VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Catholic World Report [San Francisco CA]
February 22, 2024
By Christopher R. Altieri
It shouldn’t be hard to distinguish spiritual direction from psychological torture, spiritual friendship from coercive sexual abuse and violent manipulation, spiritual formation from moral plagiarism.
Several years ago, when I was living in Rome, a confessor told me: “You are too rigid.” I don’t recall precisely what year it was, but it was toward the beginning of the Francis era and “rigidity” was still a new buzzword.
Maybe the fellow thought I really was being too hard on myself, or something. I don’t have the slightest recollection of what the matter may have been, but I know I wasn’t beating myself up about anything. It was a run-of-the-mill, number-and-kind confession that shouldn’t have taken five minutes.
I thought of that when I read Gloria Branciani’s story of how Fr. Marko Rupnik would abuse her on long car rides and in other circumstances, and how he would chide her for rigidity when she tried to stand up for herself.
Branciani is a former member of the now defunct Loyola Community of religious women co-founded by Rupnik and Sr. Ivanka Hosta in Slovenia, and one of Rupnik’s many victims.
“Every time I tried to talk,” Branciani told reporters in Rome on Wednesday, “to say that for me it was a mistake, [Rupnik] said this was me being unable to live sexuality, that it was related to my rigid personality.”
It shouldn’t be hard to distinguish spiritual direction from psychological torture, spiritual friendship from coercive sexual abuse and violent manipulation, spiritual formation from moral plagiarism.
A big ask?
“Truth and justice shouldn’t be an extraordinary ask in the Catholic Church in 2024,” said Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org at the same Wednesday press conference, but here we are.
Among the concrete steps for which Barrett Doyle called, along with victims Mirjam Kovač and Branciani and their lawyer, Laura Sgrò, was an independent investigation of the hierarchy’s irresponsible handling of Rupnik’s crimes and a full report of investigators’ findings.
Don’t hold your breath.
It’s not that there is any lack of men or dearth of material to investigate. Rupnik’s erstwhile Jesuit superiors in both his native Slovenia and in Rome heard of his behavior no later than the 1990s, but either allowed Rupnik’s accusers to be discredited, or else actively participated in efforts to make sure Rupnik would never face significant consequences.
The names of some of the Jesuits allegedly involved in the Rupnik business aren’t exactly those of back-benchers, either.
Fr. Francisco Egaña SJ, who was vice-rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University and held several important billets in the Jesuit curia over two decades, allegedly heard of Fr. Rupnik’s behavior no later than 1998. So had Tomáš Josef Card. Špidlík SJ, a close friend to Rupnik and a board member of the Centro Aletti art center of which Rupnik was the founding director, to hear one accuser tell it. Pope St. John Paul II gave Špidlík the red hat in 2003.
When formal accusations finally found their way to Rome in or about 2019, a Jesuit–Luis Card. Ladaria SJ–was in charge of the department that handled the investigation and a Jesuit–Fr. Robert Geisinger SJ–was chief prosecutor (ironically styled “Promoter of Justice” in ecclesiastical jargon).
There was a preliminary inquiry and the determination that there was a case to answer, but the competent department (then styled the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) decided not to lift the statute of limitations.
The AP got hold of one Vatican investigator’s correspondence–Bishop Daniele Libanori SJ, an auxiliary of the Rome diocese who had gone to Slovenia to sniff out allegations of bad governance in the Loyola Community under Hosta–in which Libanori said among other things that the allegations against Rupnik are correct and noted that Rupnik’s victims had “seen their lives ruined by the evil suffered and by the [Church’s] complicit silence.”
Still, the dicastery now styled the DDF closed the books on the celebrity Jesuit creep from just across the river and up the way a bit.
It’s not that the Jesuits are universally the villains of this story. Reducing this whole unutterably awful saga to a conspiracy theory about Evil Jesuits would do profound disservice to everyone, especially the victims. The optics, however, are bad—not only the optics—and senior Jesuit leadership has not distinguished itself by forthrightness or competence.
Pope Francis: “I had nothing to do with this”
Another Jesuit, Pope Francis, has admitted to some direct involvement at one stage. As best as can tell, Francis intervened to make sure the Rupnik business stayed with the DDF. He insisted he did not meddle in the case. “I had nothing to do with this,” Francis told AP’s Nicole Winfield in January of 2023, but “nothing” was all Pope Francis had to do in order to make sure Rupnik didn’t see justice.
It bears mention that a secret Vatican tribunal did find Rupnik guilty, in 2020, of “absolving an accomplice in a sin against the Sixth Commandment”–that’s what it’s called in ecclesiastical argot when a cleric grants absolution to someone with whom he engaged in illicit sex–and ratified the excommunication Rupnik incurred when he committed that crime. That excommunication was lifted almost as soon as it was imposed.
Why that case against Rupnik could proceed to trial and a guilty verdict while the abuse charges remained statute-barred, well, it frankly beggars the human capacity for fantasy.
There was copious evidence against Rupnik, much of it collected by the Jesuits themselves from witnesses considered highly credible. Rupnik would have had ample opportunity to confront his accusers at trial.
Whatever Pope Francis’s role in the business, we know he didn’t waive the statute of limitations until he did, sometime between September and October of 2023.
Between the time Pope Francis didn’t lift the statute of limitations and the moment he did, Rupnik’s Centro Aletti art institute somehow got itself a clean bill of health from the Rome vicariate. Rome’s cardinal vicar also cast aspersions on the secret proceedings that ended with Rupnik’s brief excommunication.
News that Rupnik had been incardinated as a priest in good standing in the Slovenian diocese of Koper precipitated incandescent global outrage, in the face of which Pope Francis decided to waive the statute of limitations on unspecified charges against his depraved olim confrére.
That’s not half the dirty business already part of the public record in the impossibly sordid Rupnik Affair, which is one powerful reason why Pope Francis’s eventual decision life the statute of limitations only made matters worse.
Dubiously timed and incredibly explained as a response to “serious problems in the handling of the Fr. Marko Rupnik case” that came to Pope Francis’s attention “in September [of 2023],” the move did not pave the way for real justice. It set the stage for a show trial or a star chamber. Either of those would mock the victims–more than forty of them, according to Branciani and Kovač–and further obfuscate the truth regarding Rupnik’s depravities and the atrocious mismanagement of business from start to finish.
In any case, it is impossible to believe–and risible to claim–that Pope Francis only learned of problems with the Rupnik case in September 2023.
McCarrick redux
Way back in 2018, it appeared that the bishops’ “Apalachin Moment” had come. That reference was to the sleepy town of Apalachin, NY, on the southern bank of the Susquehanna River. Notorious gangster Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara had a home in Apalachin, at which in 1957 he hosted a meeting of organized crime lords from cities all across the United States.
Local police took note of the fancy cars with out-of-state license plates and began to take an interest in the doings. They broke up the meeting and arrested dozens of participants, but most were released in short order. Still, those enterprising local lawmen made it impossible to maintain the fiction preferred by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, according to which there was no nationwide organization of criminal outfits in the United States.
With that convenient fiction destroyed, law enforcement from the feds on down took to setting up task forces to tackle the mob.
Twenty years after the Dallas Charter, forty years after Gilbert Gauthe, sixty years after Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald reported to the Holy Office, the best the leadership of the Church can do is, well, what we have here.
A statement from the Vatican press office on Wednesday said the DDF now needs “to study the documentation acquired [in the Rupnik case] in order to identify which procedures can and should be implemented.”
Basically, what we have here is an outfit that can’t figure out how to stage manage its own sham.
Even if Pope Francis were to commission an investigation into the Rupnik business, it would be maudlin and criminal to expect of it better than what we got in the McCarrick Report: Hundreds of pages of fluff, heavily sauced with workaday horror and peppered with blame avoidance, garishly garnished with the scapegoating of mostly dead men.
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.