monastery was in the news was in 2002, when Abbot Tarcisio Nazzaro, who is also the local bishop, sacked one of his parish priests, Father Vitaliano della Sala, for defying church authorities and taking part in a gay pride march through the centre of Rome.
- INDEPENDENT
