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The news this past week put the opacity of canonical criminal proceedings squarely in the spotlight, when the Vatican was forced to deny rumors a disgraced former Jesuit and one-time celebrity artist had been acquitted in his secret Church trial.
The case of Father Marko Rupnik – who somehow remains a priest apparently in good standing, though he now serves a diocese in his native Slovenia – doesn’t only highlight the problems of secrecy in criminal proceedings at Church law.
The Rupnik affair also illustrates how the abuse of adults – usually women – isn’t being addressed properly.
The Rupnik case in brief
Rupnik has been investigated several times, by different Church authorities, and each investigation has uncovered and confirmed gruesome evidence of the priest’s crimes against dozens of women over a period of thirty years.
Some of Rupnik’s accusers have told Crux Now the Jesuits had heard from them of Rupnik’s depredations as early as the mid-1990s, but the priest continued to earn art commissions and accolades, and to enjoy the favor of his Jesuit superiors and the Vatican.
The Slovenian priest is also accused of using his “creative process” to manipulate his victims spiritually, psychologically, and sexually.
The Jesuits now believe he is guilty, and they have said so. Vatican investigators looked into the matter for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which found a case to answer against Rupnik in 2022 but ruled his crimes beyond the statute of limitations.
Rupnik was expelled from the Jesuits in 2023 – for disobedience, not for his crimes – and a friendly diocese in the priest’s native Slovenia accepted him as a member of the diocesan clergy in good standing later that same year.
Sustained media scrutiny, public and private pressure from the pope’s own inner circle, and incandescent global outrage at the news Rupnik would be allowed to continue as a priest, led Pope Francis to waive the statute of limitations and order a review of the case.
That was nearly three years ago.
It would be almost exactly two full years before the Vatican would announce it had empaneled a college of judges to try the case against Rupnik, but Church authorities haven’t said who the judges are or even announced what specific charges he is facing.
Even with the priest facing serious charges, Francis continued to display his artwork in his residence in his personal quarters inside the Domus Sanctae Marthae guesthouse where he lived while he reigned.
Lots more has happened in the Rupnik case besides those broad strokes, but there you have the quick-and-tidy version of what is a really macabre story, labyrinthine in its complexity and horrific in its details.
Lessons (un)learned
In an important sense, however, the Rupnik case comes down to two related points.
First, the secrecy surrounding the business has hurt the victims – who have waited too long to see too little justice – and the Church, whose faithful are scandalized and whose leaders have lost moral credibility.
RELATED: In Rupnik case, the cost of secrecy is visible
Second, what we have learned regarding the case shows how Church leaders continue to follow the same playbook they used throughout the dark decades of the child sexual abuse crisis.
The playbook includes therapy, clergy moves, and payoffs. It also includes turning the blind eye, victim-blaming and intimidation, minimization, obfuscation, and even out-and-out denial.
All of it is designed to keep the bad behavior under wraps and the stories away from the papers.
It is nearly a quarter century since the Catholic Church faced the impact of the allegations of clerical abuse against children in the “Spotlight” series published by The Boston Globe in 2002.
(The Boston Globe established Crux in 2014; the news agency became private in 2016.)
The outrage led to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops creating the Dallas Charter for addressing the clerical abuse against children later in 2002. The U.S. bishops reviewed and updated the Charter just this year, during their plenary meeting this spring, and the document continues to set the standard for addressing the sexual abuse of young people around the world.
The Dallas Charter has also seen deployment in less wholesome ways.
Churchmen have used various forms of the phrase, “Not a Charter violation,” as an excuse for failing to report cases of abuse to the relevant authorities and to justify the quiet transfer of offending clerics to other locations and sometimes to other jurisdictions.
Too many bishops too often feel too little obliged to do much of anything when the abuser didn’t violate the letter of the 2002 Church legislation.
This is not speculation.
Crux Now’s Managing Editor heard a version of this rationale directly from a major U.S. archdiocese earlier this year, when he was reporting on the case of a Nigerian priest sentenced to life in prison after a Texas jury found him guilty of felony sexual assault.
RELATED: New Orleans kept accused priest in pulpit despite complaints: misconduct ‘involved adults’, archdiocese admits
Clergy, medical staff, and counselors commit a felony under Texas law if they exploit their position in obtaining another person’s participation in a sex act.
That’s what the priest in question – Father Anthony Odiong of Uyo diocese in Nigeria – was accused, tried, and convicted of doing.
Right now, Church leaders have to make decisions without having any specific Church legislation to work with, although – as in the Texas case – there are civil and criminal laws that can come into play.
RELATED: Diocese of Austin had allegations against sex offender priest years before arrest, conviction
Clergymen have been caught with prostitutes; they’ve had affairs with parishioners; they’ve committed other violations of their priestly promises. This is nothing new – and there’s a very important sense in which it is only human nature – and fairly common.
Bishops will be quick to point out – not wrongly – that not every sin is a crime, and a lapse in judgement shouldn’t be equated with sexual assault.
But some should be, because some are, and even the large grey area in which we all live most of life admits of darker and lighter shades.
If a priest has an affair with a parishioner, what are the consequences? If the parishioner is married? If he is counseling the parishioner?
What happens when a priest gets caught up in a prostitution sting? What if he has been arrested more than once?
The same sorts of questions can be asked about possession of pornography, serial affairs, and other subjects that most of the faithful would hope would only feature in soap operas.
Responsibility, Accountability, Transparency
Without procedures and transparency, even relatively small sexual mistakes by priests can be conflated with more serious cases of sexual assault, especially in the eyes of a faithful exhausted by years of scandal.
The lack of procedures and transparency also makes it possible for some very bad actors to get away with very bad things, sometimes for a very long time.
This is especially true when the lack of procedures and transparency is coupled with ingrained attitudes in society and in leadership culture insensible of how spiritual, psychological, and sexual power dynamics are intertwined.
This was underscored in the case of then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. He was finally laicized only after credible allegations were made that he abused children.
For decades before Church leaders finally prosecuted McCarrick, however, the cleric’s habit of sharing a bed with young seminarians was an open secret, and rumors of him holding intimate “parties” with young men circulated for years.
Even so, McCarrick’s star continued to rise.
The months that passed in the wake of the “Spotlight” coverage came to be known in Catholic circles as the “Long Lent” of 2002.
If the Church leaders from Vatican to the last parish outpost do not awaken soon to the nature and scope of the adult abuse crisis, the Long Lent will have a sequel in the middle of the 21st century.
Follow Charles Collins on Twitter: @CharlesinRome
