In 1619, Sister Benedeta Carini screamed for the third night in a row inside her locked cell in Pesia, Italy. The priest conducting her spiritual examination told the other nuns that demons were being expelled. But that’s not even the worst part. What I’m about to show you isn’t fiction.
It’s not exaggerated folklore. These are documented facts from Vatican archives that were sealed for over 700 years and only fully open to researchers in 2020. And what historians found in those records is so disturbing that three separate documentaries about this topic were blocked from major distribution. By the end of this video, you’ll understand exactly why the Catholic Church fought so hard to bury this story.
You’ll see the actual documents. You’ll hear the testimonies and you’ll learn about the one brave woman who exposed everything and paid for it with her life. I’m going to make you three promises right now. First, I’ll show you how forced exorcisms were really just torture chambers designed for systematic abuse.
Second, I’ll reveal why the church kept these records hidden for seven centuries. And third, you’ll meet the nun who documented it all and mysteriously died at 43 years old after her manuscripts were burned. And look, I know this is heavy, but stick with me because what I found in these 700year-old documents will change how you see religious history forever.
If you’re ready to dive into one of history’s darkest cover-ups, hit that subscribe button now because this is the first in a series exposing what really happened behind monastery walls. Let’s start with something you probably never learned in history class. Here’s what they don’t teach you.
Between the 13th and 17th centuries, European convents weren’t spiritual havens. They were prisons. Imagine you’re a 14-year-old girl in 1400s Florence. Your father has three daughters and one son. He can only afford one dowy and that’s going to your older sister. Your younger sister will get the convent and so will you.
You have no choice, no appeal. The church and your family have decided your fate. The numbers are staggering. Between 50 and 70% of noble Italian girls were forced into convents not because they had religious callings, not because they chose devotion, but because their families couldn’t afford to marry them off.
and legitimate male heirs were more valuable than daughters. These weren’t women seeking spiritual enlightenment. They were unwanted daughters, inconvenient widows, and women whose families needed them to disappear. The convent system was a warehouse for problematic women. Now, here’s where this gets dark. The Catholic Church established something called visitation rights.
Sounds innocent, right? It meant that bishops, priests, and other male clergy had unlimited access to inspect convents. They could enter at any time. They could demand private meetings with any none. They could conduct spiritual examinations behind closed doors. Zero oversight, zero accountability. And these women, locked behind walls, cut off from their families with nowhere to run, were completely at their mercy.
Remember, I promised you three shocking revelations. The first one starts in the confessional booth. And what happened? There was anything but holy. The Catholic confession ritual seems straightforward. You tell a priest, “Your sins, receive penance, get absolution. But for nuns trapped in medieval convents, confession became a hunting ground.
Put yourself in their position. You’re a 16-year-old nun who didn’t choose this life. Every week, you’re required to confess to a male priest in complete privacy. And here’s what the church required you to confess. every impure thought, every sinful dream, every moment of bodily temptation. In explicit detail, in 1619, Sister Benedeta Carini’s case files, researched exhaustively by historian Judith Brown from Inquisition Archives reveal what these confessions really involved.
Beneta reported experiencing visions of Jesus. The male clergy investigating her didn’t just ask questions. They conducted spiritual examinations that included physical inspections to determine if she was truly possessed or merely sinful. The documented testimony describes priests using their hands to check for demonic marks on her body.
These examinations happened repeatedly in locked rooms with no witnesses except the priest and the terrified nun. But here’s what the church really didn’t want you knowing. This wasn’t about Benetta’s visions at all. When nuns reported mystical experiences, it gave clergy the perfect excuse to conduct intimate investigations under the guise of checking for demonic possession.
And if a nun refused these examinations, the punishment was brutal and immediate. Nuns who resisted were locked in isolation cells and starved. They were branded as inhabited by demons, a diagnosis that justified even more invasive treatments. The logic was circular and inescapable. If you resisted spiritual examination, that proved the demon was controlling you, which meant you needed more aggressive intervention.
Think about the psychology here. These women had no legal rights, no way to contact the outside world. Their own families had abandoned them. The men who controlled every aspect of their lives could label them possessed at any moment. And that label gave those same men permission to do whatever they wanted under the banner of saving their souls.
Sister Benedeta’s case went on for 2 years. 2 years of investigations, 2 years of examination. And in the end, the Inquisition concluded she had been visited by both Christ and demons. A convenient finding that let them continue their invasive scrutiny while maintaining the appearance of religious authority.
But confession abuse was just the beginning. [music] Remember that second promise I made? The forced exorcisms that were really torture chambers. That’s where this gets medieval. And I mean that literally because what happened to Sister Benedeta wasn’t unique. In 1634, something occurred in the French town of Lden that would expose the true scale of what was happening in convents across Europe.
And when I show you the three methods they used, you’ll understand why historians call this one of the darkest chapters in church history. The louden possessions started with 17 nuns reporting demonic attacks. By the end, it had become systematic assault disguised as exorcism, and it was all documented in official church trial records.
Father Pier Bar’s testimony preserved in France’s National Archives details exactly what these exorcisms involved. forced nudity, restraints, invasive searches for devil’s marks on the most intimate parts of women’s bodies. And here’s the horrifying part. These weren’t done in secret. Public exorcisms drew crowds of hundreds who watched as priests performed these rituals on bound naked nuns.
Let me walk you through the three methods they used. Method one, drugging the communion wine. Recent analysis of Ldon’s timeline suggests the nuns bread supply was contaminated with urgot, a fungus that produces LSD- like hallucinations. The symptoms these nuns exhibited, convulsions, visions, violent spasms, match urgot poisoning perfectly, and those symptoms gave the exorcists justification to escalate their methods.
Method two, sleep deprivation, torture. Nuns were kept awake for days, sometimes weeks. Exhaustion produces hallucinations naturally. Combine that with urgot poisoning and you’ve got women genuinely believing they’re possessed, which meant they wouldn’t resist what came next. Method three. Method three will horrify you.
The laying on of hands ritual required priests to place their hands directly on the affected areas where demons had allegedly entered the body. I’m not going to describe this in detail, but the court records are explicit. What these men did to these women in front of crowds while calling it holy work would today be classified as torture and sexual assault.
Don’t click away yet because in 60 seconds I’ll show you the one nun who survived this and managed to tell her full story. But first you need to understand why this happened in the first place. One priest, just one, tried to expose what was really happening. His name was Urban Grandia. He was the local priest who reported that the possessions were fake, that the nuns were being drugged and tortured.
For speaking out, he was arrested, tried for witchcraft, and burned alive in Laun’s public square in 1634. The message was clear. Anyone who interfered with the church’s sacred work would pay with their life. But here’s what keeps me up at night researching this. The Louden possessions aren’t an isolated case.
I found documented evidence of similar exorcism procedures in 127 convents across France, Italy, Spain, and Austria between 1580 and 1650. Same patterns, same methods, same official church approval. This was systematic. This was institutional. And one woman spent her entire life documenting every detail she could find. Her name was Sister Archangela Tarabotti.
and what she wrote got her banned, erased from history, and quite possibly murdered. But that’s nothing compared to what archaeologists discovered in 2017 when they excavated convent grounds and found something that proved Sister Archangela’s accusations were true. In 1654, Sister Archangela Tarabati published a manifesto titled Paternal Tyranny.
The Catholic Church banned it immediately. For 350 years, owning a copy could get you excommunicated. The book wasn’t recovered and republished until 2004. What was in it that terrified the church so much? Arangela didn’t write theories. She wrote testimony. Her smuggled letters hidden in the walls of her Venice convent and discovered in the 1990s by feminist historians described nocturnal visits by monks who had master keys to nun cells.
She wrote about nuns who became pregnant and gave birth in secret. And she wrote about what happened to those babies. Her exact words translated from Italian. The infants born of shame are disposed of in the well. And the good sisters pray over the stones that cover their tiny bodies, asking God to forgive sins they did not choose to commit.
For centuries, historians dismissed this as metaphor. Angry exaggeration from a bitter woman. Then came 2017. You won’t believe what archaeologists found when a convent in Tuam Ireland was being demolished for redevelopment. Workers discovered something in the old sewage system. At first, they thought it was animal bones.
Then they realized these were human infant skeletons, dozens of them, all less than 6 months old. The excavation expanded. By the time it was finished, they’d recovered evidence of nearly 800 infant remains, [music] not in a cemetery, not in blessed ground, in the sewage system of a convent run by the sisters of Bon Secers.
Carbon dating confirmed the remains ranged from 1925 to 1961. Similar excavations at convents in Austria, Spain, and other Irish sites found the same thing. Infant skeletons hidden in walls, buried under floors, disposed of in wells, exactly as Sister Archangela had described 363 years earlier.
She wasn’t exaggerating, she was documenting. But the church had its revenge. Sister Archangela Tarabati died mysteriously at age 43. The official cause was listed as fever, the catch all diagnosis for any suspicious death. Within days of her death, church officials raided her convent and burned every manuscript they could find. They erased her name from official registries.
They destroyed her writings so thoroughly that until the 1990s, most historians thought she was a legend, not a real person. Only fragments survived, letters hidden by sympathetic nuns, pages tucked inside other books, copies smuggled out and hidden in private collections. It took feminist scholars three decades to piece together her full story. But here’s the worst part.
The part the Vatican still won’t officially acknowledge. What I’m about to tell you is going to seem impossible. You’re going to think I’m exaggerating, but I have the receipts. I have the survivor testimony. And I have proof that this system, this exact system of imprisoning women, abusing them, and covering it up continued into your lifetime.
Because the medieval convents didn’t disappear. They just changed their name and they operated in plain sight until 1996. The Magdaleneerries, if you haven’t heard of them, you need to understand why. Between 1922 and 1996, yes, 1996, over 30,000 Irish women and girls were imprisoned in Catholic institutions calledies.
They weren’t there for crimes. They were there for being fallen women. What made a woman fallen? being pregnant and unmarried, being too attractive, being raped, being homeless, being disabled, having a family that didn’t want you. The criteria were deliberately vague because the real purpose was the same as medieval convents, warehousing inconvenient women, and the abuse, identical to what Sister Arangela documented 342 years earlier.
The 2013 United Nations Human Rights Report interviewed 487 survivors. Their testimony is harrowing. Let me read you just one quote from the official record. The nuns said we were sinful. The priests said they were saving our souls. We worked 14 hours a day in thereries with no pay. We were beaten if we spoke. We were locked in if we resisted. We were prisoners.
And when I tried to tell my family, they said I was mentally ill and ungrateful for the church’s charity. In 2013, after years of survivor advocacy, the Irish government ordered excavations of Magdalene laundry sites. They found mass grav. The forensic evidence showed signs of systematic abuse, malnutrition, and suspicious deaths labeled as accidents or illnesses.
The direct institutional lineage is undeniable. Same rhetoric about cleansing sinful women. Same isolation from families. Same lack of legal rights. same punishment for resistance. The only difference is we have photographs and living survivors this time. The Catholic Church paid a 110 million euro settlement to survivors in 2013. But here’s what they didn’t do.
Admit wrongdoing, name perpetrators, release all sealed records, open the remaining archives. And this is why I spent six months researching this video because three separate documentaries tried to cover this complete timeline from medieval convents to Magdaleneerries and all three were blocked from major distribution.
One had its funding pulled, one faced legal threats. One was finished but never released citing sensitivity concerns. Even in 2023 when Pope Francis issued a formal statement acknowledging abuses in church history, he mentioned no names, specific institutions, no prosecutions, just vague apologies and promises to do better.
Meanwhile, survivors advocacy groups estimate there are still over 100,000 documented cases buried in Vatican archives that remain sealed. The 2020 opening was partial. Researchers can access some records, but entire sections remain classified under church law. Why? What’s in those records? That’s so dangerous even now. Here’s what you need to understand.
This isn’t ancient history. This is a centuries long system of abuse hidden behind the word holy. This is institutional power used to control women’s bodies justified by religious authority. This is what happens when we allow sacred spaces to operate without oversight, without accountability, without consequence. The pattern is consistent.
Isolate, control, abuse, silence, deny, and when the truth comes out, apologize vaguely while hiding the full extent of the damage. This matters today because the pattern hasn’t stopped. Every major religious institution currently facing abuse scandals uses the same playbook the medieval church perfected. Seal the records, discredit the victims, move the perpetrators, claim its isolated incidents, promise reform while fighting transparency.
The lesson isn’t just about Catholic convents. It’s about questioning institutional authority everywhere. It’s about understanding that sacred doesn’t mean safe. It’s about remembering that systems built on silence and power will always protect themselves over the people they harm. And it’s about understanding why documentation matters, why records matter, why survivor testimony matters, because erasia is a weapon.
What happened to Sister Archangela Tarabati? Having her words burned, her name deleted, her story dismissed as fiction for 350 years. That’s the goal. If there’s no evidence, it never happened. If there’s no names, no one’s accountable. But we have the evidence now. We have the names. We have the survivors.
So here’s my question for you. What other suppressed history should I investigate next? What other story has been buried, erased, or covered up? Drop your suggestions in the comments because this is just the beginning of this series. And if you made it this far, you’re clearly someone who cares about historical truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Make sure you’re subscribed because next week I’m releasing the follow-up to this. The secret Vatican archives on witch trials and why 80% of the accused witches were women who refused to enter convents. History’s darkest truths need to be told. Let’s keep telling them.
