VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Catholic World Report [San Francisco CA]
June 22, 2024
By Christopher R. Altieri
“We’re not talking about abuse of minors,” said Dr. Paolo Ruffini, Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication of the Holy See, on Friday, 21st June 2024, in response to questions after an address given at the annual Catholic Media Conference.
The Vatican’s chief comms officer on Friday defended his department’s use of an accused serial rapist’s art.
“We’re not talking about abuse of minors,” said Dr. Paolo Ruffini, Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication of the Holy See, on Friday, 21st June 2024, in response to questions from journalists gathered in the Heritage Ballroom of the Atlanta Marriott Buckhead and Conference Center.
Ruffini was there to deliver the keynote address on the last day of the annual Catholic Media Conference and had opened the floor to queries, two of which came from Colleen Dulle of America Magazine and Paulina Guzik of OSVNews.
The Vatican has continued to use digital reproductions of pieces by a disgraced former celebrity Slovenian artist-priest, Fr. Marko Rupnik, even after he began to face allegations he spiritually, psychologically, and sexually abused dozens of victims, most of whom were women religious.
The Vatican originally declined to prosecute Rupnik, and Pope Francis only reversed course after facing close scrutiny and sustained criticism.
“We did not put any new photos,” Ruffini told the room full of journalists and other media professionals, “we just left what [images] there were.”
The head of the Vatican comms dicastery’s theological-pastoral department, Natasa Govekar, was in the Vatican delegation to the week-long conference. Govekar’s department is directly responsible for the digital liturgical calendar that frequently features Rupnik images. A close associate of Rupnik, a member of the Centro Aletti art institute Rupnik founded, and a native Slovenian like Rupnik, Govekar did not headline official sessions or answer questions.
“Do you think that if I put away a photo of an art (away) from my—from our—website, I will be more close to the victims?” Ruffini asked Guzik, who had posed question to him regarding the message his dicastery is sending to victims of abuse and coverup.
“Do you think so?” Ruffini asked
“I think you’re wrong,” Ruffini said.
“I think you’re wrong,” Ruffini repeated.
“I really think you’re wrong”, Ruffini said again.
Ruffini noted that the Jesuits have not removed the Rupnik art that adorns the chapel in their general curia building, and called their decision, “inspiring.”
Even staunch papal defenders have expressed consternation at the Vatican’s continued use of Rupnik images.
“This is crazy,” wrote papal biographer Austen Ivereigh on X. “Of course, the Vatican should not be using the [Rupnik] images in websites, etc.,” Ivereigh also wrote, “especially given that Rupnik is being investigated by the Vatican.”
Ivereigh’s remark was noteworthy not only because it from a fellow close to Francis, but also because Ivereigh has sharply criticized people who have called for works by Rupnik to be destroyed or removed from sacred spaces.
“Many disgraced and dubious religious artists have created works that over the centuries have raised minds and hearts to God,” Ivereigh wrote in response to a call—in April of this year—for the removal of Rupnik’s art. “This is pure iconoclasm,” Ivereigh wrote, “Puritan not Catholic, and heretical, because it does not allow for grace to supplement sinful nature.”
Anatomy of a scandal
Ruffini, however, is in good company.
In June of 2023, when the Rupnik scandal had been before the public for nearly six months, Pope Francis recorded a video message to the participants in a Marian Congress in Aparecide, Brazil, in which he used a mosaic depiction of the Madonna and Child by Rupnik as a prop in a spiritual reflection.
“We are talking [about] a story that we don’t know,” Ruffini also said. “Who am I to judge the Rupnik stories?”
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is currently conducting a review of the Rupnik matter.
“We think—the dicastery—and I personally think that [removing images of Rupnik’s works from official Vatican media] is not a good way to anticipate,” the outcome of the review process, which may or may not end in trial. “As Christians,” Ruffini said, “we are asked not to judge.”
Rupnik escaped prosecution—at least for a while—after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (now styled the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) found there was a case to answer but declared the charges against Rupnik statute barred.
That decision did more than raise eyebrows, since it also emerged around the same time that a secret Vatican court had in fact found Rupnik guilty of absolving an “accomplice” in a sexual sin, and secretly declared him excommunicated. After Rupnik’s secret trial and secret excommunication, the Vatican secretly and very swiftly lifted the secret penalty.
Not only.
There was mountainous evidence against Rupnik already collected, and there would be ample opportunity for Rupnik and his lawyers to confront witnesses. There was, in short, no plausible reason for not waiving the statute of limitations.
Statutes of limitations exist to ensure accused persons get fair trials, in other words, and, in Rupnik’s case, he could have received one.
The Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—expelled Rupnik last year, for disobedience, after he flouted restrictions his Jesuit superiors had placed on him in the wake of investigations that produced mountainous evidence but failed to secure a prosecution.
Pope Francis has never confirmed that he ordered the CDF/DDF not to lift the statute of limitations and bring Rupnik to trial, but he did explain—in an interview with the Associated Press—that he tends to leave such legal safeguards in place when cases of abuse involve victims who were not minors.
In any case, it is certain that Francis did not waive the statute of limitations against Rupnik at first, and in fact only did so in the wake of incandescent global outrage over news Rupnik had been received as a priest of Koper diocese in his native Slovenia.
“Rupnik had not been sentenced to any judicial sentence,” Koper’s vicar general told The Pillar, meaning Rupnik had not been convicted of any crime and was therefore to enjoy good standing and to keep the full exercise of his ministry as a priest of the diocese.
Ars gratia abusus
When it comes to Rupnik’s art itself—the actual works, not the digital images of them—the problem isn’t only or primarily that it is creepy, though lots of people find it to be so and did even before the first news of his abusive depravity (long known to his Jesuit superiors in Rome and in his native Slovenia)—began to reach the public a few weeks before Christmas, 2022.
The main problem with Rupnik’s art is that he is accused of using his art to forward his perverse designs on the vulnerable women in his spiritual care. They allege that his depraved and indeed diabolical abuse was part of his “creative” process.
“Father Marko [Rupnik] asked me to have threesomes with another sister of the community,” one victim-accuser, Gloria Branciani, told Italy’s Domani, “because sexuality had to be, in his opinion, free from possession, in the image of the Trinity where, [Fr Marko Rupnik] said, ‘the third person would welcome the relationship between the two’.”
Branciani recounted her story in gruesome detail to Domani in 2023, originally under a pseudonym—Anna—but she later decided to reveal herself.
Even if there really is no accounting for taste, there is accounting for modus operandi in crime.
The continued use of Rupnik images compounds victims’ hurt and causes scandal in the strict, technical sense of the term.
“Mr. Ruffini’s comments are the type of dismissive, abuse-minimizing responses which compound the pain and trauma of survivors of abuse and further erode trust in the institutional Church,” abuse survivor and advocate Antonia Sobocki told CWR.
Sobocki founded the LOUDFence group in the UK to raise awareness and support victims of clerical sexual abuse and coverup, and recently brought her advocacy organization to the United States.
“Failing to take decisions which actively support and care for those who have been so gravely injured by abuse is not a neutral act,” Sobocki said, “it is an act of support for the abuser.”
Noting Ruffini’s “position of grave responsibility in the Church,” Sobocki called for his resignation.
“If he cannot bring himself to be part of the solution to one of the greatest challenges facing the Church in modern times,” Sobocki said, “then he should step down and permit someone else to undertake this role with the compassion and responsibility it absolutely requires.”
What, now?
In late May, in Italy—Conelgiano Veneto, in the parish church of Our Lady of the Graces—a series of mosaics designed and installed by Rupnik’s Centro Aletti were officially unveiled. It wasn’t the only such official unveiling in recent times, either.
Official Vatican media have been using images of Rupnik art as the Rupnik scandal has unfolded, despite increasingly intense criticism from across the spectrum of opinion in the Church.
Vatican Media just this month used the same Rupnik image to illustrate the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart as they did last year.
Another Rupnik is scheduled to be used later this month, to mark the feast of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, illustrated with an image from a Rupnik studio mosaic in the chapel of the apostolic nunciature in Paris.
It may take time and will cost money to take down all the hundreds of Rupnik pieces and installations in shrines and chapels and even cathedrals throughout the world, but there is broad agreement that no one—certainly not the Vatican—should be using digital images or other reproductions of any of them for any purpose.
Dr. Paolo Ruffini, Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication of the Holy See, disagrees. Vehemently.
Apparently, so does Pope Francis.