OPINION: Why Vatican Still Featuring Artwork by Disgraced Rupnik – Christopher R. Altieri
Christopher R. Altieri is a journalist, editor and author of three books, including Reading the News Without Losing Your Faith (Catholic Truth Society, 2021). He is contributing editor to Catholic World Report.
It is getting more and more difficult to imagine how the Vatican types from Pope Francis on down could possibly mean it when they say they do care about victims or about justice for them in the Church.
Vatican Media illustrated its Feast of St. Joseph liturgical calendar post with a Rupnik studio image.
So, what?
Well, Fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik (olim Fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik SJ) is a disgraced celebrity artist-priest and sometime retreat leader credibly accused of spiritually, psychologically, and sexually abusing more than two dozen victims—most of them women religious—over the course of three decades, much of it spent right in Rome.
So, that’s what.
Officially, March 19th is the day on which the Church celebrates the universal patronage of Our Lord’s earthly foster father. In many Catholic countries, the March 19th solemnity is therefore celebrated also as Fathers’ Day.
In fact, Rupnik’s Centro Aletti art studio—he founded it and ran it for thirty years, and is still listed on the studio’s website as the man in charge of the outfit’s spiritual art workshop and theological laboratory—is a stone’s through from the Basilica of St. Mary Major, where Pope Francis says he’d live if ever he should retire. If that seems fitting, well, there you go.
I thought you all should know. That’s what this job is mostly all about, if you ask me: Letting people know.
I write a lot of news analysis these days, but I made my bones as a shoe leather reporter before I became an investigator and editor. “Organized crime,” I remember telling an old school crony several years back when he asked me about my beat. My tongue ever so lightly ensconced in my cheek, I quickly added, “…perhaps disorganized.”
Even for this bunch—the Vatican comms outfit, I mean—it shouldn’t be too difficult to realize that this sort of thing is killing their guy. Sure, it’s a calorie burn to change all the images, but it would be worth it, even if only to save the principal needless grief.
It makes good sense, in other words, even if you don’t care a whit about the victims—Rupnik’s or anyone else’s—who are traumatized every time they see Rupnik’s stuff, not to mention the faithful who are scandalized and appalled.
To be perfectly frank, it is getting more and more difficult to imagine how the Vatican types from Pope Francis on down could possibly mean it when they say they do care about victims or about justice for them in the Church.
I worked in the Vatican comms outfit for a lot of years and haunted the Vatican for several more after I left—let me say that it is always a great honor to be in the service of the Holy Father, one I bore for more than a dozen years and did not put down lightly—so I have great respect for the capacity of Vatican types (of higher-ups especially) to miss the thing that’s right in front of them, to miss the point, to just not see.
That said, folks may be forgiven the impression that active contempt for the faithful is at work in the Vatican’s continued support of the former Jesuit, inveterate creep, and professional pervert incomprehensibly and intolerably still styled Fr. Marko Rupnik.
