asked for 200 thousand euros in compensation and reinstatement

Dismissal without just cause, employee sues the company. Nothing particularly unusual, if only the protagonist of the legal case wasn’t a nun and…

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Dismissal without just cause, employee sues the company. Nothing particularly unusual, if only the protagonist of the legal case wasn’t one nun and the employer the Vatican. The protagonist of this story is Mother Marie Ferréol.

Nun fired, the story

The decision to treat the case as a common dismissal and bring it before a civil court has raised considerable controversy in France, where Mother Marie Ferréol was removed after 34 years from a monastery in Brittany, and provoked a strong reaction from the Saint Sede, who sent a “verbal note” to the Paris embassy at the Vatican, expressing concern about the “risk of a serious violation of the fundamental rights to religious freedom and freedom of association of the Catholic faithful”.

Mother Marie Ferréol, 57, was expelled from the Institute of the Dominican Sisters of the Holy Spirit in Berné in October 2020, after 34 years spent in the community, following an “apostolic visit” conducted by Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet. The former nun, born Sabine de la Valette, has been living thanks to the “Revenu de Solidarité Active”, a minimum income guaranteed by the French state, since she was expelled.

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The court condemned the community’s trade union association to pay 33,622 euros for duty of care and ordered compensation of 182,400 euros for material damage plus 10,000 euros for moral damages, also involving Cardinal Ouellet and two other apostolic visitors. According to the lawyer of the Vatican inspectors, the court “did not have the right of access to the dossier on canonical matters”, since it is an internal matter of the Church.

THE VATICAN’S REPLY

The Holy See, through its spokesperson Matteo Bruni, underlined that it had learned of the “alleged sentence” only through the press and reiterated that Cardinal Ouellet “has not received any summons decree”. Bruni confirmed that «the cardinal actually conducted an apostolic visit to the Institute of the Dominican Sisters of the Holy Spirit, in compliance with a pontifical mandate» and that «at the conclusion of this visit, a series of canonical measures were adopted against the Lady Sabine de la Valette, including her dismissal from the religious institute.” The verbal note of the Holy See concludes by underlining that «a possible ruling by the Court of Lorient could raise not only relevant questions regarding immunity but, if it were to rule on internal discipline and membership of a religious institute, it could having given rise to a serious violation of the fundamental rights to religious freedom and freedom of association of the Catholic faithful”.

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