If you are not familiar with the case of Slovenian priest Marko Rupnik, here is a short summary.
Rupnik was a Jesuit who was recently expelled from the order after accusations of decades of sexual abuse against women religious, including some particularly blasphemous instances of sexual abuse including forcing nuns to drink his semen from a chalice and engaging in threesome where he invoked the Holy Spirit.
In 2020, he had been excommunicated, only for it to be swiftly revoked. This became knowledge at the end of last year.
Rupnik has long been a hero to many in the church for his grotesque ultra Modernist art, which has a freakish obsession with large eyes, which now seems bizarrely linked to his weird sexual lifestyle. His ‘art’ can be seen at Lourdes, Fatima and other major places of worship. His work has also been used for the World Meeting of Families and other big events and the websites for the Synod and the Vatican currently feature many of the iconography created by him, some of it mutant like, betraying the degenerate and depraved lifestyle behind his art.
Rupnik’s World Meeting of Families icon
Last weekend, images emerged of Pope Francis meeting with Maria Campatelli, director of the Aletti Center, at the Vatican.
The story descended into farce yesterday when the vicariate of Rome published an incredulous statement which not only exonerated Rupnik, but also questioned his excommunication. The document also praised the centre where Rupnik had worked, writing:
It emerges clearly that within the Centro Aletti, a healthy community life free of any particular critical issues is present.
The visitor was able to ascertain that the members of the Centro Aletti, although saddened by the accusations and the ways in which they were handled, chose to maintain silence – despite the vehemence of the media – to guard their hearts and not to claim any irreproachability with which to stand as judges of others.
The entire affair, in the judgment of the visitor, has helped the persons who live the experience of the Centro Aletti to reinforce their trust in the Lord, in the awareness that the gift of life in God makes space for itself also in trials.
The tone of the comments, not to mention their content, has led to outrage online.
In a powerful response today, some of his alleged victims wrote:
To the Holy Father Pope FrancisTo Cardinal Vicar De Donatis
To Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, president of the CEI
To Cardinal João Braz de Aviz
The facts and press releases that have followed in recent days - the private audience, later made public through images that appeared online, granted by the Pope to Maria Campatelli, former religious of the Loyola Community and current president of the Aletti Center; and the statement released today with the final report of the canonical visit made to the community of the Aletti Center - leave us speechless, with no voice left to shout out our bewilderment, our scandal.
In these two non-random events, even in their succession over time, we recognize that the church cares nothing about the victims and those seeking justice; and that the "zero tolerance on abuse in the church" was only an advertising campaign, which was instead followed only by often hidden actions, which instead supported and covered up the perpetrators of abuse.
They make us think that the rhetoric we saw on stage in Lisbon during last July and August is an empty word ("Everyone, everyone, everyone is welcomed into the church!"), because in the end there is no place in this church for those remember uncomfortable truths.
We have no other words, because we have exposed all the suffering of the victims as an open wound, and certainly disgusting.... And the victims were therefore censored for not having been discreet, but for having exposed something repugnant: their pain, the manipulation of those who defrauded them in the name of Christ, of spiritual love, of the Trinity. They exposed their pain because the manipulation and abuse had forever wounded their dignity.
All they have received and continue to receive is silence. Above all, the victims of the abuse of power by Ivanka Hosta (who for thirty years covered up Rupnik's atrocities, and reduced to spiritual slavery those who opposed her plans for revenge) await a definitive, clear, maternal response for more than one year. But they only received silence. And with this report published today, which clears Rupnik of any responsibility, he ridicules the pain of the victims, but also of the entire church, mortally wounded by such ostentatious arrogance.
That conversation granted by the Pope to Campatelli, in such a familiar atmosphere, was thrown in the faces of the victims (these and all victims of abuse); a meeting that the Pope denied them. He never even responded to four letters from as many religious and former religious of the Loyola Community who had them delivered to him in July 2021.
The victims are left in the voiceless cry of a new abuse.
Some of the people invited to the upcoming Synod have been bullish in their opinion of Rupnik and his ‘art’, with one prominent Synod leader even tweeting:
Sacraments are ex opere operato; why not a great religious artist’s work? Rupnick stays on my wall; I don’t approve of what he has done, but his are works of grace, and I don’t want to reject grace. (Shocked that God makes use of sinners? Try the gospels.)
We hold that his ‘art’ is hideous and that abuse was central to their creation, every single work that he made should be physically destroyed and banned from use in books, parish newsletters and Synod events.
