Center founded by accused abuser rejects calls to remove his artwork

ROME – Members of a Rome-based artistic center founded by former Jesuit Father Marko Rupnik, who is accused of abusing some 30 adult women, have voiced belief in his innocence and condemned calls to see his artwork removed.

Rupnik, 69, is among the Catholic Church’s most celebrated contemporary artists and muralists, with his works adorning famed chapels and cathedrals around the world, including the Marian shrine in Lourdes and the Vatican’s Redemptoris Mater chapel, sometimes dubbed the “Sistine Chapel” of the late St. John Paul II.

That chapel, situated inside the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, contains a giant mosaic installed by the Aletti Center, founded by Rupnik in 1999.

Currently under investigation by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), Rupnik is accused of sexually abusing at least 30 adult women, many of them nuns belonging to the Loyola Community he helped found in his native Slovenia in the 1980s.

Last summer he was expelled from his Jesuit order, the same order to which Pope Francis belongs, after Jesuit authorities found the allegations to be “highly credible,” and after Rupnik refused to collaborate with an internal inquiry.

For years the base of operations for Rupnik, who is now incardinated in the Slovenian diocese of Koper, was in Rome at the Aletti Center, where he lived, led retreats, and executed various commissions.

In the wake of the allegations, calls have been made from both abuse victims and advocates for Rupnik’s artwork to be taken down or, at the very least, covered up.

American Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, recently penned a letter to the prefects of Vatican departments asking that they exercise “pastoral prudence” in displaying Rupnik’s art, after the Vatican’s communications office came under fire for continuing to use Rupnik’s artwork on its website.

Nataša Govekar, a Slovenian who leads the department for Theology and Pastoral activity in the Vatican’s communications dicastery, is a member of the Aletti Center and is widely considered to be a close Rupnik ally.

In a recent letter addressed to “friends of the Aletti Center,” Maria Campatelli, an Italian lay theologian who is a key figure at the Centro Aletti and who has defended Rupnik against abuse charges, thanked supporters for standing by the center  “during nearly 20 months of this time of trial we are passing through.”

“It is thanks to your friendship that we manage to turn the other cheek and to overcome our distress, when even art becomes the object of attack and the will to destroy,” Campatelli said, referring to calls for Rupnik’s artwork, much of which was completed at the center with the help of fellow artists, to be taken down.

Campatelli noted that the investigation into the allegations against Rupnik has not yet been completed, and she recalled how Rupnik himself has consistently denied the allegations.

As the investigation continues, Campatelli said the Aletti Center has largely sought to “abstain from any public defense, limiting ourselves to duly presenting the information in our possession to the competent authorities.”

“We have acted thus out of respect for the accusers, for the investigation, and for the authoritative bodies responsible for them, avoiding participating in a mediatic trial,” she said.

However, given the mounting pressure to remove or cover up art created not only by Rupnik, but also by the Aletti Center, she said members felt obliged to express their concern over “the widespread diffusion of the so-called ‘cancel culture,’ and of a way of thinking that legitimizes the ‘criminalization’ of art.”

Campatelli reiterated the legal presumption of innocence, saying, “If we forget this, we arrive at the paradox of issuing a sentence without possibility of appeal before the judgment has been rendered, and asking for the sacrifice of a kind of scapegoat on behalf of victims, taken generically.”

In Rupnik’s case, she said, this means that “anyone who has suffered a wrong or an act of violence on the part of any church representative is legitimated in feeling offended” by the artwork created by the Aletti Center.

“Justice cannot be pursued by means of injustice. What does not have its origins in the good cannot bear good fruit,” she said, noting that the works produced by the Aletti Center do not bear just one signature, but many.

Each work, she said, is the product of the creativity of the dozens of artists and theologians who contribute to every project, “and who do so in cooperation from the first instance with the local ecclesial community that has desired this work of art.”

From beginning to end, the artwork is a collaboration intended to produce spiritual fruit, Campatelli said, saying, “Since each work has an ecclesial and communal genesis like this, it finds in the church its vital fulfillment.”

The removal of artwork, she said, “ought never to be thought of as a punishment or a cure. Nor can such a measure be imagined to be a kind of public punishment of one of the persons involved in a communal work.”

“While pastoral care for suffering persons is of course necessary, this cannot become a justification for the removal or covering of works of art, for doing so creates other sufferings,” such as the pain inflicted on the artists themselves, as well as believers who have drawn spiritual inspiration from the works.

Campatelli said members of the Aletti Center will remain “in silence and prayer also for those who accuse us,” and will seek to draw closer to God amid their current troubles.

“We continue to trust in the Lord and to entrust ourselves to his hands, believing that in all this the design of his providence is being carried out, and experiencing that the difficulties of the present moment have also been a way for us to become more aware of the communion that has been granted to us as a gift,” she said.

She closed her letter saying the sense of community that members of the Aletti Center feel is what sustains them and keeps them “free of resentment.”

“It is what feeds our hope that one day, we will also come to understand more clearly what the spirit has wanted to say through this story, for us and for the church,” she said.

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