The Vatican announced on Monday, in an unusual way, the appointment of judges who will decide the fate of a famous Jesuit artist, whose mosaics decorate basilics from all over the world and who has been accused of over twenty women of sexual, spiritual and psychological abuse, according to AP.
Marko Ivan Rupnik, Jesuit artist photo: x
The case of the priest Marko Ivan Rupnik has seriously stained the legacy of Pope Francis, given the suggestions that the Jesuit Pope, the Jesuit religious order and the Vatican Bureau for Sexual Abuse, led by Jesuits, would have protected one of them for decades, rejecting the accusations of disciplinary deviation against it.
The congregation for the doctrine of faith, the Vatican office that manages the cases of sexual abuse committed by the clergy, said that the five judges appointed to hear the Runik case in a canonical court include women and priests who do not have positions in the Vatican bureaucracy.
He said that such a composition was “made to guarantee better, as in any judicial process, the autonomy and independence of the court mentioned above ”.
The statement suggested an implicit recognition of the fact that, until now, the way the Vatican managed the Rupnik file had not been autonomous or independent.
Rupnik's mosaics adorn some of the most visited altars and sanctuaries of the Catholic Church in the world, including at the altar in Lourdes, France, a new basilica in appearacid, Brazil, and the chapel of the Augustinian religious order of Pope Leon XIV in Rome.
The Rupnik scandal exploded publicly for the first time at the end of 2022, when Italian blogs began to relate the statements of nuns and other women who said they were sexually abused, spiritually and psychologically, including during the production of his works of art.
Rupnik's Jesuit religious order soon acknowledged that he had been excommunicated for a short time in 2020 because he committed one of the most serious crimes of the Catholic Church – using the confession to graduate a woman with sexual relations. But he continued to work and preach.
