Therese and Dom Severino

Therese and Dom Severino are bound by a relationship in which the language and setting of religious refuge conceal coercive control. Severino first receives Therese as a vulnerable traveler and promises care; he then leads her into the monastery’s concealed rooms, where she discovers that his apparent hospitality was a means of delivering her into the monks’ custody. His role is not confined to one act of betrayal: he is a superior who helps enforce the institution’s rules and repeatedly exercises power over Therese within them.

The Promise of Refuge and Its Reversal

Severino initially presents himself as a cleric prepared to meet Therese’s needs. He tells her that he will arrange for her to pray before the image she has come to visit and leads her farther into the church, ostensibly to provide for her immediate necessities. When she questions why they are going inside, he answers by invoking the shelter of the monks. His assurance turns into an explicit threat: he says that if the monks do not give her pleasure, she will at least serve theirs. Therese recognizes the danger, but by then Severino has brought her into the secluded building, and he orders her forward rather than allowing her to withdraw.

The change in Severino’s manner exposes the false protection at the heart of their first encounter. The religious promise is not merely broken; it is used to draw Therese into a place where ordinary appeals to safety, decency, and faith have no force. She recalls that they pass through dark passages and climb roughly thirty or forty steps before entering a brightly lit room. There Severino presents her to the monks and describes her as both marked by past abuse and, in his account, still nearly a virgin. His introduction turns her history into material for the group’s appraisal, while his authority determines how she is received.

Authority Within the Monastery

Severino’s power over Therese is reinforced by the monastery’s organized system of confinement. He tells her that resistance is useless in the isolated retreat and points to instruments of punishment as the answer to disobedience. He stresses that outsiders do not enter the premises and that the building’s walls make it safe from discovery. In this setting, his threats are backed not only by his own position but by the collective power of the monks and the institution’s separation from public scrutiny.

The rules Therese later describes show how that authority is maintained from day to day. At nine each morning, the Officer of the Day inspects the women, hears the superintendent’s report, assigns participants for the evening, and oversees punishments. The jailer carries a card bearing the name of a woman requested by a monk; even the officer cannot refuse the request. Therese’s account places Severino among the men who can summon and select the women, while the system ensures that their choices are implemented. This daily procedure gives institutional form to the private power Severino first asserted over her.

Repeated Abuse and Therese’s Responses

At Therese’s arrival, Severino declares that a recalcitrant attitude will achieve nothing and uses the other captive women as examples of what submission under threat looks like. When the monks begin their ritualized inspection, he helps determine how she is presented and exposed to their scrutiny. His position allows him to frame her as an object of collective attention before the others act. The scene establishes the imbalance that will recur throughout their relationship: Severino speaks with the authority of a superior, while Therese is given no meaningful choice about what happens to her.

During the first morning after Therese is assigned new clothing, she secretly removes her money from her pockets and hides it in her hair before surrendering her old garments. The detail records a small but deliberate effort to preserve something of her own under conditions in which the monks control her clothing and movements. As she changes, Severino watches and touches her; he then directs her into a position chosen for his pleasure, while the others gather around. Therese decides that obedience is safer than asking him to spare her, judging his anger by the look in his eyes. Her compliance is a survival response within a coercive situation, not consent.

Severino’s demands recur. Therese says that at this period he sought her almost every night, and she recounts an episode in which he subjected her to severe physical abuse using an object from the monastery and a device that caused intense pain. She describes pleading for mercy and obeying when he threatened her. The episode makes the relation’s repeated pattern unmistakable: Severino’s desires govern the encounter, his threat secures compliance, and Therese bears the consequences. His response to her suffering is presented in direct opposition to her appeals for relief.

Relation to the Other Captives and Narrative Significance

Severino’s treatment of Therese belongs to a broader system that also governs the other women. At the supper where she first sees the group, the eight girls differ greatly in age, including a child scarcely ten years old, a pregnant woman, and women around forty. Therese’s attention to their distinct circumstances reveals a captive population organized into classes rather than a single, undifferentiated group. The monks decide who serves, who attends them, and who is selected to spend the night; the women are also threatened with punishment if they refuse food. Severino’s actions toward Therese therefore exemplify a collective regime, even as their personal encounters give that regime an immediate human focus.

Therese’s account also sets the monastery’s professed religious identity against its actual practices. Severino invokes the authority of a spiritual superior while warning that the retreat recognizes neither mercy nor humaneness and holds religion in contempt. The contradiction makes the betrayal more than a change in one man’s conduct: religious language and sacred space are used to disguise an institution founded on secrecy and domination. Therese’s relationship with Severino is consequently a central example of how the monastery converts trust into captivity and authority into a means of abuse.