June 25, 2021
The Islamic Republic is expelling one of two Roman Catholic nuns who have long treated lepers in Iran; the government didn’t say why it was expelling one but not the other.
Seventy-five-year-old Italian Sister Giuseppina Berti, who has worked for 26 years in the leprosarium of Tabriz and now lives in Esfahan in the house of the Congregation of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, will have to leave Iran in the coming days.
Her visa has not been renewed and she has received an expulsion order. The government did not say why it was expelling her.
Her fellow nun, Sister Fabiola Weiss, a 77-year-old Austrian, who has spent 38 years tending the poor and the sick in the leprosy hospital, has seen her residence permit renewed for another year.
Roman Catholic nuns ran a large school that was confiscated after the 1979 revolution. In recent years, the two sisters did not carry out any outside activities, to avoid being accused of proselytizing, the Vatican News reported.
There is little Roman Catholic presence left in Iran. The Vatican News says it amounts to: two Assyrian-Chaldean archdioceses of Tehran-Ahwaz and Urumiyeh-Salmas, which have one bishop and four priests (in the summer of 2019, the patriarchal administrator of Tehran of the Chaldeans, Ramzi Garmou, was also denied a visa renewal and could not return to the country); an Armenian diocese in which there is only one bishop, and the Latin archdiocese, which currently has no priest and is awaiting the arrival of its newly appointed pastor, Archbishop Dominique Mathieu; the Daughters of Charity, with three sisters in Tehran and two sisters in Esfahan. There are also two consecrated laywomen. The membership totals about 3,000.
In 2016, the house of the Lazarist Fathers in Esfahan was confiscated.