Horror usually has a familiar face. And in the case of the mistreated nuns of the Loyola community in Slovenia in the 1990s, it was always the same. However, the scale of atrocities increased over the years. Marko Rupnik was a priest and respected leader of a world-famous spiritual community for decades. A guru. There was no valuable religious space, including the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid, that did not have one of his famous mosaics. This is also why he was always the pretty boy in the power circles of the Catholic Church. And that is why, as everything now suggests, he has managed to evade scrutiny and justice for so long, despite obvious evidence that he psychologically and sexually abused a dozen nuns from his community. His case is also a complete manual of the Vatican's dubious handling of abuses.
On Wednesday morning, just five years after the summit the Pope held at the Vatican to discuss and change the dynamics of preventing and punishing sexual abuse in the church, two of the nuns abused by Rupnik held a press conference. They were accompanied by their lawyer Laura Sgró and Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the American association Bishop Accountability. The former nuns said they estimate another 20 women from that community were abused by the Jesuit and that “a wall of silence” was erected around the case, which they hope can now be broken. It was the first time they showed their faces. And his story went far beyond the call for “justice and truth.”
Gloria Branciani, born in Rome in 1964, told in detail, repeatedly interrupting her speech due to emotions, how she was manipulated by Rupnik when she was still a medical student. The priest was able to do whatever he wanted with her “so that her spirituality grew,” he explained. The woman reported sexual abuse at the mosaic studio where she worked in Rome. Also the times when Rupnik took her to a porn cinema. “For him it was an art form. It was the path to the collective orgy. Every feeling had to be overcome. He told me I was too sweet, tender, insecure… and that would be good for me. He took me to X-Rooms in Rome twice. And it was clear he was a regular there,” he said. But also when he accompanied her and forced her to get into the car, where he drove her through Slovenia “so that she could get to know the culture.”
The worst from a theological point of view was when Rupnik forced her to have relations with another woman and he – another nun also recruited by the Jesuit – “invoked the Holy Trinity” and ensured that this was “his maximum representation” be. “When I initially resisted, he told me that I didn't want to because I was jealous and couldn't live sexuality spiritually. He was sexually aggressive, but he said it was a healthy aggressiveness. The worst thing is that we can’t talk about it among ourselves out of fear.”
In this case, and this is one of the key points of the case, Rupnik would have committed a canonical crime of false mysticism. That is, passing off a pure and simple sexual practice as a religious experience. This type of crime is not prescribed, and it was precisely this type of crime that the religious doctrine at the time did not want to recognize.
Father Rupnik, a 70-year-old Slovenian Jesuit priest, was a star. A successful and charismatic religious artist who managed to sign important works in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican (with some mosaics in the Redemptoris Mater Chapel). But last December 2022, the Society of Jesus announced that Rupnik had been denounced by several nuns from the Loyola community in Ljubljana, of which he had been the spiritual father. The victims had turned to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to report cases dating back to the 1990s, but the Vatican body responsible for analyzing and adjudicating these cases ruled that the statute of limitations had expired.
The problem with this case is that it directly affects the highest authority of the faith and calls into question the role of the Pope. According to the chronology published by the Society of Jesus on its website, in May 2020 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a decree punishing the Jesuit with excommunication for the crime of “absolution of an accomplice in a sin against the sixth commandment”, but it was suspended shortly afterwards the excommunication was lifted by an extraordinary act. It is not known why the artist's excommunication was lifted. The Pope is the only authority capable of doing this, while others suspect that Father Rupnik's ruling may have been challenged and later changed through other types of sanctions.
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