It’s hard to say what the next twelve hours will bring on the Church beat, let alone the next twelve months, but there are a few prognostications that are safe bets all the same. One major reason for this is that several of 2023’s biggest stories have yet to play all the way out, and several of them will probably come to a head in 2024.
Money, money, money, money, money
We know that there will be appeals in the Vatican financial trial that saw Cardinal Angelo Becciu condemned to five and a half years in prison, along with several other defendants also found guilty. But we don’t know much beyond that. In fairness, the story that reached its climactic moment in the Vatican’s “trial of the century” broke way back in 2019, with a Vatican police raid on various offices in the Secretariat of State and the Vatican’s financial oversight outfit, then styled the AIF. It will drag on at least a little longer, possibly into 2025.
More broadly, however, the entire financial reform in the Vatican will continue to be under the spotlight. Expect there to be more scandals involving money, until someone decides to clean house—personnel is policy—and implement really sane and effective institutional oversight measures.
Anywhere there is bureaucracy, there will be money. Anywhere there is money, there will be misuse of it. In order to get anything done, a principal must trust his lieutenants and subalterns, some of whom will abuse that trust. A few of them, at least, will abuse that trust for personal gain.
More often, the principal will see them betray his trust by incompetence rather than by malicious malfeasance, but the end result will still be the gifts of the faithful from all over the world—many of them pennies of the poor—either sinfully miscarried or wantonly trifled away. There’s no stopping this outright, but there is discouraging it by meaningfully transparent procedural regularity and regular consequences for incompetence as well as malfeasance.
Without getting into specifics—my crystal ball is on the fritz—expect these ineluctable human realities to come further into focus during 2024.
The Three-eyed Mercy Monster
I have oceanfront property in Arizona—available on the cheap—for anyone who believes that the Vatican under Pope Francis is capable of doing justice either to Fr. Marko I. Rupnik or his many victims.
Rupnik is the olim Jesuit and mosaic artist who preyed sexually, psychologically, and spiritually on more than a dozen victims—most of them women religious—over some three decades, much of which he spent at the Centro Aletti art institute he founded in Rome.
Rupnik’s erstwhile Jesuit superiors in both his native Slovenia and in Rome either winked at his bad behavior or actively worked for years to discredit his many accusers, until another Jesuit—auxiliary Daniele Libanori SJ of Rome—stumbled into the web of lies and secrecy that had protected Rupnik and made a stink about it.
The business found its way first into Italian blogs and then onto the news wires, setting off global furor that became incandescent when the Vatican office responsible for investigating and prosecuting the kinds of crimes Rupnik’s accusers said he committed decided not to pursue a case against him for technical reasons.
L’Affaire Rupnik went nuclear when news hit that the Slovenian diocese of Koper has decided to welcome Rupnik as a priest in good standing, giving him the legal wherewithal to exercise his priestly ministry essentially unimpeded.
Pope Francis then discovered problems with the handling of the Rupnik business and ordered the competent office—the discipline section of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith—to take another look at the case.
Rupnik, meanwhile, is living at Aletti in Rome as an extern priest, and there’s no word from either the Vatican or the Rome vicariate on whether Rupnik is under even nominal restrictions while the DDF reviews the case.
Rupnik’s art decorates shrines and chapels—some of them very significant ones like Lourdes and Fatima—all over the world. The Vatican’s official communications outfit continues to use works by Rupnik and his studio to illustrate and accompany their digital liturgical calendar items and Pope Francis himself has publicly praised a Rupnik work he keeps in his apartments.
The Rupnik story broke in 2022 and developed in real time throughout 2023. The details included in the rehearsal I’ve just offered don’t begin to convey its complexity or adequately depict its gruesomeness.
Expect it to come to a head in 2024. Do not expect its climax to be satisfactory. Do not expect its denouement to be pretty.
The Old Man and the C(onclave)
The fact is that popes can stay very sick for a very long time. Pope Francis had several health scares in 2023 but appears to have bounced back at least tolerably well from each and all of them. He is older and slower than he was ten years ago, but everybody is.
That said, the pressures of the job would put the hurt on a fellow half Francis’s age, even if he didn’t have Francis’s “hands on” management style. The strain of multiple converging global crises—most of them mostly of Francis’s own making at this point—can’t continue without tearing something.
It is evident that Pope Francis wants to see his big synodal project through to completion, but he’s the first to admit that these sorts of things are not for mortal flesh to decide.
I wouldn’t fall out of my chair to see a conclave in the bottom half of the year, maybe in autumn. Whenever it comes, I expect it to be longish, messy, and surprising in its result.
That’s as far out on a limb as I’m willing to go.
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Surprising in a good way, I hope.
Well done, Mr. Altieri. You very appropriately mentioned Rupnik as a top item on your list.
Let me suggest that Rupnik is the lodestar of the Bergoglian papacy. Of the entire Jesuitical order, in fact.
The empty, void-eyed, undead figures that inhabit Rupnik’s “art” are the perfect symbols of the Church under Bergoglio — or, if you will, the Bergoglian captivity.
Heretofore, whether we’re talking about tomorrow or a hundred years from now, this tortuous papacy should always be viewed through the lens of the predatory, monstrous corrupter of faith, Rupnik.
“The empty, void-eyed, undead figures that inhabit Rupnik’s “art” are the perfect symbols of the Church under Bergoglio — or, if you will, the Bergoglian captivity.”
Spot on, Brineyman!
From the back bleachers, here, a footnote about the possible and “messy” conclave mentioned by Altieri…
Such an autumn conclave would either precede, coincide with, or displace Synod 2024. Would Synod 2024 be divided by a de-facto and post-“polyhedral” Church? Within limits, a potentially good direction but now in the wrong hands, so to speak…
At the Synod, would the ILLUMINATI pretend the high ground of a “trinitarian” family (!) of blessings: the sacramental, the liturgical and now the side-plate pseudo-blessing of “irregular” combo-households? And, would the rest be branded as BACKWARDISTS, because clearly faithful to a coherent understanding of the perennial Catholic Church, and of the innate and universal Natural Law and moral absolutes (and therefore the Catechism and Veritatis Splendor)?
The illuminati? Synodally “walking together” in step with pied piper Fr. James Martin, and the media spin-doctors of invasive secularism? And now even the former (2002-2008) United States Attorney (!) for the sovereign state of New Jersey, the newly-evolved rainbow Chris Christi–who surely has read correctly all the fine print and word selection (“couple”!) that issueth forth from the keyboard of Cardinal Fernandez!
POLYHEDRALISM…of which, speaketh Cardinal Fernandez to a faceted and now divided Church, that each bishop retains the authority to decide or judge, or whatever, whether an enabled “scandal or confusion”–as clearly acknowledged in many dioceses (Africa, Kazakhstan, Poland, Hungary, some caution in the United States, etc.)– can be painted otherwise in his own domain.
The Apostolic Succession lives! And, a checkerboard Church. And too bad, too, for any historic bridging between Synod 2024 and the Orthodox Churches.
Altieri turned Hemingway offers the reader a new short story account of the Old Man and the C, that should be read in context of the previous two prophecies Money and Rupnik.
First, while the fictional Hemingway’s old man caught a giant fish that was eaten down to the bone by sharks before he could beach his boat, the real old man and the C landed a giant project on the Church’s lap that turned out to be a fish. Although this fish should be dead it continues to tread water.
Money and Rupnik scandals are the beneficiaries of the fish that should be dead in the water. Nothing like a miraculous diversion. “Whenever it comes [a Synodal completion], I expect it to be longish, messy, and surprising in its result” (Altieri). Perhaps with the clearing out of dissident cardinals from the Vatican apartments we’ll see a Vatican rehab centre for the morally handicapped. Or is that already the case? Happy New Year Everyone.
… continuum, the church in further turmoil.
A fine revelation of some impending issues facing the church. However, there appears to be little “Command and Control” to address the lethal actions or the seriousness of a crime. Rupnik is a symptom, not the source. His sinful actions violating his holy orders give pedophile priests the idea that they have an open field. His case is “under review”? Why are the municipal courts not involved in a monstrous serial rape case?
Excerpts:
“in 2019, with a Vatican police raid on various offices in the Secretariat of State and the Vatican’s financial oversight OUTFIT”. How about the civil indictment of all OUTFITS? “under review”? Sounds like the US justice system, “any day now”. Once it is proven that criminal acts have been committed civil authorities must immediately arrest the perpetrator.
“The Old Man and the C(onclave).” The ecclesiastical influence needs updating. Old men have an OPIONAL retirement age of 70. Many Bishops are in their 70s-80s. Pope Francis is 87. No more lifetime service.
We need to be more proactive.
Priests know when they are rubbing shoulders with questionable actors. A priest charged with the education and salvation of our children must be vetted.
With the continuing loss of male priests and the urgency to ordain more, I still insist the priesthood should allow women, (natural nurturers), to enhance the clergy in many ways.
Check out Garabandal, Fatima, Akita and Mother of God warnings around Synod times. For me, how the Masswss not done properly during Covid in the Vatican was a jarring experience. Bring back the St Michael prayer for the end of even weekday masses. Check out St Michael in Garabandal.