ROME (AP) — The Vatican took the unusual step of announcing Monday that it has appointed a judge to decide the fate of a prominent former Jesuit artist accused of sexual, emotional and psychological abuse of women.
The case of Reverend Marko Ivan Rupnik has severely damaged the legacy of Pope Francis, with suggestions that the Jesuit pope and the Vatican’s Jesuit-led sexual abuse agency may have shielded one of his own sexual abusers.
The Vatican office that regulates clerical sexual abuse cases, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the five judges appointed to hear the Rupnik case include women and priests from outside the Vatican bureaucracy. In a statement, it said that such a structure was “taken to better guarantee the autonomy and independence of the aforementioned courts, as well as other judicial procedures.”
This statement signaled a tacit recognition that the Vatican’s treatment of the Rupnik files had not been autonomous or independent to date.
Rupnik mosaics adorn some of the most visited shrines and sanctuaries of the Catholic Church around the world, including the Basilica in Lourdes, France, the Basilica of the Vatican, the new cathedral in Aparecida, Brazil, and Pope Leo XIV’s own Augustinian chapel in Rome.
The Rupnik scandal first publicly exploded in late 2022, when Italian blogs began reporting claims by nuns and adult women who said they had been sexually, emotionally and psychologically abused by him, including during the production of his works.
The Jesuit order of Rupnik will soon be established. he admitted that he was excommunicated In 2020, he was briefly indicted for one of the Catholic Church’s most serious crimes: using the confessional to absolve women for sexual acts.
The case continued to cause problems for the Jesuits and Francis, as more women came forward to say they had been victims of Rupnik.
Jesuit I ended up kicking him out of the cult. After refusing to respond to allegations of spiritual, psychological and sexual abuse by about 20 women, most of them members of a Jesuit-inspired religious order that he co-founded in his native Slovenia, he has since been suppressed.
The Vatican initially refused to prosecute, saying the allegations were too old. The reluctance to prosecute exposed both a loophole in Vatican law that allowed sex crimes against adult women to rarely be prosecuted, and the possibility that famous artists like Rupnik were receiving preferential treatment from their fellow Jesuits.
while francis is there denied interference In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, he said that he ultimately succumbed to public pressure and that the Vatican Start an appropriate formal trial.
Two years later, a Vatican statement on Monday suggested the trial would begin soon.
So far, Rupnik has not publicly responded to the allegations and has refused to respond while his Jesuit superiors investigate. Supporters of his Centro Aletti art studio have condemned their claims. “Lynch” in the media.
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