CV NEWS FEED // The official homepage of the Vatican’s Synod on Synodality features artwork by the disgraced former Jesuit Fr. Marko Rupnik.
Rupnik’s mosaic art has been used in many places of prominence around the world, including Lourdes and Fatima. As the Jesuit’s scandalous misconduct has come to light, however, many have called for the art to be taken down out of sensitivity to victims of sexual abuse.
The 68-year-old Slovenian priest is currently facing decades of accusations of spiritual and sexual abuse against women religious.
He was excommunicated in 2021 after being found guilty of trying to sacramentally absolve a woman after having sex with her. The excommunication was revoked shortly after when Rupnik claimed to have repented.
In June, he was expelled from the Society of Jesus “due to his stubborn refusal to observe the vow of obedience.”
>>> Read CatholicVote’s article on Rupnik’s expulsion HERE <<<
From 1995 to 2020, Rupnik served as director of the Centro Aletti, a center of art, theology, and culture in Rome.
Earlier this month after a visitation to the Centro Aletti, the Vicariate for the Diocese of Rome issued a statement which seemed to exonerate Rupnik of his crimes and praised the Centro Aletti for fostering a “healthy community life free of particular critical issues.”
The statement elicited outrage online and provoked a written response from some of Rupnik’s alleged victims addressed to Pope Francis:
We have no other words, because we have exposed all the suffering of the victims as an open wound, and certainly disgusting…. And the victims were therefore censored for not having been discreet, but for having exposed something repugnant: their pain, the manipulation of those who defrauded them in the name of Christ, of spiritual love, of the Trinity. They exposed their pain because the manipulation and abuse had forever wounded their dignity.
[The victims] only received silence. And with this report published today, which clears Rupnik of any responsibility, he ridicules the pain of the victims, but also of the entire church, mortally wounded by such ostentatious arrogance.
The victims are left in the voiceless cry of a new abuse.
Their statement was released just days before the news broke that Sr. Ivanka Hosta, the superior of the Loyola Community, had been removed from her position by Bishop Daniele Libanori, S.J.
Hosta co-founded the Loyola Community of women religious with Rupnik in the 1980’s.
The website SeteMargens reported that Hosta exercised “a style of government that is harmful to the dignity and rights of each one of the nuns….”
In addition to her removal, Hosta was ordered to pray in reparation for Rupnik’s victims and was forbidden to have contact with members or former members of the Loyola Community for three years.
In their aforementioned letter, the alleged victims of Rupnik explicitly decried Hosta for covering up Rupnik’s crimes:
Above all, the victims of the abuse of power by Ivanka Hosta (who for thirty years covered up Rupnik’s atrocities, and reduced to spiritual slavery those who opposed her plans for revenge) await a definitive, clear, maternal response….
Rupnik remains a priest and resides in the Diocese of Rome, but is suspended from ministry. No one in Rome has indicated how his situation will be handled going forward.
