Once Excommunicated Fr Rupnik, S.J. - Accused of Sex Abuse, publicly concelebrates Mass in Rome
The Daily Knight
Pope Francis greets Jesuit Father Marko Rupnik during a private audience at the Vatican in this Jan. 3, 2022, file photo. Father Rupnik, whose mosaics decorate chapels in the Vatican, all over Europe, in the United States and Australia, is under restricted ministry after being accused of abusing adult nuns in Slovenia. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)
Original article at the Catholic World Report.
The Vatican and the Jesuits continue to deflect and deny, but the evidence is decades old and deeply troubling.
So, an accused sexual predator supposedly prohibited from saying Mass in public concelebrated a liturgy in Rome on Sunday.
The accused predator is the disgraced celebrity artist-priest and spiritual guru Fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik SJ, who came to Rome in the early 1990s to found a cultural center—the Centro Aletti–from which he produced artworks in mosaic and other media that now decorate major Catholic shrines and chapels from the Apostolic Palace to Australia, and dozens of places in between.
Rupnik is now facing an internal Jesuit process that could see him expelled from the order, but that development was a long time coming and is still far from a sure thing.
In short, Rupnik has been a very popular guy until recently, and apparently still has friends among the powerful, so the rules are not really rules for him.
The man currently responsible for enforcing the putative restrictions on Rupnik’s ministry, Fr. Johan Verschueren SJ., explained that the precepts actually allow Rupnik “to concelebrate Masses in the context of the Aletti Center, which is his inner circle, his community.”
The Mass Rupnik concelebrated was at Santa Prassede on the Esquiline Hill near St. Mary Major – just up a side street and around a corner from the Centro Aletti – and the head of the Jesuit community attached to the Aletti Center, Fr. Milan Žust SJ, was among the concelebrants as well.
So, I guess that counts.
Verschueren, for his part, told ACI Prensa earlier this week that he didn’t know much about the business, and wouldn’t be making “judgments about things that I am not absolutely sure about.” I mean, it’s … good policy, I guess. Only—forgive me—why do you not have eyes on this inveterate creep, 24/7? Also, if you are not going to make judgments about things you’re not sure about, at the very least, are you going to investigate?
There are real-world practical issues of public safety—physical and spiritual—in play here. If the ease with which Rupnik’s Jesuit superior allowed him to skirt the restrictions on celebrating the sacraments is any indication of the rigor with which the general restrictions on his movement and other activities are enforced, then one would not be surprised to see Rupnik at the dedication of whatever mosaic he has coming next.
No one should be surprised.
“Fish rots from the head, down,” is an old maxim frequently applied to Rome and the Roman Pontiffs. Candid minds must acknowledge that Pope Francis’s record on abuse and coverup is dismal. After Francis stripped Uncle Ted McCarrick of his red hat and made him a layman, he commissioned a report that was largely a whitewash. Nor does it appear that his resolve has stuck. Jean-Pierre Ricard—a confessed child molester—is still a cardinal with voting rights.
In February 2022, Pope Francis tapped Ricard as his delegate to the Foyers de charité, following revelations of abuse by one of that outfit’s co-founders, André Marie Van Der Borght. Ricard held the post for only a few weeks, before resigning “for health reasons” in mid-March of that same year.
To date, no review of Ricard’s conduct in office on any of the powerful Roman dicasteries has been announced, not even at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is responsible for investigating and prosecuting crimes of sexual abuse and coverup.
The Vatican surely knew about some, at least, of Rupnik’s predations in March of 2020, when Pope Francis tapped him to pinch hit for the preacher of the papal household on the curia’s Lenten retreat.
When Francis personally invited Cardinal Godfried Danneels to participate in the 2014 synod on the family, he certainly knew that Danneels had pressured the victim of Bishop Roger Vangheluwe—the bishop’s own nephew—to keep quiet at least until Vangheluwe could retire.
Francis knew about Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta’s penchant for seminarians and predilection for porn in 2015, but sent Zanchetta back to his see in Argentina and left him there until 2017, when Francis let Zanchetta retire quietly—for “health reasons”—and go for some head shrinking before taking up a post Francis created for him in the Vatican’s sovereign asset management outfit, APSA.
Francis had received a letter—or should have received it—from Juan Carlos Cruz, a victim of Chile’s most notorious celebrity abuser-priest, Fernando Karadima, when he repeatedly accused Cruz and others of slandering Bishop Juan Barros, a Karadima protégé who enabled his protector’s abusive behavior and worked to cover it up.
Francis told a cabin full of reporters he had not received any evidence of Barros’ alleged wrongdoing, and that the victims had never brought their case to him. “You [reporters], in all good will, tell me that there are victims, but I haven’t seen any, because they haven’t come forward,” Francis said.
That simply was not true, and Francis either knew it was not true or should have known.
Francis had put Barros in the see of Osorno, against the complaints of victims including Cruz and over the objections of the Chilean bishops.
The Danneels appointment rightly raised eyebrows. The Barros business and l’Affaire Zanchetta should have destroyed any man, and likely would have sunk any similarly placed leader subject to anything like responsible oversight.
But we were talking about Rupnik.
Just so we are clear on the point: No fewer than fifteen women—many of them religious sisters—have accused him of sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse over a period of more than thirty years, from the middle of the 1980s to 2018.
A secret Vatican court found Rupnik guilty of absolving an “accomplice” in a “sin against the Sixth Commandment”—Church-speak for a broad range of sexual transgressions—in 2020, but punished him only with ratification of an excommunication he had already incurred, and then lifted the excommunication within a month of its imposition.
Until the story reached the papers late in 2022, only Rupnik’s victims and a few highly placed churchmen knew much of anything about his sordid and criminal extracurriculars. The Jesuits in senior leadership kept it that way. They were happy to let Rupnik trot the globe to receive awards and accolades and even lead retreats, too.
“We don’t have to publish every case,” Fr. Arturo Sosa, the head of the Jesuits, told Portuguese 7Margens news outlet in December of last year. “One of the things we are all entitled to as people is a certain amount of privacy: you have to make public statements when it’s public; when it’s not public, there’s nothing to do about it and that doesn’t mean hiding it.”
“We didn’t hide anything,” Sosa said.
Rupnik’s Jesuit superiors heard allegations against him no later than the 1990s, but left the priest to his devices. According to the particularly detailed account of one accuser, Jesuits in Rome and Rupnik’s native Slovenia either winked at efforts to discredit Rupnik’s accusers, or else took an active role in efforts to make sure the celebrity artist-priest would not face any consequences worth the name.
It’s not like Rupnik was stealing kisses under the portico, either.
That same accuser—“Anna”—told the Italian magazine, Domani, that Rupnik “asked me to have threesomes with another sister of the community, because sexuality had to be, in his opinion, free from possession, in the image of the Trinity.” Anna says Rupnik told her “the third person would welcome the relationship between the two.”
“On those occasions,” Anna said, “[Rupnik] would ask me to live out my femininity in an aggressive and dominant way, and since I could not do so, he would deeply humiliate me with phrases that I cannot repeat.”
The Pillar published an English translation of the whole Domani piece. It is gruesome stuff, which includes “violent masturbation” and the loss of her virginity. “He had no restraints,” Anna told Domani. “[H]e used every means to achieve his goal,” including things he learned under the seal of Confession. Given what Anna was able to describe in graphic detail, one shudders to think what she could not bring herself to say.
There’s more one could say about the manner in which Francis and his chief lieutenants have managed the Rupnik business–lots more–but this is not the place for parsing legal niceties.
As the Rupnik business continues to unravel, Francis has asked the entire Church to pray for victims of abuse.
“In response to cases of abuse, especially those committed by members of the Church, it is not enough to ask for forgiveness,” Pope Francis says in a video message announcing his March 2023 prayer intention. “Let us pray for those who have suffered because of the wrongs done to them by members of the Church,” Francis says. “May they find within the Church herself a concrete response to their pain and suffering.”
Original article at the Catholic World Report.
You could be totally forgiven for not having the slightest idea who Marko Rupnik SJ is, but you are more likely to remember some of his strange contributions to the Franciscan papacy.
As Dr. Peter Kwasniewski remarked this week “I'm not the only one who finds Fr. Rupnik's art creepy? It's just plain weird, these bulbous pop-eyed slinky figures with cartoon cut-out profiles... to me there's something inhuman about it. I'm not saying one can deduce from his art that he was a mega-pervert who, in spite of being a priest sworn to celibacy, slept with 20-something nuns (sometimes 2 at a time), blasphemed the Trinity and the Eucharist, and abused the sacrament of confession, but I *am* saying that his art should never have been so celebrated, as if he was some kind of great church artist of our times.”
In case you haven’t guessed, Rupnik is the man responsible for recent Vatican favourites like the three eyed figure chosen for the world meeting of families earlier in this pontificate:
Rupnik is at the centre of a great controversy at the Vatican after it emerged he had been convicted of abusing a number of Slovenian nuns at a religious order where he was spiritual director in the eighties. In 2015: Father Rupnik violates the confessional by absolving an Italian novice with whom he had sinned against the sixth commandment. A canonical trial into this unanimously convicted Rupnik, who is subsequently excommunicated in 2020, although the Jesuits say this was lifted soon after. Messa in Latino revealed that this was actioned by Rupnik’s friend, Pope Francis.
Despite this, Father Johan Verschueren, delegate of Jesuits' Superior General and Major Superior for the International Houses confirmed in Dec. 17, 2022, that Father Rupnik was to “avoid private, in-depth spiritual contacts with persons, forbidden to confess women, and to give spiritual direction to women specifically in the context of Centro Aletti. In 2020, these restrictions were widened geographically to include anywhere.
Regardless of the restrictions, Pope Francis either asked or approved Rupnik temporarily standing in for Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the pontifical household, to preach the Lenten homilies at the Vatican in March 2020.
A further investigation into allegations of abuse against Rupnik was launched in 2021 where at least nine women made accusations against him. Although the investigation concluded there was a case to answer, the Vatican declined to carry out a canonical process relating to these allegations citing the statute of limitations.
You would have thought all of this might give our Holy Father some cause for concern regarding the celebrity priest. But Pope Francis received Father Rupnik in private audience in January 2022. Father Rupnik also continues to record his homilies and talks and broadcasts them on the website of the Aletti Center. The latest was posted on YouTube on Dec. 10. In November, Rupnik received an honorary doctorate from the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná in Brazil.
While Father Pavone is laicised for “disobedience”, here we have a Jesuit friend of Pope Francis who is protected (Father Verschueren explained to Edward Pentin that Father Rupnik has been able to continue certain public activities because “a few exceptions” were made for him. “The local superior had the right to allow exceptions,” Father Verschueren said, and “could judge whether there were opportune or not.” He added: “I admit that this did not work well. We made these rules ‘absolute’ after complaints reached my ears.”) and allowed to continue in a very high profile ministry, is given given awards, despite the verified fact that he abused several nuns, sometimes several at once, blaspheming the Trinity and the Eucharist. This man gave confessional absolution to a woman he had sex with for which he was excommunicated, but it’s not what you know, it’s who you know! Pope Francis lifted the excommunication, stopped Vatican action & invited him to preach at a Vatican retreat day.
What does this say about Vatican promises of accountability and zero tolerance for abuse? It appears that “disobedience” is a far more problematic crime for the Vatican than abuse.
We can add Rupnik to the list of predators Pope Francis has personally protected; Zanchetta, Grassi, Inzola, et al.
One also has to wonder, given the timings and contents of the letter from the Apostolic Nuncio to the US bishops regarding Fr. Pavone actually state that huge media interest in his laicization was anticipated, was this orchestrated in some way to distract attention from the Pope’s involvement in the Rupnik affair?
In Christ Crucified and the Most Victorious Heart of Jesus.
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