No Excuse for Surprise: Rupnik, Francis, and the Pattern of Protecting Predators
Francis Has Always Protected Predators and Perverts. Rupnik is Only the Latest.
Allow me, for just a moment, to reprise my role as the Publisher of an online Catholic news and commentary website, because this Marko Effing Rupnik news today is sticking in my craw.
Who is Rupnik you ask? (I’m hoping there are at least some of you who don’t know, but I’m about to ruin that for you either way.) He’s a walking piece of human garbage in a Roman collar. A Jesuit (I know, I repeat myself), an “artist” (his crappy work is all over a bunch of recent Vatican marketing), and an alleged serial abuser of some 20 Slovenian nuns in the 1980s and 1990s. The graphic accounts of what one of those nuns endured is horrifying. This man used psychology and spiritual authority to strip away the sexual innocence of consecrated virgins and use them as his playthings. When they refused, he destroyed their reputations with their community. After all - he was a priest, and as the nun in question said:
You have to understand how Ignatian discernment works: you are called to total availability and openness, and it is your spiritual father who guides you in understanding what is good and what is evil.
If the one who guides you says God wants it and you do not obey, you are setting yourself against God. That is precisely where manipulation can creep in, as it did with Father Rupnik.
I was afraid of making mistakes, afraid of losing his approval, I felt extremely dependent on his judgment. If I did not do as he wanted, he would immediately say that my spiritual journey was stalled and present me as ‘in the wrong’ to the young men and women in the group that was forming around him in the meantime. Only Father Marko decided who was right and worth supporting; those who were in the wrong were humiliated and sidelined.
Again, the details are graphic in the link above, and I’m about to give some more from a different source - details you won’t be able to unsee.
Please skip past the next block quote if you don’t want to read them.
More accusations about Rupnik from some of the other nuns:
In 1986, a year before Klara joined the Loyola Community, Rupnik — who was living in the Jesuit community in Gorizia — visited Klara in her sublet apartment. She states that Rupnik "invited me to enter the bathroom with him where he began to masturbate in front of me over the sink."
"Then he took my hand so that I continued [to masturbate him], while with the other [hand] he pushed my head down," Klara said, forcing her to have oral sex.
She touched herself and 'played' with me in bed, talking to me about how it would be with Father Rupnik.
"You need it because you haven't received enough love and attention from your father," Rupnik told Klara, also warning her not to tell anyone about the incident.
"When he was certain that I would enter the community, he began to exploit me sexually as she pleased," Klara reported. "I remember once, after driving two sisters from Mengeš to Gorizia, he stopped in the garage and began to grope me and then masturbate himself and me."
"The same year, he chose me as an assistant while he was directing the Spiritual Exercises in the Stična Monastery, just to give me more days to have sex," she noted. "I felt trapped and couldn't talk about it with anyone. Everyone in the community told me I had to be humble and submissive."
When Rupnik visited Skupnost Loyola for spiritual guidance and confessions, Klara recounted that "he repeatedly told me that he also had sex with other sisters, repeatedly mentioning threesomes and asking me if I would rather be with a sister and him, or if I wanted to be alone with two men." She added, "He described to me our future threesome in great detail."
Klara described how Rupnik attempted to seduce her into having a ménage à trois by sending her to San Marco in Lamis, Puglia, to the home of a former member of the Loyola Community during Easter 1988.
"Rupnik had told me at length about how she inspired him artistically when, in his studio, she massaged her breasts and caressed herself in front of him. I soon realized that I had been sent to her house with the express purpose of being taught about threesomes," Klara said.
"She touched herself and 'played' with me in bed, talking to me about how it would be with Father Rupnik and how we would drink his sperm from a goblet at dinner," the nun recollected. "I was extremely embarrassed and totally stunned, so much so that one evening she called Rupnik on her phone telling him that there was nothing he could do with me."
Some of these women came close to suicide.
Suffice it to say, he’s an evil sonofabitch. He was supposedly excommunicated in 2019 for crimes against the sacrament of confession, but it didn’t stick. See, he’s a friend of Pope Francis, which is why the word today is that he’s being sent back to active ministry:
The influential mosaic artist Fr. Marko Rupnik has been incardinated into a diocese in his native Slovenia.
Msgr. Slavko Rebec, vicar general of the Diocese of Koper, said in an Oct. 25 statement to The Pillar: “In response to the question whether the priest Marko Ivan Rupnik has been received (incardinated) into the Diocese of Koper, we answer that the said priest was received into the Diocese of Koper at the end of August 2023.”
“The Bishop of Koper admitted him on the basis of the decree of Rupnik’s dismissal from the Jesuit order and on the basis of Rupnik’s request for admission to the Diocese of Koper, and on the basis of the fact that Rupnik had not been sentenced to any judicial sentence: ‘Everyone who is accused of a criminal offense has the right to be presumed innocent until he is found guilty according to law, in a public proceeding in which he is given every opportunity necessary for his defense’ (Declaration on Human Rights, Article 11.)”
All around the internet today, I’ve been seeing “shock” that this is happening.
And it really WOULD BE shocking if it weren’t the same pattern that’s been going on for years.
Some of us have been reporting about the pattern for nearly a decade. About Francis protecting abusers and those who cover for them, and getting away with it.
First it was Fr. Grassi, in Argentina.
Then he was all BFF with Card. Danneels, who was caught ON TAPE trying to stop a sex abuse victim from testifying.
Then he fired 3 CDF priests investigating clerical abuse without cause and ultimately, Cardinal Muller, the CDF prefect himself, for refusing to run cover for abusers.
Then he called the people of Osorno “dumb” and accused Chilean abuse victims of calumny in defense of his buddy Bp. Barros., whose installation in Chile literally caused a riot because of his alleged abuse.
Then he shielded Card. Errázuriz, who is accused of covering up for Barros and his alleged mentor in perversion, Karadima.
Then it was the case of Fr. Mauro “Don Mercedes” Inzoli, who was defrocked by Pope Benedict for his abuse of children, until Francis reinstated him.
Then it was the situations with Peña Parra and Zanchetta, who both got cushy Vatican jobs after being accused of abuse.
Then there was the case of the seminarian who was allegedly abusing the pope's altar boys, but the pope did NOTHING.
Then of course, the McCarrick coverup.
There was also the hideous cases of abuse at the Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf, with 13 suspects (and at least 1 conviction for rape), but despite repeated warnings, Francis, again, did NOTHING.
This all doesn't even highlight some of the lesser demons he surrounds himself with - Coccopalmerio, Capozzi, Ricca, Paglia, Radcliffe, et. al., who have all been associated with either actual perversity (orgies with drugs, soliciting male prostitutes, Big Gay Murals in a church) or the defense of perversity or predation. He even personally intervened to stop a plan “to establish a permanent criminal tribunal for bishops” implicated in sexual abuse.
So why, when some of us have been covering this for a DAMN DECADE, is anyone SURPRISED about RUPNIK?
It’s like I was screaming into the void with my microphone turned off all that time.