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 to lift 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.
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As usual, excellent analysis and commentary. My belief is much of this is grounded in the modernist false teaching of universal salvation that everyone will be saved no matter what they do. Many in the Church do longer belief in the reality of Hell. But as Padre Pio once said people will believe in Hell when they get there.
Dear Russell E. Snow: “the modernist false teaching of universal salvation that everyone will be saved no matter what they do.”
A few years ago, I was invited to a commemoration of Bishop Michael Putney, who had died young of an intransigent cancer. The assembled included Archbishop Mark Coleridge and Archbishop John Bathersby and members of some well-known Brisbane Catholic families, like Paul Martin. Dignitaries from other denominations were there, some sporting Freemason insignia. Apparently, Bp Michael had been a lodge member.
The gathering was addressed by two of Australia’s most active and successful Freemason proselytizers: Jimmy Hare and Bobby Gribble.
Their message was: The Bible assures us that, irrespective of faith or sins, everyone will be saved by Christ and all we Christians simply have to do is to tell them all about it!
The sage nodding by our Catholic Archbishops, clergy, nuns, and laity showed how desperately deeply immured the local church has become in heretical universalism. No voice was raised to say: “That is not true!”
Recalling this sad event, I was not surprised to read that our Church hierarchs in Rome are now proposing fraternal involvement with International Freemasonry.
Hopefully, dear Russell, this recollection lifts the curtain on the machinations driving the current corruption of our beloved Catholic Christian faith, at the highest levels.
Universal salvation – why, then anything goes, even criminal molestation of children, sexual abuse of vulnerable adults, clerics blessing each other as they engage in drug & pornography-inflamed homosexual coupling, cross-species ‘marriages’, infanticides, ‘euthanizing’ the elderly, and the accompanying devil-inspired, wicked heresies.
Am sad to have had to write this. Toxic boils need to be lanced before they kill us.
Always seeking to hear & lovingly obey King Jesus Christ; blessings from marty
All this rather strange insistence on freemasonry being behind everything is getting really weird. It is almost a “flat earth” sort of belief, because no matter what is really going on, the answer is always “freemasonry is running everything behind the scenes”. Freemasonry is anti Catholic, to be sure. But it is not the secret monster controlling the world.
Exactly! Thank you.
Dear ‘samton909’: “Freemasonry is anti Catholic, to be sure. But it is not the secret monster controlling the world.”
Two observations:
*First* – Freemasons are obviously not anti-Catholic, since very many Catholics at all levels are Freemasons of every sort of degree, in every sort of lodge.
They are living a double-minded lie, since true Catholic Christians are servants of The Holy Spirit of Truth & Life whilst, from their first apprentice degree onwards, Freemasons are vowed servants of the spirit of deceit & death.
Those, clergy & lay, who think they are secure in their dual allegiance have excommunicated themselves, according to official Catholic teaching, with no exceptions permitted at the local level.
All the men & women Freemasons in Catholic parishes commit sacrilege every time they receive Holy Communion.
*Second* – the claim that Freemasonry is not ‘the secret monster controlling the world’, is overthrown by the published testimonies of former senior Freemasons, who describe blasphemous ceremonies and blood-curdling vows that attempt to bind every Freemasons under the prince of this world – who, if you didn’t know is indeed the invisible yet monstrous evil that subverts God’s plan for this world.
“The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.” 1 John 3:8.
Unless each Catholic lodge member abjures Freemasonry with all their heart, they will find they have exchanged their eternal soul for brotherhood (or sisterhood) with the devil, the Satanic spirit of this world, responsible for all our ills.
Don’t say you have not been warned.
Ever in the love of King Jesus Christ; blessings from marty
I think you should look into this more deeply. Begin with the difference between the two types of Freemasonry. The Grand Orient is the one onwhich to focus.
Dear ‘Ann the Least’: “The Grand Orient is the one onwhich to focus.”
That’s always been the red herring used by Anglo/Irish/American/Australian Catholic Freemasons, to convince themselves that their dual allegiance is not a mortal sin. We’ve heard the blarney again & again: “We’re harmless – It’s the other guys & gals, those shifty ‘Continentals’ you should be looking at!”
The solemn, long-standing, & still prevailing judgment, with good reasons, of our Catholic leaders is that ALL Freemason membership is a mortal sin – full stop! NO provision for local exceptions.
The horrific details of Freemason initiations are freely available on the Web, together with their ‘secret’ grips, passwords, & blasphemous philosophies. No sane Catholic or other loyal Christian would have a bar of this iniquitous servitude to the spirit of disobedience, deception, & death.
Those who defy The Church [including numerous Catholic & Protestant clerics & hierarchs] commit sacrilege every time they receive Holy Communion.
Irrespective of their claims of being upright citizens & public benefactors, if they don’t repent & abjure Freemasonry they will spend eternity in Hell.
Maybe that helps explain why Freemasons are such fanatical supporters of universalism (the heretical doctrine that no one will be sent to Hell).
I have much first hand knowledge of this, being from a Masonic family going back several generations. I have read the ritual books and know the history thoroughly. I repeat what I have said and you are coming off as childish like the schoolyard boy who just wants to argue about everything.
Rumor has it that some things are too big to expose. JFK’s death is one. Rupnik’s life the other.
too big to fail (generally speaking) is not always a good thing; greater chance of hand picking winners and losers and ignoring those guilty, while punishing the innocent bystanders directly or indirectly.
The Gospel says all will eventually come into the light, if I remember correctly.
A normal person, if he hears about some awful violation of another person in a place he works/responsible for, has an instinctive reaction “away with him”. It is hard to imagine that a normal head of a kindergarten who loves children would keep a child molester employed. Hence, it all boils down to the normal humanity of that head of the office to the normal humanity of the co-workers. If there is no normal humanity then it is pointless to expect any justice. And justice comes from a felt understanding of what is good and what is evil, out of an empathy with the victim and also out of true manhood, a desire to protect those who are weaker (women and children).
So, we have men (PF, cardinals, priests etc.) who have zero instinct of justice and zero desire to protect the weaker ones. Hence there are no men. A true priest must be a father; if he lacks a notion of fatherhood, he cannot be such.
It is very easy: apply the notion of a true fatherhood to any of those people: PF, Rupnik, Fernandez, etc. Being measured against any patriarchal figure like Moses, Jeremiah, St Joseph, St Simeone they are pathetic and laughable. Moses and others had their authority and power because they listened to God and cared about the people they led. PF, Rupnik, Fernandez, etc. are nothing, imposters.
I deliberately brought all this to the level of a family. This is how the situation in the Church must be seen to avoid illusions. Precisely because a very substantial part of clergy lack fatherhood we have the current situation.
Dear Anna – accurate discernment of our present tragic church circumstance.
Dr St Peter Damian, and all you holy saints and martyrs, please pray for us.
It’s very dismaying to read of the ongoing corruption of The Church of Pope Franics. I’m a cradle Carholic, born in 1947. Never, until the advent of Francis was I ever aware of Church corruption. Never. And now look! The Church is a catastrophe. It’s heartbreaking having a corrupt Pope and his corrupt minions like this. Desperate prayer.
The fact that you were never aware of the corruption speaks volumes about the success of secrecy those men guarded for each other. The corruption is not new. Only the exposure is new.
That’s why a lot of people left the church and became protestants or quit entirely.
My uncle decades ago was upset the Bishop drove a Cadillac and I can remember my brother and dad in a heated argument in the 70s over the church’s wealth; to which my exasperated father finally replied that the church did more missionary/humanitarian type work than any other organization.
Anna, my sentiments exactly. If a man applying for the priesthood would not also make a good husband and father on a human level, he has no business being a priest or bishop. Similarly, if a man is judged on human terms of qualifying as a good husband and father, then one could reasonably say that he would also have made a good priest or bishop. Now, I invite readers to consider their own pastors and the bishop of their diocese. Ask yourself whether each would have made a good Catholic husband and father. And, there, would lie the nub of the problem that has perennially faced the Catholic Church.
Am not sure why or when we set aside 1 Timothy 3:1-7.
Anna:
Your description is the very truth. A holy priest is a fatherly man. Good fathers, as you have noted, always promote justice for all in their care, just as good mothers promote the necessity of mercy for all in their care.
Justice and mercy are joined in marriage, as man and woman are united in marriage. Neither can they ever be separated without damaging those whose lives depend on justice and mercy.
Justice is not outdated. It is part of what sustains the living.
A normal person, if he hears about some awful violation of another person in a place he works/responsible for, has an instinctive reaction “away with him”.
***********
Unless the violation is actually observed by that person, no, it’s not instinctive. If you have an animus towards a fellow employee/peer then assuming the worst about them might come easily. But when this happens amongst peers who are friends & respect each other the first reaction usually is disbelief. I’ve seen it happen over & over again.
Yes. I was slandered and abused by a group of perfectly likable priests who got away with it for that reason.
Well said Anna, as I was reading while applying in my mind how to properly deal with weak men, especially the ordained, and my own struggles with the opening thought in the article. The one and only area I’ve always felt where one can be overly scrupulous is in discerning properly between righteous anger and sinful anger, with which I struggle frequently. Any other area of morality, I believe, it is impossible to be rigid, which is why we now have so many ecclesial cowards using rigidity as an excuse to be wimpy, forcing me to wonder at what point would it become necessary for in-your-face confrontations, while “respecting the office”, of course.
Thank you! You state the facts in plain English. Morally corrupt men have perverted due process. Both the judge and his defendent are therefore guilty. We remove convicts in order to protect society. What judge must we now remove to protect our Church?
Rupnik was expelled by the Jesuits but picked up by a Diocese. I wonder why that Bishop picked him up? The accusations against him are pretty serious and should have involved dismissal from the Priesthood.
After the various clerical sexual abuse of minors scandals, you would think that the Vatican would take these serious accusations against Rupnik seriously. Why is this man still a Priest?
He’s Bergoglio’s friend, Will. A fellow Jesuitical.
It’s as simple as that.
It’s hard to imagine that these people actually believe any of this Catholic stuff.
We may well ask, “Why is he still a priest?” We should also ask why he isn’t in jail.
Exactly, jpr. My thoughts, too.
And any and everyone who shields him, including Francis.
Horrifying.
There’s no denying it, you pope-splainers. Rupnik is the consummate symbol of the Bergoglian papacy.
Both the horrific, soul-destroying crimes he committed against sweet, good-hearted women; and the soulless, empty-eyed mosaics he littered around some of Christendom’s holiest places.
Rupnik’s and Bergoglio’s names deserve to be linked forever.
A last thought: compare and contrast the treatment the monster Rupnik received at Bergoglio’s hands with the fate of the faithful shepherd Strickland.
Apparently in non-rigid Bergoglio’s ‘Catholique’ church, sexually assaulting scores of women religious is a less serious offense than allowing the celebration of the Mass in Latin.
Tells you all you need to know about this Dark Vatican. .
If you read today’s Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, there’s a strong suggestion that the Jesuits are busy shuffling off some of their problem sons from Rome right now …. and, in their best Leslie Nielsen impression, are busy announcing “nothing to see here, please, move on!”
So true. Nothing to see here… and look! Over there! Those rigid Catholics— so unwelcoming, so judgmental- we must warn folks about them!
yup, some of them Latin speakers even!
Given the vast theological and geographical distances among all the members of the college of Cardinals, it’s probably difficult, if not impossible, for them to know if the man they select as Pope will at least be a competent administrator.
Maybe that’s why God gave us prayer.
It’s apparent that we can no longer depend on the Vatican to act justly in matters of the sexual abuse of vulnerable persons at the hands of clerics of all ranks. I have to conclude that Lay Catholics need to convene a tribunal of judges that would hear cases of abuse publicly and be as “truth squads” to level judgment as to guilt or innocence of these perps. Some process independent of the Vatican to render justice to victims must be effected because it’s clear that all the Vatican is able to do is obfuscate, dissimulate, and offer an endless stream of words. The People of God have suffered enough and the People of God have had enough of it.
Does anyone know how Rupnik’s excommunication was lifted and by whom in the ecclesiastical authority?
I believe it was Bergoglio who lifted the excommunication
Must have been B. Only he can lift that kind of excommunication. No one else in the Church can do it, as far as I know. That always was what Canon Law said and, to my knowledge, it still is.
Looks like business as usual in the Vatican!
Anna’s [above] normal persons no longer exist as of old in our secular world. Most seem settled at the bottom, the less conscientiously weighted rise to the top as unfortunately we find within our hierarchy.
Read somewhere, someone’s plausible view that homosexuals seek power. Perhaps true, if for normalization plus cultural entrenchment for survival of the species as does seem the case in Rome. And clergy in general. The tendency is to infiltrate all mens clubs. That, and archaic canon law, as proposed by notable Dominican moral theologian Fr Thomas Petri . While likely true there’s also papal sovereign authority, the same authority by which His Holiness bounced several conservative bishops out of their ordinaries onto the streets with no explanation. His Holiness noted for such display of power early on when he fired CDF prefect Card Gerhard Muller’s best, his response to Muller’s Why? I’m the pope. I don’t need to answer why! His response to his involvement in Rupnik’s unholy resurrection is, I was not involved. Albeit Altieri responded that indeed was the problem.
A big ask? Altieri’s question, based on Bishop Accountability Ann Boyle’s premise for justice, is found in what I refer to above as too big to expose. An exposé equal to Pandora’s Box. Entrenchment of hierarchal homosexuality especially by appointment to the Vatican during this pontificate. These boys don’t play games. Cardinal Coccopalmerio, noted for the great drug same sex bash at his Vatican apartments is now in closed door, full swing repartee with leading Freemasons. Freemasonry the epitome of covert power accruement, Gnostic, antiChrist policy. A big three? Freemasonry, homosexuality, Anti Christianity.
Your Holiness. Please clean house at the Vatican [and Germany] before it’s too late.
He’s doing that, at least by his lights, as with the recent eviction of Carinal Burke from his apartment and cutting off his salary. But then, I guess that the Cardinal’s transgressions were infinitely more serious, as when he signed on to that Dubiam, eh?
well said. sad but true.
Anna’s viewpoint above on normal men is certainly true. What I refer to in my comment is mainly in respect to clergy. Dynamics differ depending on the setting. Although even the secular workplace things changed in respect to fundamental ethics due to an overall change in ethics culturally.
What exists among clergy, perhaps surprising for laity, is a sense of brotherhood in ordinary diocesan parish settings. Homosexuality and the legal repercussions have understandably affected this sense of trust. Our great issue is the upwards gravitation of homosexual or homosexual friendly clergy frequently forming what one cardinal called networks. Tight knit, and mutually protective they tend to prevent the genuine fatherly clergy from advancing. Rupnik and Rupnik types are tolerated, even protected. This became evident from 2013 although already in existence with Mccarrick and the network that protected him. Credit belongs to Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for breaking the McCarrick story wide open and in consequence wider knowledge of the homosexual cabals or networks living within Christ’s mystical body. Their existence explains the paradox of the Rupnik affair.
” . . the homosexual cabals or networks – falsely representing themselves as – living within Christ’s mystical body.”
Buy the truth and sell it not. There is a price to pay to stand for truth and then refuse to back down. UNTIL people like the readers of this publication are willing to pay the price for the truth, these sorts of lies will continue to destroy the credibility of the Church and bring disgrace upon the name of Christ.
I appreciate the fact that this matter is not being allowed to be swept under the “rug of selective concern” as so many important issues to our Faith appear to have been since the shift in Theological Focus initiated around the time of Vatican II.
I am concerned that the Vatican appears more concerned about the legal rights and actions being taken regarding this case concerning Fr. Rupnik and these sisters, and has apparently lost sight of the significant “Moral Issues” involved. Where is the moral outcry that a Catholic Priest is being accused of sexual impropriety toward religious sisters? Where is the Vatican’s moral concern that a supposedly ordained “Man of God” violated so many church teachings, his vow of celibacy, his vow to follow church teachings, and his commitment to be an upstanding follower of Christ?
Rather than calling Fr. Rupnik to a repentant conversion, the Vatican appears to be more concerned with protecting him from legal prosecution, and itself from scandal, by dismissing the seriousness of the sins involved and once again trying to sweep this moral issue under the rug via the manipulation of the “narrative” regarding the media coverage.
Fr. Rupnik’s behavior and reported “sin of commission” is one side of this case, but the Vatican’s “sins of omission” is also a serious matter that bears both notice and attention! The Vatican, by its failure to decry the moral sin of one of its own members, is saying to the world that “Moral Impropriety” is acceptable as long as you can make a legal argument to somehow justify it.
May Fr. Rupnik have a conversion of his soul, admit to his sins, make a penitent retribution to these sisters, and beg God to forgive him and have mercy on his soul!
When you deny that God, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, Is The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, rendering onto Caesar or oneself what belongs to God, and thus deny the Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, which is Life affirming and Life sustaining and can only be consummated between a man and woman , who have the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife, anything can become permissible, including the destruction of the life of a beloved son and daughter residing in their mother’s womb.
I believe it was Bergoglio who lifted the excommunication
Yes. It was.
Jesus established Catholic Anathema to protect the Body of His Church. Catholic anathema also assists the unrepentant wicked to repent. About 70 times in the Bible, to ‘cut off’ someone from the body-of-people, means to put someone to physical or spiritual death, for the protection of the Body of the Church. In Matthew 18:17 ‘A Brother Who Sins’, Jesus makes it clear that if, talking to a guilty perpetrator, then civil action upon a guilty perpetrator, then the Church talking to a guilty perpetrator, does not work, level an anathema upon the guilty perpetrator till he confesses his crimes to civil prosecutors, judges and juries or dies and goes to hell.
Matthew 18:5
“Whoever welcomes one such child for my sake welcomes me. On the other hand, it would be better for anyone who leads astray one of these little ones who believes in me, to be drown by a millstone around his neck, in the depths of the sea. What terrible things will come on the world through scandal! It is inevitable that scandal should occur. Nonetheless, woe to that man through whom scandal comes! If your hand or foot is your undoing, cut it off and throw it from you! Better to enter life maimed or crippled than be thrown with two hands or feet into endless fire. If your eye is your downfall, gouge it out and cast it from you! Better to enter life with one eye than be thrown with both into fiery Gehenna.
Leviticus 20:1
The LORD said to Moses, ‘Tell the Israelites: Anyone, whether an Israelite or an alien residing in Israel, who gives any of his offspring to Molech shall be put to death. Let his fellow citizens stone him. I myself will turn against such a man and cut him off from the body of his people;
Matthew 18:17 A Brother Who Sins.
“If your brother sins [against you], go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector. Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
ANATHEMA
In passing this sentence, the pontiff is vested in amice, stole, and a violet cope, wearing his mitre, and assisted by twelve priests clad in their surplices and holding lighted candles. He takes his seat in front of the altar or in some other suitable place, amid pronounces the formula of anathema which ends with these words: Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive N– himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate , so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.”…
…He who dares to despise our decision, let him be stricken with anathema maranatha, i.e. may he be damned at the coming of the Lord, may he have his place with Judas Iscariot, he and his companions.
Quoted from: New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia – Anathema
A thunderbolt from Ed Condon of ‘The Pillar’ –
*Five Years Forward, Five Steps Back*
“Wednesday of this week marked the five-year anniversary of Pope Francis’ global summit on the abuse crisis, held in Rome in 2019.
It was that summit which led to the promulgation of Vos estis lux mundi, the papal motu proprio introducing new laws and procedures to punish abuse of minors and vulnerable adults, and negligence by bishops and religious superiors.
It was meant to signal a new era of “zero tolerance” in the Church, with participants vowing “never again” amid mounting global scandals of which Theodore McCarrick was merely the most well-known.
The anniversary was marked in Rome, perhaps deliberately, by an update from the Vatican on the case against Fr. Marko Rupnik, the artist and former Jesuit accused by some 20 religious sisters of serially, violently, and spiritually sexually abusing them for years.
Two of Rupnik’s victims also marked the occasion by holding a press conference to describe their abuse, and the “deafening silence” and “rubber wall” from Church authorities in the face of their claims.
It’s hard to argue with their characterization. That Rupnik only now faces the prospect of canonical justice is only due to immense public outcry from Catholics worldwide, and a public shaming of the Vatican’s handling of the case by the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors last year.
The depths of Vatican dysfunction, or indifference, to Rupnik’s crimes has been laid bare over the last two years. Even setting aside the still-unexplained decision not to waive the statute of limitations on his crimes for several years, it is clear the en vogue artist benefitted from efforts to protect him.
In 2020 he was tried, convicted, and excommunicated for crimes against the sacrament of confession and then so quickly rehabilitated that no one ever knew — he was allowed even to retain his public appointments as an expert consulter to at least three Vatican dicasteries during the process.
As recently as last year, the pope’s own diocesan curia in Rome was issuing statements backing Rupnik, even as the Jesuits belatedly moved to expel — though not laicize — the priest.
To this day, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications seems to default to featuring Rupnik’s artwork on its devotional and promotional materials.
If Rupnik’s case were a solitary outlier within five years of concerted progress, it would still rightly be a source of shame for the Church. Instead, his case is closer to typical for a Vatican still mired in personal favoritism and a culture of clerical deference.
No number of new policies or commitment to transparency was enough to convince the Vatican to hand over its case files to Argentine authorities in the trial of Bishop Oscar Zanchetta, who was convicted of sexually abusing seminarians in 2022 but had been shielded from justice for years after Pope Francis allowed him to resign his local diocese for “health reasons” and gave him a make-work Vatican job.
Speaking of “health reasons,” they also supposedly triggered the resignation of Bishop Christopher Saunders form the Diocese of Broome, Australia, in 2021 — despite Saunders having spent a year “stepping back” from governing the diocese over allegations of serial sexual abuse of young Aboriginal men.
In another illustrative commemoration of Wednesday’s anniversary, local police arrested the retired bishop on Feb. 21, charging him with 19 counts of rape and sexual abuse. They made the bust on the strength of a leaked copy of the Church’s own Vos estis investigation into the bishop — its contents were enough for the Australian police to act, though the file has been stuck in Vatican limbo for some time now.
Meanwhile, as of last year, Saunders was still listed as the legally “responsible person” for nine Catholic charities in his former diocese, several of which are affiliated with local parishes.
In the United States, the first bishop to face a full Vos estis investigation, Bishop Michael Hoeppner of Crookston, was also allowed to resign, rather than face a formal canonical trial and sanction, after he pressured a victim to recant his abuse claim.
While he wasn’t able to cite “health reasons” for his premature retirement, he did throw himself a Mass of Thanksgiving for “the blessings that Almighty God has bestowed upon us” through his time in charge, which he called “a real treat.
Meanwhile, the former president of the French bishops’ conference, Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, remains a cardinal in good standing and able to vote in a future conclave, despite having admitted in 2022 to abusing a 14-year-old girl.
Rupnik, Zanchetta, Saunders, Hoeppner, and Ricard make a revolting, though far from exhaustive, summary of what “transparency and accountability” actually mean in the post-Vos estis Church.
For all the motu proprios, vademecums, reports, policies, and clarifications, it is clear there has been virtually zero substantive change in operating mindset at the top of the Holy See.
Indeed, five years on and five steps back, the enduring lesson of 2019 and the McCarrick saga seems to be that public outcry and forensic journalistic scrutiny remain the only real or reliable mechanisms of accountability.
After five years on a reforming road to nowhere, this is where we’ve arrived.”
following Ed, I discern our current pope & his henchmen singing:
“Why worry, we be happy – no one can touch us!”
Maybe that Small Still Voice singing: “You really think so!”
is expressing Almighty God’s view? Let’s hope so.