ROME (AP) — The Vatican took the unusual step on Monday of announcing that it had named judges to decide the fate of a famous ex-Jesuit artist accused of sexually, spiritually and psychologically abusing women.
The case of the Rev. Marko Ivan Rupnik badly tarnished the legacy of Pope Francis, given suggestions that the Jesuit pope and the Jesuit-headed Vatican sex abuse office had protected one of their own.
The Vatican office that regulates clergy sex abuse cases, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that the five judges named to hear the Rupnik case include women and priests who are external to the Vatican bureaucracy. In a statement, it said that such composition was “done in order to better guarantee, as in any judicial process, the autonomy and independence of the aforementioned court.”
The statement suggested an implicit recognition that prior to now, the Vatican’s handling of the Rupnik file had been anything but autonomous or independent.
Rupnik’s mosaics grace some of the Catholic Church’s most-visited shrines and sanctuaries around the world, including at the shrine in Lourdes, France, in the Vatican, a new basilica in Aparecida, Brazil, and the chapel of Pope Leo XIV’s own Augustinian religious order in Rome.
The Rupnik scandal first exploded publicly in late 2022 when Italian blogs started reporting the claims of nuns and adult women who said they had been sexually, spiritually and psychologically abused by him, including during the production of his artwork.
Rupnik’s Jesuit religious order soon admitted that he had been excommunicated briefly in 2020 for having committed one of the Catholic Church’s most serious crimes — using the confessional to absolve a woman with whom he had engaged in sexual activity.
The case continued to create problems for the Jesuits and Francis, since more women came forward saying they too had been victimized by Rupnik.
The Jesuits eventually kicked him out of the order after he refused to respond to allegations of spiritual, psychological and sexual abuse by about 20 women, most of whom were members of a Jesuit-inspired religious community that he co-founded in his native Slovenia that has since been suppressed.
The Vatican initially refused to prosecute, arguing the claims were too old. The reluctance to prosecute exposed both the Vatican’s legal loopholes, where sex crimes against adult women are rarely prosecuted, and that a famous artist like Rupnik might have received favorable treatment by his fellow Jesuits.
While Francis denied interfering in a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, he eventually caved to public pressure and waived the statute of limitations so that the Vatican could open a proper canonical trial.
Two years later, the Vatican statement on Monday indicated that the trial was about to start.
To date, Rupnik hasn’t responded publicly to the allegations and refused to respond to his Jesuit superiors during their investigation. His supporters at his Centro Aletti art studio have denounced what they have called a media “lynching.”
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