VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Catholic World Report [San Francisco CA]
June 25, 2024
By Christopher R. Altieri
The miscarriage of justice in the case of Marko Rupnik—the appalling farce it has been from the start—is sadly not an aberration under Pope Francis. The Rupnik Affair has indelibly stained this pontificate.
“Who am I to judge the Rupnik stories?”
Pope Francis’s Communicator-in-Chief, Dr. Paolo Ruffini, asked that rhetorical question on Friday in an Atlanta, GA hotel ballroom, in front of journalists, one of whom—Colleen Dulle of America Magazine, it happens—had asked him to explain his dicastery’s rationale for continuing to use reproductions of artwork by a disgraced priest who is accused of serial sexual abuse.
Well, nobody is asking Ruffini to judge the case, which—just so we’re clear on the point from the outset—is very strong.
The Rupnik Affair has been before the public for the better part of two years. The Jesuits who investigated him believe he is guilty. The CDF believes there is a case to answer but declined to prosecute, citing the statute of limitations. Rupnik would never have faced the prospect of trial were it not for sustained press scrutiny and pressure from inside Francis’s own inner circle.
No one is asking Natasa Govekar to judge the business, either.
Govekar is the close associate of Rupnik and member of the Centro Aletti art house he founded at Rome under Pope St. John Paul II (whose favor he enjoyed) in the early 1990s. She is also the director of the theological-pastoral department in the Dicastery for Communication of the Holy See, responsible for the liturgical calendar on which several Rupniks are featured.
Govekar was in Atlanta all week, as part of the official Vatican delegation, but she wasn’t taking questions.
Another journalist—Paulina Guzik of OSV News—specifically asked Ruffini what message he thinks the Dicastery’s continued use of Rupnik images sends to victims.
“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 offered by way of reply. “I think you’re wrong,” Ruffini told her.
Victims of clerical sexual abuse have called repeatedly for the Vatican to stop using images, explaining that seeing the images compounds their trauma. Ruffini believes he knows better than they do, too.
I almost wrote “Ruffini’s Dicastery,” but before that I almost wrote “Rupnik’s Dicastery … etc.” Really, though, the Dicastery for Communication of the Holy See is the pope’s outfit and no one else’s.
Francis is the pope.
Qui tacet …
One word from him could have put a stop to this traffic almost before it started. One word from him would put a stop to it now.
With apologies to Robert Bolt’s fictionalized Thomas More (who quoted a version of it) and the real Pope Boniface VIII (in whose law books the maxim may be found): Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debet ac potuit. “He who keeps silent is to be taken as consenting, wheresoever he ought to have spoken and was able to speak.”
“We’re not talking about the abuse of minors,” Ruffini also said.
I can curse to make a sailor blush in several languages, but I want power of eloquence to heap sufficient execration upon such callousness.
In point of fact, we are talking about the abuse of vulnerable persons. At the very least, we are talking about persons investigators believe to have been in a condition of physical, moral, and spiritual disparity with their alleged abuser and somehow in his spiritual care.
If Rupnik’s victims are not “vulnerable adults” in the legally pertinent sense of the term, then the category is meaningless. No one ever could be vulnerable in the legally pertinent sense, whatever it is.
The changes to Church law that introduced the category of vulnerable adults were, it appears, mere paper reforms designed not to give ecclesiastical investigators and prosecutors greater power to discover crime and punish it, nor to help pastors police their clerical ranks and protect the faithful.
They were designed, it appears, for some other purpose.
Setting the tone
The miscarriage of justice in the case of Marko Rupnik—the appalling farce it has been from the start—is sadly not an aberration under Pope Francis. The Rupnik Affair has indelibly stained this pontificate. Every second this intolerable state of things persists, the Rupnik Affair comes closer to defining the Francis era.
Even if Pope Francis fires Ruffini for cause and orders the use of Rupnik’s depraved work to cease, he will only have taken cosmetic action.
Pope Francis personally set the tone and established de facto the policy Ruffini formally stated and defended for his comms dicastery last Friday. One year ago this month, Francis used one of Rupnik’s artworks as a prop in a video message for folks at a Marian congress in Aparecida, Brazil.
The Rupnik Affair had been a public scandal for seven months, at that point.
It is not only unrealistic to expect any expression of remorse or regret from the current administration, but maudlin to presume any such or similar expression will come with the action necessary to begin repair of the damage already done to lives and souls.
His name a by-word
When I was an undergrad, I played a computer game called Age of Empires. I was never much of a gamer, but I imagine my parents would not have been best pleased to know how much time that one got from me. They were paying for my education, after all.
I don’t remember much about the game, but I do recall its cheeky campaign scenario failure messages.
“Your reign will mark the end of your people’s history, but you will be remembered,” began one of them. “Your name,” the message continued, “will become the word for ‘worthless’.” Come to think of it, many of the fail messages were not only cheeky, but clever and even well informed. Anyway, the development of language is endlessly fascinating. Like history more generally, it is always messy and always happening.
The Solemnity of the Sacred Heart was on June 7th this year, but last year it was on June 16th. Vatican Media used the same Rupnik to illustrate the feast day this year as they did last year.
So, sometimes history repeats itself, or at least it rhymes.
Another piece of Rupnik art 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.
One wonders what will become of Rupnik—the name—whether it will become a by-word for diabolically depraved criminal abuse.
There’s more to the Rupnik Affair. There is culpable prosecutorial incompetence, irresponsible leadership, dereliction of duty, contempt of government and of the governed. Those things are better associated with the one who presides over this ghastly spectacle.