Continued errors are costing the Vatican in late innings

In a word: Nothing.

In another: Everything.

Bad for business, bad for baseball

There are gambling scandals, for example, one of which has seen a player get the boot and one of which hasn’t.

24-year-old journeyman Tucupita Marcano of Venezuela received a lifetime ban for placing bets on baseball with a legal sportsbook, totaling $150,000 over a several months’ stretch that began in 2023 when Marcano was on the injured list.

The LA Dodgers’ superstar nice guy and perennial fan favorite, Shohei Ohtani of Japan, has seen his reputation tarnished by the behavior of his friend and interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. Ohtani, it seems to prosecutors, had been inadvertently bankrolling his interpreter’s gambling habit to the tune of $16 million in illegal bets on games other than baseball.

One should not be surprised to see the Lords of Baseball taking an institutional hard line on baseball betting.

The “Black Sox” scandal nearly ruined Major League Baseball a little more than a hundred years ago. The best-known of the unfortunate fellows at the center of the Black Sox scandal was Joseph Jefferson “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, a slugging outfielder. Some shady characters offered Jackson and seven other players for the Chicago White Sox some big money to throw the 1919 World Series.

Word got out. There was an investigation and a trial that ended in acquittal, but Major League Baseball banned Shoeless Joe and the others for life.

The management of the Black Sox affair was highly imperfect from start to finish, with conflicting evidence—including a record-setting World Series performance from Jackson—unreliable testimony, and glaring conflicts of interest.

The ugly business destroyed careers and dogged big-league ball for years.

Major League Baseball’s institutional memory of the Black Sox scandal’s effects is a perduring trauma. If you doubt it, ask Pete Rose—“Charlie Hustle”—who earned himself a lifetime ban for betting on baseball in the 1980s, after a record-setting career of hard play that made him a fan favorite.

There has been other unpleasantness, like the “juicing” scandals of the early aughts. There is other unpleasantness now, like the looming scandal of age fraud in signing prospects. Still, nothing compares to the scandal of betting on baseball because nothing threatens the integrity of the game in quite the same way: corrosive, corrupting, contaminating, contagious.

Baseball has learned its lesson—some of it, anyway, and imperfectly—but the conduct of senior Church leadership has not convinced either the faithful or increasingly careful observers of the same.

On Pope Francis’s watch, a cardinal—Jean-Pierre Ricard, emeritus of Bordeaux—kept his red hat and the prospect of exercising his Orders even after Ricard admitted to molesting a teenage girl.

Another cardinal—the late Godfried Danneels—saw Pope Francis attempt to rehabilitate his person and reputation after Danneels participated in the coverup of Bishop Roger Vangheluwe’s heinous sexual abuse of his own nephew (not Vangheluwe’s only victim, it turns out, not even among his own family members).

The former Archbishop of Paris, Michel Aupetit, saw Pope Francis accept his resignation “on the altar of hypocrisy”—Francis’s own words—even though the presumed victim publicly stated she never alleged any possibly criminal misbehavior and a thorough French police and judicial investigation eventually exonerated him.

The list of friends Pope Francis has been either quick to protect or slow to prosecute despite his paper reforms—Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta of Orán in the pope’s native Argentina was both, even though an Argentinian criminal court convicted him of aggravated sexual abuse and sentenced him to 4½ years in prison—is not empty.

It isn’t too terribly short.

Even when bad actors have faced investigation, prosecution has been rare and measures imposed have been light, while the processes themselves have been opaque.

Inside-out, outside-in

One high-profile case has led observers, pundits, journalists, editors, and various stakeholders to wonder—seriously and out loud—whether the fix is in.

The Ohtani Affair can perhaps shed some light on what’s wrong with the Vatican’s handling of the impossibly sordid and diabolically chilling Rupnik Affair.

It was no later than 2023 that federal prosecutors began to look at the doings of one Matthew Bowyer, alleged to have illegally operated a sportsbook for several years in the US state of California. Investigators executed a search warrant on Bowyer’s house and seized documents pointing to Ohtani and Mizuhara, but eventually concluded that Ohtani was a victim rather than a witting accomplice.

Folks are torn between their desire to keep Ohtani as the stainless nice guy hero who deferred $680 million of his ceiling-smashing contract with the Dodgers worth $700 million over ten years so his team could stay on the right side of the league salary cap, and their desire not to be the kinds of fools who believe a fellow could not miss $16 million even if he is super-rich superstar pro athlete.

It’s a tough spot to be in, as a fan. It’s a tough spot to be in for Ohtani, as the subject of unwanted attention. Ohtani doesn’t want to be a fool, but better a fool than an accomplice. Folks don’t want to be cynical, but the world is cruel. Both Ohtani and baseball may benefit from the stubbornness of facts and the doggedness of federal investigators whose reputations both personal and institutional depend on the thoroughness and transparency of their work.

Mizuhara entered a guilty plea in federal court last week, by the way, to bank fraud and tax fraud.

So, prosecutors went from zero to a conviction on multiple counts in a little over a year. That’s quick work, especially given the complicated nature of the crimes and the complexities of an investigation and prosecution involving at least three major federal offices: the IRS, Homeland Security, and the US Attorney (Central District of California).

Federal law enforcement agencies have bigger budgets and more experienced investigators than do criminal prosecutors in the ecclesiastical judiciary. Still, when one considers the mountainous evidence already collected in a case like that against accused serial abuser Fr. Marko I. Rupnik (olim SJ), one wonders what is so complicated about the case that a mere paper review of it has taken nearly eight months?

The price of tea

“It’s a delicate case, really, and we are working on it,” Msgr. John Kennedy told journalists late in May. Kennedy is the head of the disciplinary section in the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, responsible for directing investigations and prosecuting the most serious crimes at Church law.

Kennedy was speaking to scribblers at a conference on the abuse crisis in Italy, during which he reported that his office’s re-examination of the Rupnik case is “at an advanced stage,” but didn’t offer a time frame for its completion.

“[W]e started well,” Kennedy also said, “and we are really continuing step after step, keeping all aspects in mind because there is the aspect of the allegations against him, there is the aspect of the victims, there is the aspect of the impact on the Church, so it’s delicate.”

Delicacy is not a quality most observers associate with Church leaders’ handling of the Rupnik allegations to date, though it is fair to say that Rupnik—the disgraced former celebrity artist whose works decorate shrines and chapels from the Apostolic Palace to Australia and hundreds of places in between—himself received the kid glove treatment for many years.

Rupnik allegedly engaged in serial sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse of scores of victims—most of them women religious—over decades. Vatican investigators have called Rupnik’s accusers “highly credible” and mountainous evidence has been gathered.

At one point, a secret court found Rupnik guilty of “absolving an accomplice in a sin against the Sixth Commandment”—Church-speak for giving absolution to a person with whom the absolving cleric had illicit sexual relations—and briefly excommunicated him but quickly lifted the penalty before anyone was the wiser.

The DDF nonetheless decided that the abuse charges against Rupnik were statute-barred. After that, the Jesuits expelled Rupnik. After that, the Diocese of Koper under Bishop Jurij Bizjak agreed to take him since “Rupnik had not been sentenced to any judicial sentence.”

That’s only the barest of bare-bones-sketches of an unimaginably sordid business, the last part of which—Rupnik’s incardination—triggered incandescent worldwide outrage, after which Pope Francis decided to reopen the case.

That was eight months ago, give or take.

Meanwhile, the Vatican’s official communications outfit continues to use Rupnik studio images to illustrate its digital pages.

A Rupnik image stood atop the Vatican Media article presenting the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart on June 7^th, setting off another round of questions from journalists and critical commentary from across the spectrum of opinion in the Church.

There’s a Little League field just down the street from our house, and I love watching the kids play, even if the stories about “travel ball” straining families and ruining the fun make me worry about the present and the future of the game and its place and role in our common life.

Whether one thinks of the installations themselves or of the digital reproductions the Vatican continues to use, the damage Rupnik studio art does to the Francis pontificate, to the credibility of the Church, and to the souls of victims, is far worse in kind and by orders of magnitude and is ongoing.

Both evince an advanced disease of moral culture from which there can be no recovery absent sweeping change and radical reform, which paper laws alone are not only powerless to effect but in fact tending rather to impede than to favor.