‘I don’t want to hide anymore. I want to be seen and heard’: Nun in rape case against Bishop speaks out

Sr Ranit at the chapel of the St Francis Mission Home at Kuravilangad in Kottayam district. (Photo: Nikhila Henry)

Mulakkal, who was accused of raping Sr Ranit 13 times between May 2014 and September 2016 when he was the Bishop of Jalandhar Diocese, was arrested in September 2018 — the first time a sitting Catholic Bishop in India was taken into custody on charges of sexual assault.

In 2022, a trial court acquitted Mulakkal on the grounds that there was lack of proof and there were inconsistencies in the survivor’s statements. Sr Ranit, who moved the High Court against the acquittal, is awaiting a hearing in 2026.

“I have decided to come out because it will give strength to a lot of women,” she says, adding, “I will not be defeated. I will attend public meetings and speak the truth. I don’t know what I will talk about. But I will surely talk.”

Nun in rape case against Bishop speaks out

‘The structure is stifling’

A blue signboard next to the Pala-Vaikkom state highway announces the St Francis Mission Home. A steep, narrow lane leading down from this sign stops at an imposing two-storied building at Kuravilangad village in Kottayam district.

Spread over a six-acre campus, the Mission Home is a scattering of buildings, including a chapel and a convent run by the Missionaries of Jesus, a congregation based in Jalandhar, Punjab. While it’s an all-woman congregation of nuns engaged in pastoral and social work, and has its own hierarchy, it belongs to the Jalandhar diocese with the Bishop as the patron.

The Mission Home is a labyrinth of dimly lit passageways, but sister Ranit walks briskly, with the conviction of someone who has walked these halls countless times. She has been here since 2013, when she moved from Jalandhar after the end of her term as Superior General, the highest office a nun can hold in a congregation. It was at the Mission Home that she led a team of nuns as they tended to elderly destitutes and managed the property for the congregation. It was here that she was raped, in Room Number 20.

Bishop Mulakkal after his acquittal in 2022.

As she reaches her spartan room on the ground floor, she says, “It’s the structure that is stifling.”

In the darkness of the convent, in the oppressive silence that screams out of its walls, is a reflection of the Church itself and of the rigid administrative structure of dioceses and archdioceses that govern it.

The hierarchy often peaks with the Bishop, who not only has administrative authority over the churches and other institutions within the diocese, but wields significant control over religious congregations such as the Missionaries of Jesus to which Sr Ranit belongs. It’s a structure that demands complete submission to the authorities, no questions asked. And when someone does stand up, there are consequences. As Sr Ranit was to find out.

May 5, 2014 was a busy day at the Home. Bishop Mulakkal was in Kerala to attend the ordination of a priest at Chalakudy in Thrissur district, and had informed the Home that he would be staying there the night. Court documents say that as the Bishop reached Kuruvilangad from Chalakudy after the day’s engagements, he retired for the night to Room No. 20. The documents say that after 10 pm, he allegedly called Sr Ranit and asked her to iron his cassock and bring it to him.

While such tasks are not part of a nun’s prescribed duties, women in mission settings often find themselves performing them due to the Bishop’s authority and the absence of institutional safeguards.

When Sr Ranit knocked on his door to hand him the cassock, Mulakkal allegedly asked her to bring him documents related to the recent renovation of the kitchen in the Home. Court documents say that when she entered the room with the papers, Mulakkal “bolted the door from inside”, and allegedly disrobed and sexually assaulted her.

Nun in rape case against Bishop speaks out

“I remember wanting to scream at the time. But I was too scared for my life because he was the Bishop, someone as close to God as possible,” she says. The sexual assault allegedly happened the following day, May 6, too, as the Bishop again allegedly summoned her to his room.

Two months later, on July 11, 2014, as the Bishop again came to the Home, Sr Ranit says she was too scared to even do her chores. This time, too, he allegedly raped her.

The assaults allegedly continued during each of the Bishop’s 13 visits spread across 2014 and 2016, the last of them on September 23, 2016. He once allegedly called on the phone to make sexually explicit remarks, her statement to the court said.

As she speaks of “the utter shame” of what she faced in Room No 20, the sunlight bounces off the stained glass windows of the chapel, lighting up her face that’s contorted in pain and streaked in tears.

“What he was inflicting on my body and mind, I alone had to bear,” says Sr Ranit. She says that she was also worried that her biological sister, Sr Alphy, who was part of the same congregation in Jalandhar, would be penalised if she didn’t succumb to the Bishop’s wishes.

Sr Ranit at the St Francis Mission Home at Kuravilangad village in Kottayam district.

“I begged him to leave me alone, but he laughed off my pleas,” she tells The Indian Express.

By September 2016, two years after the assaults began, Sr Ranit says, she gathered the courage to oppose the Bishop, telling him during phone calls that she didn’t want him to stay at the Home.

The retribution that followed was swift, leading to her being removed from her post of Mother Superior of the Home. Sr Ranit’s statement to the court read, “(The Bishop) tried to implicate her family members in false police cases.”

While the defence highlighted the two-year delay in filing the complaint, Sr Ranit told the court that she had reported the assaults to her spiritual mother, Sr Lizzy Vadakkel of Franciscan Clarist Congregation, and had also spoken of them in her confession to a priest, a holy sacrament that’s protected by the absolute seal of secrecy binding on the priest.

Sr Ranit says she was too scared to speak out, “Virginity and chastity are central to my belief system, part of my vows to the church. The Bishop ripped these off me, he broke my vows. There are dire consequences if vows are broken, even involuntarily. I did not want to be expelled from the congregation. I was too scared to speak out.”

The tracts around the Mission Home now have rows of tapioca, cabbage, cauliflower, ginger and turmeric plants.

Court records show that days before filing a police complaint on June 26, 2018, Sr Ranit wrote to senior Church authorities, including the Apostolic Nuncio, the Vatican’s diplomatic representative in India, alleging that she had been subjected to rape.

“I had knocked on every possible door inside the Church to save myself from the Bishop’s cruelty. But none of the superiors addressed my complaints. I had to finally lodge a police complaint,” says Sr Ranit.

‘I thought I was finished’

The case and the sharp glare it cast left Sr Ranit broken. “I considered my life to be over. I thought I was finished because of the shame of what was inflicted on me,” she says.

But as she locked herself up in the convent, five of her sister nuns stood up in a moment of sisterhood – Sr Neena Rose, Sr Anupama, Sr Josephine, Sr Ancitta and Sr Alphy, her biological younger sister who moved from Jalandhar to be by her side. The five nuns pitched a tent in the heart of Ernakulam, at Vanchi Square, to protest and demand that Mulakkal be defrocked or removed from the church, arrested and tried in a court of law. The protest soon caught on as about 80 organisations backed the nuns with resistance songs and searing speeches against Bishop Mulakkal.

Nun in rape case against Bishop speaks out

On September 21, the Bishop was arrested. As the case went to trial, the prosecution argued that Mulakkal had used his “official status, control, supremacy and dominance he was holding as the Bishop of the Diocese” to illegally “confine, rape and subject her to unnatural sex”.

However, in 2022, Kottayam Additional Sessions Court acquitted Mulakkal, stating that the prosecution had failed to prove all counts due to lack of evidence and inconsistencies in Sr Ranit’s statement. While acquitting Mulakkal, the court observed, “…when it is not feasible to separate truth from falsehood, when grain and chaff are inextricably mixed up, the only available course is to discard the evidence (of PW 1, Sr Ranit) in toto”.

The prosecution lawyer refused to comment on the trial court’s order.

A year after the acquittal in 2022, Mulakkal resigned from the post of Jalandhar Bishop. However, he still holds the title of Bishop since he has not been defrocked by the Church.

Nuns protesting in September 2018 in Vanchi Square, near Kerala High Court in Kochi. (Photo Source: ieMalayalam)

The Indian Express reached out to Mulakkal through  his lawyer, Senior Advocate Raman Pillai, who said the Bishop will not issue a statement. He said, “She (Sr Ranit) is just repeating the false allegations she once made against the Bishop. She can repeat the allegations if she wants.”

‘I was a victim. Now I am a survivor’

In 2023, a year after the acquittal, Sr Neena Rose, Sr Josephine and Sr Anupama left the congregation to lead private lives.

Nun in rape case against Bishop speaks out.

With that, St Francis Home went silent. Today, just three nuns, Sr Ranit, Sr Alphy and Sr Ancitta, walk the halls of the building that has 36 rooms and a chapel. Besides, silence is a virtue taught in convents.

No longer, says Sr Ranit, as she takes on an increasingly hostile Church.

“For the Church, it is as if this convent does not exist anymore,” Sr Ranit says, adding that they have not been getting the monthly sustenance funds from their congregation.

“We are supposed to get Rs 5,000 per month as support funds, but we have not been getting it. So, we decided to grow vegetables, sew… do everything we can to keep the Home going,” she says.

The tracts around the Home now have rows of tapioca, cabbage, cauliflower, ginger and turmeric plants. In a pen on the campus, hens and ducks cluck and quack noisily. On January 2, 2026, a cow and its calf arrived at the Mission Home.

The nuns have also been stitching clothes, tote bags and sling bags under a banner ‘Stand by Me’ to sustain themselves. “A few priests and nuns from different congregations and some concerned persons from the laity have stood by us since 2018. They bought us sewing machines so that we could have some income from stitching clothes and bags,” Sr Ranit says.

Bishop Jose Sebastian Thekkumcherikunnel, who took over as the Bishop of Jalandhar in 2024, denies that the diocese has abandoned the sisters. “The Mission Home belongs to the Jalandhar diocese and any income generated from the Home is of Jalandhar diocese. Hence, factually, the sisters at the home are still being supported by the diocese. The church has not thrown them out as they are claiming,” he says.

As she ploughed through, there were times when deep despair took over. “There were days when I felt like I should not have reported the rape. There were questions about my character, family background and life itself. I felt my head would explode,” she says.

With Bishop Mulakkal’s acquittal, there were more questions than answers. “How to go out? How to face people? How to live? These were the questions I asked myself,” she says.

But few things pained her as much as watching the congregation she built disintegrate around her. “I was in the founding batch of this congregation. Even after I became the Superior General, I worked a lot to build the congregation, travelling in general compartments of trains, even sitting near bathrooms,” she says.

The congregation, she adds, has shut her out now. “I don’t even get newsletters from them. The isolation is complete. It is an attempt to break me,” she says.

Yet, it was out of this deep hurt that came the conviction to fight back.

“When I was not able to get justice from the church, I had to file a police complaint. When I did not get justice from courts, I decided to speak out in public,” she says, adding she was the most comfortable during Covid days when everybody had to wear a mask. “I used to hide behind that mask for long. It is time to shed it,” she says.

As they await the hearing in the High Court, the three sisters stick to their life of discipline, starting with a prayer at 5.45 am and ending at 10 pm.

She says it’s the life lessons she got from her father P P Antony, a soldier in the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), that keeps her going. Growing up in Kurichilakodu village in Ernakulam district as the second of five siblings, Sr Ranit says she was always an introvert – shy to speak up, shy to get on a bus and go to college after her Class 10. She was happy to hang out with her mother, Philomina Antony, in the family’s coconut groves and paddy fields. “My oldest memory of home is that of accompanying my mother to our paddy field to deliver food to our workers,” she says.

Inside the convent of the St Francis Mission Home. Today, just three nuns, Sr Ranit, Sr Alphy and Sr Ancitta, walk the halls of the building that has 36 rooms and a chapel.

But it was her father, she says, who insisted that she go out and study. After her mother’s death from cancer when Sr Ranit was 15, she moved to Punjab where her cousin brother lived and worked as a priest. Somewhere along the way, “daiva vili (the call of God)” happened and she joined the congregation.

A lot has happened since then, but Sr Ranit insists she won’t give up. “My father used to tell me, Dany… that was the name I was given before I became a nun… Dany, don’t leave anything midway. I won’t. I will continue to fight and I will stay a nun till my last breath. All these years, I stayed a victim. Now I am a survivor,” she says, as her electric embroidery machine whirrs into life.

She is embroidering a bag for the survivor of the 2017 Kerala actor assault case in which actor Dileep, who was accused of conspiracy to commit rape, was acquitted.

Referring to the victim in the case, she says, “They ask me why I didn’t complain earlier. But what happened to the woman who complained on the very same day she was sexually assaulted? Did she get justice?”