The Rupnik affair is a microcosm of Church’s leadership crisis – Catholic World Report

This Rupnik business may be very bad. There’s no telling how bad it’s going to be for Pope Francis, the Vatican, the Jesuits, or the Slovenian bishops. There’s loads of bad to go around.

Rupnik’s art is to be present in shrines and chapels all around the world. That’s what makes this Rupnik business look like a world-in-a-nutshell instance of the Church’s leadership crisis and the effect of it on the institution and the faithful worldwide.

The Inescapable Rupnik

There is no such thing as a escaping it. Lourdes. Fatima. Padre Pio’s crypt in San Giovanni Rotondo. Pope St. John Paul II’s shrines in Krakow and Washington, DC. Madrid’s cathedral adoration chapel. Aparecida. The Redemptoris mater chapel of the Apostolic Palace within the Vatican. Even the image most closely related to Pope Francis’s signature 12 months of Mercy.

Those are only a number of of the Catholic places – several of them major pilgrimage sites – at which one cannot avoid the artwork of Fr. Marko I. Rupnik, SJ, the Jesuit priest and world-renowned mosaic artist accused of sexually, psychologically, and spiritually abusing at the very least nine women over several years.

Fr. Rupnik’s Jesuit superiors reportedly heard the allegations against him greater than twenty years ago, but either turned a blind eye or actively covered for his or her guy, whose fame was growing and whose stock was high within the papal apartments.

A few years ago, Bishop Daniele Libanori SJ conducted a fact-finding mission called an “Apostolic Visitation” to a community of girls religious that Fr. Rupnik had helped present in his native Slovenia. There, Libanori – one other Jesuit – uncovered and eventually succeeded in pinning one accusation on his celebrity confrere. The Vatican decided that Rupnik had absolved an “accomplice” to his “sins against the Sixth Commandment” – that’s Church jargon for sexual misbehavior – however the Vatican office answerable for investigating and prosecuting sex crimes passed on the possibility to prosecute Rupnik for his actual crimes of abuse.

Luis Ladaria, SJ – the Jesuit prefect of the Congregation Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith – who got here into his position through the Jesuit pope, decided to not waive the canonical statute of limitations and take a look at the celebrity Jesuit artist-priest on charges of serial sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse.

The Jesuits put secret restrictions on their Fr. Rupnik, but those strictures didn’t keep the priest from travelling the world, receiving awards and accolades, and even from preaching a Lenten retreat to the papal household during 2020, while judges were deciding what to do concerning the charge of absolving an accomplice. Eventually, the excommunication Rupnik mechanically incurred could be declared administratively, then lifted lower than a month later.

Sure, statutes of limitations exist for a reason – mostly, to ensure that somebody accused of against the law has the wherewithal to mount a defense well worth the name – however the CDDF often has no trouble waiving the statute for crimes just like the ones of which Rupnik is accused, and anyway each Rupnik and (some, at the very least, of) his alleged victims are alive and well enough. Encouraged by Bishop Libanori, SJ, several of Rupnik’s accusers have filed formal complaints against him inside the last two years.

Vos estis(ne) lux mundi?

If the bald facts of the Rupnik Affair were to have come to light in some other chancery anywhere on this planet, the faithful of those places would rightly be screaming for the Vatican to make use of Vos estis lux mundi, the possibly powerful paper reform Pope Francis introduced in 2019, to find the precise nature and extent of the wrongdoing and start to rectify it.

The Vatican has been extremely reluctant to make use of Vos estis, to say the very least.

For one thing, the Vatican still doesn’t have an independent investigative arm to receive complaints and act on them, neither is there an independent judiciary wherein to try cases investigators refer for prosecution.

All the pieces is finished inside a single dicastery – an outfit inside the Roman administrative apparatus that’s somewhere between a government ministry and an executive department – while the office inside the department that handles investigations and prosecutions is critically understaffed and chronically cash-strapped.

The discipline section of DDF has a worldwide remit. There are well over a billion Catholics alive on planet Earth.There are fewer than two dozen people working full time within the discipline section of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the entire of which has a budget of a paltry few million Euro each year. In contrast, the 2022 budget for the Department of Justice within the US State of Montana was $114,965,234.

All of the laws in all of the world, all of the paper reforms and speeches and exhortations and pleas and guarantees are price exactly as much as those in charge are willing to place behind them in dollars and cents, to indicate they’re earnest and make them stick.

Apostolica sedes a nemine iudicatur.

Across the time that the Vatican was rolling out Pope Francis’s signature reform law, Vos estis lux mundi, I used to be standing with a gaggle of reporters within the Vatican press office. One among them – a recent face, if memory serves – asked (ipsa vox), “Are they serious about it this time?”

“If you would like to know whether or not they’re serious,” I offered, “then consider that Dick Malone continues to be in his job, and Siobhan O’Connor isn’t.”

Richard Joseph Malone was then the Bishop of Buffalo, NY. He had been embroiled in a coverup scandal that had long since change into national news within the US. Siobhan O’Connor was a former Buffalo chancery worker and the whistleblower who helped bring the story to light.

It could be August before Rome would take an interest in Buffalo. Malone could be out by the tip of the 12 months, but he never faced a canonical criminal investigation. Roman hands were careful to avoid that, choosing an Apostolic Visitation – that’s a form of fact-finding mission that has a broad scope and will be conducted more discreetly than a criminal probe – moderately than a test of Pope Francis’s reform.

Even when the Vatican types desired to Vos estis themselves – and so they don’t – they couldn’t. They’ve made sure of that. Nobody on earth can Vos estis the pope. The Apostolic See is judged by no man.