It really is hard to tell what’s going on in Pope Francis’s Vatican, especially these days, but that’s because there’s plenty—too much—to see.
Heading into the weekend, Italy’s Domani published a piece detailing new allegations against the disgraced former Jesuit, Marko Rupnik–inexplicably and intolerably styled Fr. Marko Rupnik—extern of Koper diocese in his native Slovenia, currently resident in Rome and reported to be regularly seen at the Centro Aletti he founded in the early 1990s.
The allegations amount to physical assault and grievous bodily harm.
Basically, the victim alleges that Rupnik broke her right index finger during a “spiritual counselling” session. Maybe he did break the finger, maybe he didn’t. Both Rupnik and Ivanka Hosta (then-superior of the woman’s religious community) allegedly prohibited the victim from seeking medical treatment.
A fracture should show on x-rays, even at many years’ remove from the incident. A “mere” dislocation or other, similar injury could be difficult to prove physically, but the Vatican investigator chiefly responsible has already declared the witnesses against Rupnik to be highly credible.
“I did it for love,” the victim recalls Rupnik telling her. “Now,” Rupnik allegedly told her, “you have the permanent seal of the Society of Jesus.”
Maybe these allegations will be among those a Vatican canonical tribunal eventually tries out, when and if it gets around to trying Rupnik at all. Count on the tribunal to conduct its proceedings in secret. Count on the tribunal to be about as trustworthy as any Court of Star Chamber.
Domani carried the story less than a full week after Pope Francis thanked the Vatican press corps for their “silence” regarding scandals touching the Holy Father and his governing apparatus in Rome, a silence he described as “almost abashed.” The Italian, vergognoso, literally means “shameful”–as many early renderers took it–and could be rendered “ashamed” or “abashed” as the official Vatican translation of the remarks took it as well.
Folks tied themselves in knots for days, arguing–a generous word for it–over the meaning of the modifier. It was a sight to see. The words doing almost all of the really awful work in the sentence were silenzio and grazie.
Silence is a plain word. Silence is a word with plain sense. Silence was doing plain labor in a plain sentence, uttered in the plain light of day. “Thanks” is a plain word, too. “Thanks” did its own plain work.
In Rome, it is business as usual. Journalist Federica Tourn noted in her Domani piece that Rupnik appears to be keeping a relatively low profile. She reports that he is still accompanying friends on visits to Rome’s major seminary, the chapel of which is decorated with Rupnik’s artwork. Italian celebrity priest don Fabio Rosini recorded a talk in the chapel of the Seminario Maggiore, published recently by the vocations conference of Italy’s conference of bishops. The video has several long, lingering shots of the chapel, decorated with Rupnik’s art.
In fairness to Rosini and the CEI vocations guys, they were only following the lead of Pope Francis himself, who used a piece by Rupnik to illustrate video remarks to a South American Marian convention not too terribly long ago. The Vatican’s own communications dicastery continues–intolerably but not entirely inexplicably–to use Rupnik’s art in illustration of its own web content. Perhaps it is only coincidence, as Tourn notes for Domani, that Nataša Govekar–a member of the Centro Aletti leadership, who has published on Rupnik’s devotional art–is in charge of the comms dicastery’s pastoral-theological efforts.
In any case, it has long since been clear that somebody in comms continues to like Rupnik, very much.
This week, The Pillar had a piece on the Belgian bishops’ efforts to get action on the case of Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, revealed in 2010 to have abused his biological nephew for more than a decade. A year later, Vangheluwe confessed–on Flemish television–to abusing another nephew. The Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI allowed Vangheluwe to resign and keep his emeritus status, while the CDF ordered that Vangheluwe undergo “spiritual and psychological treatment” and prohibited him from public ministry.
The thing that got at least one prominent Belgian prelate’s goat in 2011, after the second confession, was that Vangheluwe broke his pinky promise to keep mum and disappear. Sure, the prelate found Vangheluwe’s easy manner on TV untoward–almost as if he were on holiday, several local news outlets reported–but, “The interview was not expedient and the timing even shocking, given the fact that Rome had asked him not to speak and to keep a low profile,” to hear the nonplussed prelate tell it.
The prelate was Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, who succeeded Godfried Danneels in the See of Mechelen-Brussels, after Danneels resigned in disgrace. Danneels, you may recall, had pressured Vangheluwe’s nephew to keep quiet about what his uncle, the bishop, had done to him. Pope Francis had Danneels with him on the loggia in 2013, when he greeted the faithful for the first time, and invited Danneels to participate in the 2014 synod assembly on the family.
Now, the Belgian bishops are telling the Flemish parliament that Rome’s continued inaction will likely frustrate Pope Francis’s desire to visit the country later this year.
“We know that those responsible in Rome are aware of the magnitude of the scandal and are working for a solution,” the Belgian bishops’ general secretary told parliament late last week. “It will be difficult for Pope Francis to make a peaceful visit to our country in September until there is clarity on this matter.”
“Those responsible in Rome” is cute. There is one guy responsible in Rome. His name is Francis. He is the pope.
One may be forgiven the impression that the Belgian bishops are at some pains to ensure that they do not have a situation analogous to the one that developed in Marseille last year, when Pope Francis visited the French port right before news broke of gentle-tap-on-the-wrist measures against another confessed child molester, Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, native of Marseille and emeritus of Bordeaux.
La Croix had a news piece on the measures, which they published a few days after the pope’s return. It was more thoroughly reported than a quick turn-around on a hot tip, come to think of it. In fact, the measures had been in place since the spring of 2023, several months before the pope’s September 22-23 visit to the ancient French coastal city.
I readily confess that I’m having a hard time with all this.
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Unbelievable.
All of this revolting sexual predation and exploitation make a mockery of our Lord and His Church. Yet here we are, business as usual in the Bergoglian Captivity.
Call it loathsome, abominable, vile, diabolical, disgusting, whatever— the point is inescapable: with very few exceptions, our leaders, our shepherds, refuse to confront this evil.
So the betrayal of Jesus just goes on and on. And the contemptible cowardice of the Catholic clergy is on display for all to see.
Thank you, Mr. Altieri, and thank you, CWR, for helping us keep track of this appalling spectacle in all its putrescent grotesquery.
One might imagine the PF machine responding: “My dear child, Brineyman, it is MY image that is important & I have excellent PR advisors who have established great respect for ME among the world’s media. What is it to ME that so many peripheral minors have suffered so atrociously at the hands of MY clerical intimates. I have virtually limitless wealth to destroy them in court. They will bitterly regret telling the truth about clergy immoralities & predations. As my good friend Pontius always says: “What is truth?”
As a former atheist, I never thought it required any special insight from the experience to have particular insights, but I did learn a few things about how other atheists thought, which helped propel me away for such foolish thought. I always believed, in retrospect, that the true definition of an atheist is someone who believes in the fungible nature of truth. For such a person, despite whatever religion he might profess, faith becomes meaningless when he loses sight that God and God alone is the source of all truth and God never changes. Even as a non-hardcore atheist, I was able to figure out those religious people who couldn’t figure out that the faith they thought they had should make them aware of immutable truth. When we sin, we suspend our faith at least for a moment. I do not presume to judge his soul, but there certainly are indicators that Francis is his abstract thought descends into atheistic premises regarding the nature and meaning of truth. Anyone rising to the level of cardinal should be able to point this out to him. Maybe it would slow down the bleeding.
With apologies to St. Matthew:
And he saith to them: It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of pervs and pederasts and low-life reprobates.
Re: Belgian bishops trying to get the Vatican to act on the Vangheluwe case – I’d like to give the new Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, Luc Terlingen, the benefit of the doubt. Bonny, the bishop of Antwerp, has shown pro-euthanasia tendencies, as well as other leanings that fit well with the German Synodal Way, so I don’t find his involvement reassuring.
Archbishop Leonard was, I believe, a backwardist, who wasn’t particularly well-received in nominally-Catholic Belgium.
Cardinal Tocho writing books one containing especially outrageous blasphemy against our Lord and His Mother and also a teenager, is not even repremandid!!! We are in the End times, when such things that should have warrant lacisation and excommunication!
Cruelty is a sign of an underlying addiction, such as sexual masochism. It would seem likely that with Rupnik he has enjoyed a sex addiction. Sex addiction has any number of names, such as progressive, or LGBT, or even pedophile. It’s addiction all the same. But due to deception, perpetrated by medical science, or fear, perpetrated by social canceling, we dare not call it by its plain name and rush about sweeping it under the rug. Yet there is also a theological name for sex addiction our Church could use: idolatry.
From day one of this papacy, it’s been divisive, rigidly authoritatian, contrary to the Gospel, misleading to the faithful, nasty, vengeful, pitting one group against another. What else do we need to know?
Let us pray that the Vatican reporters do not be silent, do not help keep crimes secret, do not aid and abet the cover-ups and convenient distractions: Look, breaking news, the Pope hugged another sick person and kissed another baby!!! Let the Holy Spirit guide them about speaking the truth and helping the corruption to be fully exposed and cleaned out. Serve the Truth, reporters, not lies.
Yes. Consternation and unanswered, begging questions beyond Francis I to Benedict XVI, John Paul II. Indicative of a homosexual mentality that affected the good and the bad, perhaps the good unable to face the reality. Vangheluwe, Danneels, Rupnik, walking, talking as if celebrities of the sordid.
His Holiness has gone several steps beyond his predecessors, a vindicated Danneels appearing on the papal balcony when Jorge Bergoglio became Francis I. Commenters have cited with dismay what Altieri pointedly covers here expressing his own dismay, What’s going on! What’s going on is strikingly consistent with our worst fears. The outrage is complete, so great that it’s not beyond even the most temperate reasoning that we may be facing what Christ warned would occur to Jerusalem when surrounded by eagles, an allusion to Roman standards, a precursor of a future time.
Thank you. We are living in difficult times.
The twisted teaching of the pontificate: If all are saved, regardless of repentance, then Mercy Alone should be preached. As such, promoting and protecting the most malicious malefactors is a way to demonstrate through papal power that God’s Mercy trumps all.
Time to meditate on the Word of God and His Saints. Stay Catholic and confess.
Worse still, popular causes like protecting vulnerable immigrants and poor are championed and justice demanded, while every manner of vulnerable young are sexually abused by protected pets of this pontificate. Perverse indeed.
Christ is crucified. Stay Catholic with the Saints at His feet.
Despite the disaster of this pontificate, disappointment with a Pope is never an excuse to reject the Papacy.
Italian here. “Domani” is a secularist and vehemently anti-catholic newspaper. Once the president of the Italian Episcopal Conference criticized it for misrepresenting a case of pedophilia of a priest. I think we cannot exclude that Domani exaggerated in reporting the Rupnik case.
Yes, Giovanni, one might be tempted to think so.
If it weren’t for all of those pesky victims…
You demean yourself, Giovanni; one hardly needs anything that Domani has written at all to see unambiguously that Francis’ administration almost from the beginning has been fraught with unredressed scandal, heterodoxy and actual heresy, and it is increasing. As this article conveys, the exact opposite of what you’re whining about is the issue here where the media is concerned, which is its coverup complicity. With notable exceptions (e.g., LifeSite news, this site, et al) the media and a majority cowardly, effeminate hierarchy is egregiously guilty in all of this sordidness, second only to the Bishop in white.
The problem is not that an enemy of the Church reported the truth. That they did so is to our shame.
The problem is that Church officials covered up Rupnik’s crimes and even now, still protect him. Such malefactors act as if God cannot see what we do, when even we can. Pathetic.
“I readily confess that I’m having a hard time with all this.” I can only imagine how it must be, day after day. I’m praying for you, Christophe, and for all victims.
Popesplainers say that Francis hasn’t taught heresy. But the point is he has lived it by the way he says one thing and does another. That robs him and, by association, his office of integrity. Since Christ himself established his office, Francis has brought disgrace and heresy into that office and it makes me sad.
The Catholic Church ought really to be careful in its associations. A female «bishop» of the anglican ecclesial community is slated to address cardinals on the matter of «demasculinizing» the Church, no doubt delivering with reformist gusto.
Demasculinizing, emasculating, feminizing, it’s all in the interpretation.
Such a nuisance Our Lord got brith/circumcision, what a rich harvest of gender speculation might have been had.
If Pope Francis was a conservative like his two predecessors, the same media outlets covering for him would be screaming for his resignation for the things he did. But because he’s a Leftist they opt to protect him so he can promote their agenda.
May our Lord hear the cry of all His Children and come again soon.