SEX PREDATOR RUPNIK STILL A PRIEST - IN A CONVENT

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Day 4 of the Catholic Advent Calendar: an image by Rupnik

"A satanic, luciferian religion." How do Catholics feel about the description of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church dumped by a reader on this page yesterday? But the increasingly anti-Christic, demonic manoeuvres of the Bergoglian sect in the Vatican make it sound fair enough and faithful Catholics should withdraw their financial support, forthwith.

The notorious Jesuit Father Marko Rupnik. who sexually abused 20 nuns, criminally misused the sacrament of confession and desecrated a chalice with his bodily fluids, is now sheltering in a convent in Montefiola near Rome, its nuns having been evicted. Rupnik has evaded sanctions for the canonical offence of  absolving an accomplice in a sin against the Sixth Commandment and is still a priest in good standing. How has he got away with it?

Well, you know, as Cardinal Victor Fernandez explains, his Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) is dealing with “more serious” cases that are “less publicized.”Good grief. The mind boggles.

And Fr Rupnik has a godfather: Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, former Vicar General of His Holiness for the Diocese of Rome and now Major Penitentiary. 

The convent now housing Rupnik and the Jesuits of his Alettti Centre

It is no secret that the Cardinal is Rupnik's great protector, and that in illo tempore he dismissed as slander the numerous and detailed accusations that emerged against the former Slovenian Jesuit, even going so far as to issue a ridiculous note praising the impeccable reality of the Aletti Centre, while Rupnik's victims demanded truth and justice.

Moreover, De Donatis is at home in Montefiolo, where he has built a two-storey house on the nuns' property. ...In the nearby village of Poggio Catino, the Cardinal also owns a former farmhouse with a swimming pool, where it seems he had accommodated Rupnik & Co. until they could be incorporated into Montefiolo. 

The result is that the Cardinal is the director of the new arrangement that permits Rupnik and the small group that left the Society of Jesus to occupy a property that does not belong to him, but in which he has made a home and which he manages as if it were his own. Since he himself was unable to incardinate Rupnik in the diocese of Rome, which was certainly too much in the limelight after the media scandal, a bishop was sought and found in Monsignor Jurij Bizjak (noe replaced by Peter Štumpf), who was willing to perform a purely formal incardination and then let Rupnik form a new community and continue his artistic activities. 

Above all, De Donatis had no objection to putting Rupnik back in direct contact with nuns after all that had come to light.   https://newdailycompass.com/en/rupnik-and-his-companions-occupy-convent-near-rome-cardinal-de-donatis-is-director

Meanwhile, Father Jesusmary Missigbètò is expelled from the priesthood for upholding Catholic doctrine against the heresies of Jorge Bergoglio.

*We need to rediscover the sense of punishment. A priest who commits a mistake must be punished. This is a manifestation of charity toward him, because it allows him to correct himself and to do penance. But it is also justice for the Christian people. A priest who fails to be chaste must receive a punishment.* *Canon law (canon 1340)* foresees many ways of correcting. He should be sent, for a definite period of time, to do penance in a monastery. *Under the guise of mercy, guilty priests have just been moved geographically, even in tragic cases of pedophile acts. This damages the credibility of the whole Church.* *It is urgently necessary to rediscover the meaning of the penal law.* Who knows how many priestly souls could have been saved if there had been an attempt to correct them before something irreparable had been committed? —Robert Cardinal Sarah.

 

 Before long, De Donatis and Fernandez will be among those voting in conclave to elect a new pope. Only the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, won over by faithful Catholics' fervent prayer and sacrifice, can deliver us from the post-Vatican II, Novus Ordo Synodal Bergoglian sect and restore to us the Mystical Body of Christ and his true Vicar on earth - a holy pope. 

 

The Italian website La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana broke a story March 3 (linked below) claiming that Marko Rupnik and his Centro Aletti confreres are moving into a convent in Montefiola, northeast of Rome. According to the report, the nuns currently there are being evicted.

 

The website claims the whole process most likely enjoys the support of Cardinal Angelo de Donatis, formerly Vicar General of Rome (the Pope’s delegate to run his diocese) and now Major Penitentiary (the cardinal who heads the Church’s “internal forum” work, i.e., administration of the sacrament of Penance). Many regard de Donatis as a long Rupnik protector.

 

Predator but papal-pet Rupnik has long managed to evade sanctions for the canonical offense of absolving an accomplice in a sin against the Sixth Commandment. The Jesuits managed to wash their hands of him by expelling him for disobedience (kind of like getting thrown out of the Anglican Church for heresy).

 

Free-agent Rupnik then got incardinated in a Slovenian diocese, with what looks like the understanding that he’d never actually be expected to serve there. (See how far you’d get with an American bishop, telling him you’d like to serve God’s people in a college or university rather than a parish setting!)

 

Not actually expected to live in Slovenia, he’s now apparently gotten mountaintop digs not-too-far-but-far-enough from Rome to continue Aletti-style business as usual, seemingly with the indulgence of a cardinal protector. Meanwhile, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (under revised norms that exempt its Prefect (Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández - ed), (another papal-pet, from disciplinary work) grinds on with its investigation which, prolonged enough, might yet produce the magic “McCarrick effect” — everybody who knew anything is dead and anybody alive knew nothing!

 

Vaticanistas report that Rupnik’s “false mysticism” is apparently not a clear-enough charge for canonical punishment; only canonists would cavil about whether a priest who is a member of a religious order once deemed the papacy’s intellectual shock troops and spiritual marines who talked a nun into a sexual tryst as a mystical spiritual experience might be criminally sinful enough to discipline him.

 

I raise all these points in light of a letter published February 26 by the Dicastery for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts (here) about the “good name” of “credibly accused” priest sexual predators, especially dead ones. With the usual Vatican “transparency,” the letter’s addressee is unspecified nor is there any explanation why the document written September 5, 2024 suddenly saw the light of day almost half a year later. Being part of Francis’s Roman Curia means never having to explain things.

 

The best and the worst of Francis - his nightly call to a priest in Gaza while displaying the work of serial sex abuser Marko Rupnik

 

Perhaps it is a coincidence that the letter came out just as the new Rupnik story is surfacing. More to the point, however, is: Should we perhaps question the letter’s arguments?

 

Let’s draw some clear methodological lines. This letter is a legal document, a response to a legal inquiry about what provisions of the Code of Canon Law require in such instances. As such, it is an interpretation of a positive law and at least theoretically distinct from the moral questions it implicates concerning good name, detraction, calumny, and transparency.

 

Whether it should be so distinct is another question, but this pontificate has tended to wield the cudgel of canon law as both its weapon and shield irrespective of how well or ill the law serves good theology. Canon law should be rooted in and serve good theology; whether it has, particularly in recent years, is an independent question.

 

I write as a moral theologian and I will admit I am researching the logic behind what the Church teaches about good name, detraction, and calumny. I do so precisely because I think too many clerics, including far too many hierarchs, have taken refuge behind “detraction” and “good name” to justify both their negligence about and cover up of priestly sexual predators, especially homosexual ones.

 

Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, Paolo Ruffini (“Who am I to judge the Rupnik stories?”) has Rupnik's 'art' on display, 2021  

This Holy See has tended to blow hot and cold on eradicating clerical sexual predation. Public accusations of abuse are met with criticisms of “detraction” and the need to “preserve the good name” of the accused. Those criticisms, of course, do not address why people go public, i.e., because they do not trust the Church’s clergy to conduct a timely and fair judgment in a closed, confidential setting. 

 

And, given the drip-drip-drip of sexual abuse cases bedeviling the Church since Boston 2002 and especially post-l’affaire McCarrick, no honest man should blame those people for their incredulity.

 

The Dicastery’s letter seems to come from a make-believe world in which (i) neither Boston 2002, the McCarrick affair, nor widespread civil prosecutions in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Australia, and France happened; (ii) social and secular media reporting about accusations of sexual abuse can be pretended neither to exist nor to have been usually the first cause in exposing this sinful rot; (iii) Catholics will generously suspend judgment pending “proof — judicial — to the contrary and definitive” (i.e., presumably a final and unappealable verdict); and (iv) the Church’s own credibility is not at stake. Earth to Bishops Iannone and Arrieta: That make-believe world ends at the boundary of the Vatican City State.

 

Francis and Rupnik with the Jubilee Year logo designed by Rupnik 


 

Rome appears to nurture a deep-seated belief that the only party with rights to a good name here are accused clergy. That’s just not true. The Church also has rights: rights to be credible in holding to account clergy whose sexual abuse makes a mockery of that Church and its priesthood.

 

And when that abuse acquires the dimensions it has today, it seems that the full measure of a “legitimate and proportionate” reason for open talk was long ago filled: the Church also has a right and duty to be transparent so that her sons and daughters — especially her minor sons and daughters — can feel safe in the presence of an ordained person.

 

If the Church does not attend to that right and duty, the civil authority will. Nor is attending to that right and duty merely a way of avoiding civil entanglement. The civil authority may not divert prosecutorial resources to convict or exonerate dead people (a key theme of the Dicastery’s letter) but that does not mean that conviction or exoneration should be ignored, suspended ad infinitum. That is the Church’s job, both as regards the accused who were her ministers as well as the alleged victims who were/are her sons and daughters.

 

In a normal society, most accusations sooner or later become public. The Dicastery’s vision seems to be that is some kind of injustice. An accusation is not proof, much less conviction; but neither is it nothing. The accusation exists.

 

Lourdes, France

Rome’s mindset seems to be people should pretend it does not until it is fully and irreversibly adjudicated. Not only is that not realistic, it is not to the Church’s good, since experience shows it enables the possibility of a culture of cover-up. And, arguably, a case can be made that it is not absolutely morally required.

 

No doubt this mindset of not having to acknowledge anything until it is at least canonically inevitable and indisputable serves to shield against having to explain what might be going on atop Montefiola and who is involved in those goings-on.

 

Until that mindset is gone, the Church’s behavior in matters of sexual abuse and its cover-up will be suspect and legitimately so. And if the Church won’t clean up its act legally, its faithful may force it to by starving it financially. Hitting Rome in the pocketbook usually has a salutary effect in fixing its attention on the essentials. But one shouldn’t become a “poor Church of the poor” in order to protect abusers.

[The La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana article link is here.]

 https://www.newoxfordreview.org/rupnik-reality-the-right-to-a-good-name/

 

Pope St Gregory the Great by Mathias Stom



"We ascend to the heights of contemplation by the steps of action."