Vatican City, Mar 13, 2025 / 11:50 am (CNA).
A media report says the Vatican’s doctrine office could be close to a decision in the case of the ex-Jesuit Father Marko Rupnik.
According to OSV News, a “sentence is expected in the not too distant future” in the canonical trial of the priest-artist accused of the sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse of dozens of religious sisters under his spiritual care.
OSV News also said Rupnik would be tried for the crime of “spiritual abuse.” Last November, the head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, said a Vatican working group was studying the possibility of making “spiritual abuse” a formalized crime in Church law rather than merely an aggravating circumstance of other crimes.
The report was published as some of Rupnik’s alleged victims shared their stories on the Italian television program “Le Iene” (“The Hyenas”), which aired on March 9. In the program, Italian journalist Roberta Rei confronted Rupnik at a Rome airport baggage claim but received no response to her questions about whether the abuse claims against him were true.
Bishop Jurij Bizjak, who retired Nov. 29, 2024, from the Diocese of Koper, told OSV News in January that Rupnik continues to travel internationally as part of his artistic career. Another recent media report said he is living in a religious convent about an hour’s drive from Rome called the Convent of Montefiolo, with some of his collaborators from the Centro Aletti art and theological center he founded in Rome.
In August 2023, Rupnik was accepted for priestly ministry in the Diocese of Koper, in his native Slovenia, after he was expelled from the Jesuit order for disobedience. In an October 2023 press release the Diocese of Koper stated that “as long as Rev. Rupnik has not been found guilty in a public trial in court, he enjoys all the rights and duties of diocesan priests.”
Regarding Rupnik’s case in the DDF, Fernández said in an interview at the end of January that the dicastery had finished gathering information, had conducted a first review, and was working to put together an independent tribunal for the penal judicial procedure.
CNA contacted officials of the DDF and others close to the case but received no answer by the time of publication.
In October 2024, one year after Pope Francis waived the statute of limitations, thus allowing the Vatican to investigate and try Rupnik’s case, a person working inside the disciplinary section of the DDF told CNA that they were examining the procedural steps that could be taken in the Rupnik case and “the mechanism by which justice can be served.”
Rupnik, internationally recognized for his religious artistic works, has been accused of abusing adult women who were under his spiritual care as part of a religious community he helped found in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of these accusations became public through the media in early December 2022, although the priest’s superiors and officials at the Vatican were aware even several years earlier.
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Themis Vatican makes a laughingstock out of justice for victims of sexual abuse.
It’s just a good thing that Rupnik doesn’t say the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. If he did, he’d have been dismissed, defrocked, and defenestrated overnight.
1. It might be noted that secular media in Italy have recently turned the heat up on the foot-dragging in the Rupnik case, e.g., Rupnik dogged by a reporter through Fiumicino Airport.
2. Somebody might also ask what Cardinal De Donatis is up to (Francis’s former Vicar General for Rome, now Major Penitentiary) since it’s alleged he is allowing the Centro ALetti crowd to move into a monastery northeast of Rome from which the elderly traditional sisters are being relocated.
It takes time to confirm not just a mountain of evidence, rather mountains of evidence. Perhaps the Vatican has discovered a new range.
It’s beyond me why, if he did indeed commit these crimes, he hasn’t been tried in a civil court found guilty and sentenced. Once defrocked he should be handed over to the civil authorities for consideration. Why has he been allowed to slip through civil loopholes? It seems that “ there is something rotten in the State of Denmark “!!!
That occurred to me also. But there might not have been sufficient evidence and coraboration to try him in a criminal court.
Answering both of your posts here,. The offenses that have been the focus of attention, where religious sisters came forth and testified against Marko Rupnik, occurred in Slovenia back in the early 1990s, not in Rome or Italy. Other offenses may have taken place in Italy later, but the Jesuit internal investigation that provided the substantive information about Rupnik’s actions focused on events during the early years of the Loyola Center, co-founded by Rupnik and Ivanka Hosta who are both Slovenian. Slovenia also declared independence arounds the same time, so one can imagine that the legal system was still a work in progress. The three women who have gone public, Gloria Branciani, Mirjam Kovacs and Sister Samuelle, have an excellent, thoroughly experienced lawyer, Laura Sgro, who would presumably file civil charges if she figured out a way to do it. Also, keep in mind that many more women have told their stories to investigators but have not gone public. There are dozens.
The thing is, when we wonder why these acts of sexual abuse and violence don’t seem to have been reported to the police, we can ask the same question about the offenses by Theodore McCarrick, which included seminarians as well as legal minors such as James Grein. We can ask the same about most of the abuse by priests, until relatively recently. It just seems to have been very rare to report abuse by priests to law enforcement, until tbe abuse scandal broke open twenty years ago. Especially within religious communities, seminaries and other religious institutions. People in those institutions may have genuinely believed that if they reported the incidents to their superiors, as they had been guided to do, the offenses would be dealt with in time. Their trust was abused as well.
A lot of the information about the accusations about Rupnik, followup actions, background details, etc. are, already out there and accessible to anyone who wants to learn more. For instance, The Pillar and the National Catholic Register have both published several detailed timelines beginning around two or three years ago.
Did any of the alleged crimes take place within the walls of Vatican City? If not, isn’t he subject to other civil authorities?
The handling of the Rupnik case so far has been appalling. Should he be found not guilty it will be the final nail in the coffin of Vatican credibility.
A fact that so many are glossing over in the Rupnik affair is the fact that he was already found guilty! It was the punishment that was lifted, but as far as can be seen the trial itself was not vacated, the evidence not deemed false. As a canonist I can note that the DDF could have simply had the penalty reinstated but that would have meant getting Francis’ permission. Even if the first trial had been vacated, there is a procedural norm that allows it to be given another hearing if it can be shown that a gross violation of justice occurred. Even with a new trial, one can import all the evidence from the first one, and either go just with that, or add a little bit of the supposedly new cases. This would have significantly expedited matters. Even more, the cases that bought upon the new trial are not of a different kind, but rather additional instances of the same crimes. This makes the claim that they needed a whole new trial, taking years to gather new evidence, a crock. The notion that they need to come up with new categories of crimes, as though there’s nothing already existent to try Rupnik on is also false. There’s also no reason for the length of time except by deliberate delay. Such cases- and in fact ones dealing with much lesser matters that they could be set aside for now to address Rupnik- are often handled in less time than has transpired. So, this is all a bunch of baloney and there should be no doubt that ultimately Francis is protecting him.
Thank you for this in-indepth information. It helps to make sense of some of what I have read… well, maybe “sense” isn’t the word because nothing with the handling of the Marko Rupnic case makes sense. But it provides much insight.
Francis is at the top of the heap of Rupnic’s network of protectors and enablers who have run interference for him and helped him escape consequences for years– beginning with the group of women who came with him from the Loyola Center when he left and moved to Rome, and who then became ensconced in the Aletti Center and in positions in the Vatican organization. I hope that one day, some diligent investigator untangles that network, but that person will have to be tough and fearless, and hopefully, driven by faith in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.