Victims of Rupnik release statement expressing hope that truth be “acknowledged”

Five victims of the disgraced former Jesuit celebrity artist-priest, Fr. Marko Rupnik, have issued a terse statement following news that Pope Francis has reversed course and decided to waive the statute of limitations so the priest could face some sort of criminal process in the Vatican’s canonical court, presumably on charges related to allegations he abused dozens of victims over decades.

“We were very surprised by the [27 October 2023] communiqué from the Holy See Press Office, in which the Holy Father asks the DDF to examine the Rupnik case and waives the statute of limitations to allow for a process to take place that may render justice for the victims,” the statement begins.

“We hope,” the statement goes on to say, “that this is a suitable step towards seeing the truth acknowledged [It. riconosciuta].”

“We await further developments,” the statement concludes.

Don’t trust, verify

If the statement does not read as replete with confidence in either the pope’s willingness or the Vatican’s ability to make good on his late undertakings in these regards, there is ample reason.

The statement was first reported by Italy’s daily Domani newspaper on Monday. Domani quotes Fr. Johan Verschueren SJ, a senior official in the Jesuit leadership in Rome who has been the public face of the order for the better part of a year. Verschueren told Domani he had “extensively described the different types of accusations and abuse that have been brought against [Rupnik],” in March of this year, to Bishop Jurij Bizjak of Koper in Slovenia, who was already then planning to welcome Rupnik to serve as a priest of his diocese, should Rupnik have been able to extricate himself from the Jesuits on his own terms. Verschueren also detailed the legal cases against Rupnik for the bishop.

The Jesuits expelled Rupnik—for disobedience—but Bizjak welcomed him anyway. The Slovenian bishops had already issued a statement in December of last year, saying they believe the allegations against Rupnik. Bizjak was among the signatories of that declaration, which decried Rupnik’s “unacceptable and reprehensible actions.”

The Slovenian bishops have since issued their own statement dissociating themselves from Bizjak’s decision to welcome Rupnik.

In any case, the news of the incardination instantly brought on incandescent outrage from across the spectrum of opinion in the Church, and even drew the ire of the Slovenian government.

It was not two full days after news of Rupnik’s incardination had caused the public opinion piles to reach critical mass and set off a chain reaction, that Pope Francis announced his volte-face and offered a laconic explanation citing a report of “irregularities” in the handling of Rupnik’s case that the Vatican said Francis received from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors in September, which led to the pope’s decision to change course.

Observers including this one found that very difficult to credit.

Domani cited an unnamed source who reported that the president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley OFM Cap. Of Boston, raised l’Affaire Rupnik in “discussion” during the recent synod assembly. The Commission was attempting to organize some sort of outreach to Rupnik’s victims as recently as October 8^th. Domani reported that an online meeting organized by the PCPM took place with some of Rupnik’s victims on October 21^st,

One victim who participated in the virtual gathering told Domani, “There is no need to hear the victims at this point, since we have all been heard several times and the only thing missing is justice.”

“I don’t need to be listened to,” said the same victim—who preferred to remain anonymous. “[I need] justice,” the victim said, “for myself and for the others.”

Two of the victim-signatories of Monday’s statement, Gloria Branciani and Mirjam Kovač did not participate in the PCPM meeting with victims. “We proposed another method to the members of the Commission,” Branciani told Domani, involving an in-person interview with their lawyer. “[The Commission] agreed,” Branciani said, “but we have not yet established when and where it will take place.”

Courageous witnesses

The statement from the victims, as reported in Domani, bears the signatures of five women who had already chosen to reveal themselves publicly.* Two of the victims—Gloria Branciani and Mirjam Kovač—have also chosen to reveal that they were the witnesses previously identified by pseudonyms, “Anna” and “Ester” respectively, in pieces published by Domani several months ago. Kovač and Branciani are joined in the statement by three other victims: Vida Bernard, Mira Stare, and Jožica Zupančič.

The Pillar translated Anna’s interview into English and published it in full. Anna’s gruesome, harrowing account is credited with raising the profile of the case and contributing to the intensity of pressure on Church authorities.

Ghastly details both of Rupnik’s abusive exploits and Church leaders’ appalling mismanagement of the affair continued to emerge over the course of a year that saw the Vatican, the leadership of the Society of Jesus, the Rome diocese, and other organs of Church government at various levels obfuscate, machinate, and outright stonewall in the face of increasingly intense scrutiny by news media and outrage from the general public.

Stacking the deck

Once a celebrated mosaic artist, Rupnik’s works adorn shrines and chapels all over the world—from Fatima, Portugal to New Haven, Connecticut, to Queensland, Australia, and many other places in between, including the Lourdes, France– for the time being, at least—and the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.

Rupnik—a former Jesuit who was expelled from the religious order earlier this year for disobedience—is accused of sexually, psychologically, and spiritually abusing some two dozen victims—most of them women religious—over a period spanning three decades, much of which he spent in Rome at the head of an art studio—the Centro Aletti—right under the noses of Jesuit superiors and Vatican officials.

Starting in the 1990s, Rupnik’s victims repeatedly complained to Rupnik’s erstwhile Jesuit superiors both in Rome and in his native Slovenia.

Those Jesuit superiors in Rome were not mere rank-and-file priests, either.

Tomáš Špidlík SJ was a renowned theologian, professor of the Pontifical Oriental Institute attached to the Jesuits flagship Pontifical Gregorian University, and an influential spiritual director who received the red hat from Pope St. John Paul II in 2003. Francisco Egaña SJ had a long career in and around the Jesuit generalate. He was responsible for the Jesuits’ international houses in Rome from 1992-1998 and vice-rector of the Gregorian from 1998-2011.

These were men in a position to do something—and to make noise in the event their own superiors did not act on their reports—but no action issued and not a peep was heard.

It was only in 2019, after an auxiliary bishop of Rome—another Jesuit, Daniele Libanori SJ—began an investigation into the leadership and culture of the Loyola Community of women religious Rupnik had helped found in his native Slovenia, that victims complaints began to get any sort of real hearing from official Rome.

Hopes rose and were swiftly dashed when Pope Francis let stand an October 2022 decision by the office responsible for investigating and prosecuting Rupnik’s crimes—then styled the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF)—not to waive the statute of limitations, even though there was mountainous evidence and ample opportunity for defense counsel to confront witnesses.

That decision let Rupnik escape trial.

It also set up a course of events that saw Rupnik expelled from the Society of Jesus—Pope Francis’s own religious order—while Francis publicly praised Rupnik’s artwork and the Vatican continued to use Rupnik’s designs in promotional material.

The Rome vicariate under Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, meanwhile, undertook its own investigation into Rupnik’s art studio—the Centro Aletti, which came under the vicariate’s umbrella as a public association of the faithful in 2019—and eventually found its way to giving the center a clean bill of health.

The Rome vicariate’s investigator, Msgr. Giacomo Incitti, also attempted to throw doubt on the small consequences—a secret trial on other charges Rupnik had “absolved an accomplice in a sin against the Sixth Commandment”—which ended in the ratification of a penalty, excommunication, though the penalty was lifted almost as soon as it had been imposed.

Rupnik’s successor in the leadership of the Centro Aletti, Maria Campatelli, had earlier issued a statement calling the charges against Rupnik “defamatory and unproven” and accusing the Jesuits of running a smear campaign. For her efforts, Campatelli got a private audience with Pope Francis in September, just days before the Rome vicariate issued its clean bill of health for the Centro Aletti.

There is a lot more to the story, nearly all of it thoroughly nauseating, though none of it daunted the five women who didn’t quit.

A new deal?

The sordid details of l’Affaire Rupnik—a case of farcical mismanagement at best, of preternaturally awful corruption at worst—are many and dire, ghoulish in their contours and hideous in almost every particular that has come to light.

Only a few of the salient elements are given here.

Witnesses with less credibility and a fraction of the moral courage the five women who signed Monday’s statement have shown over years and decades, have brought down governments. They have not only brought about real legal reform but set off seismic events that have created new cultural landscapes in the wake of upheaval.

These women have given Pope Francis one final chance to make good on his promises.

We await further developments.

* This piece has been edited to clarify that the five victims had already made their identities known — in an open letter published by Italy Church Too—while two of the five have now chosen to reveal the pseudonyms by which they gave previously published interviews.