Marko Rupnik and the Jesuits. (Not a Rock Band)

Guest post by Bell 

Paul Gauguin, in his Polynesian phase, took three local teenage girls – the eldest of whom was only fourteen -- as lovers, and managed to infect them all with syphilis. Pablo Picasso was a monster who famously said that women are either goddesses or doormats. Of the many doormats he wiped his feet on, two committed suicide and two suffered nervous breakdowns. Caravaggio was a flat-out killer who had to clear out of the Papal States when he was put under a bando capitale, which allowed anyone to lawfully – and quite literally – take his head. Back then, popes judged these things...well, let us say, a little more “rigidly”. There’s something about artists which makes thedangerous, and the greater the artist, the more dangerous they seem to be.

Is Marko Rupnik a great artist? Maybe. I can see the style and control in his work, but to me, that work is cold, sterile and not a little disturbing, and not in a good way; it’s disturbing because it comes from the hand of a Catholic priest, and his eye sees things that should not be visible to the well formed conscience. Be that as it may, it is an artist’s eye, and that which can see beauty and delicacy can just as easily detect weakness and vulnerability, and if the conscience is not well formed, what you get is a predator.

Sister Anna (not her real name) is quoted extensively by Jules Gomes, Rome correspondent of the US based Catholic internet outfit Church Militant, in an article dated December 19th on that body’s website. He is quoting from an interview she gave to the Italian newspaper Domani in which she describes the abusive influence the charismatic Jesuit had over a young nun (21 years old at the time of first abuse in 1985). Anna told of how he, Rupnik, kissed her on the mouth, claiming that this was how he kissed the altar and it was thus an expression of God’s love, took her to porn cinemas and continued the grooming and abuse over a number of years. The original Domani article is behind a paywall and is in Italian, so I’m relying on Gomes’ translation. Gomes has now come forward with the testimony of another nun, whom he refers to as Esther (also a pseudonym). Esther confirmed Anna’s claim that Rubnik was running a sexual take on the Trinity with two of the nuns. She has also witnessed the devastation of the community, attesting that several of the nuns have become drug abusers on foot of Rupbik’s malign influence. Gomes’ articles are available on the Church Militant website for those who desire more detail.

Not everybody is a fan of Church Militant, of course, and it’s without question that the emphasis is very much on the “Militant” aspect. Its founder, Michael Voris, is particularly aggressive in his crusade against modernism within the Catholic Church, and for this reason, it might be argued that Gomes’ investigation has an agenda. Maybe, but there’s a point here which need to be addressed: despite the whole “listening” and “synodal” image the Vatican is putting forth under Francis, when it suits Rome, it reverts to the imperial papacy of pre-Vatican II and becomes a black hole of information, with nothing escaping, not even light. In fact, especially not light. The question is, when does it suit?

Right now, it seems to suit where the Jesuits are involved, and this is where it gets really murky. EWTN is a much more centrist organisation than Church Militant, and it’s timeline on this scandal reveals some uncomfortable aspects. Rupnik had been dodging a bullet for a quarter of a century before the Jesuits finally caught up to him, finding him guilty in 2020 of absolving in confession one of the nuns with whom he had been fornicating. For the benefit of non-Catholics, this is similar to a crooked governor of an American state pardoning one of his cronies after ripping off the state treasury and splitting the loot. It’s an absolute no-no and draws an automatic excommunication.

Yet in March of that year, Rupnik was to be found preaching the Lenten homilies in the Vatican, standing in temporarily for Fr Raniero Cantalemessa, the preacher to the papal household. To quote EWTN’s rather subdued comment on this, “It remains unclear if this happened before or after the conviction”.

Something else that remains unclear is who exactly lifted the excommunication. Catholic blogger Anthony Stine has claimed that Francis did it himself, within hours of its imposition and on receipt of a phone call from Rupnik. I’m uncertain where he got this. Possibly from the Italian site, Messa in Latino, which reported something similar according to CM. I’m unable to confirm the veracity of the story, but whether it’s true or not – and I have my doubts; yes, Francis is a Jesuit, but that sounds really Jesuit – the fact that it could go abroad and gain any traction at all shows the standing of Rome in the eyes of too many Catholics today. The question could easily be answered with a press release from the Vatican, but so far, none has been forthcoming. One would, however, be most welcome, since Rupnik’s excommunication under Canon 977 (the relevant canon here) can only be lifted by “The Apostolic See”. That means Rome, but does it mean Francis himself?

What is even more disturbing to Catholics is that all of this is swilling out in contradistinction to the way in which Fr Frank Pavone has been treated by the Church. Without doubt, Fr Pavone was a difficult man for a bishop to keep a lead on, but his militancy was at least in the service of a cause supposedly close to the Church’s heart, opposition to abortion. Laicisation for what he is alleged to have done would be considered excessive, to say the least. The charges were disobedience to the bishop and blasphemy. The first recourse for disobedience is suspension, not laicisation, and the alleged blasphemy was a tweet where Fr Pavone used the term “Goddam him”. Not nice language to be sure, especially coming from a priest, but his repentance and receipt of confession for this didn’t seem to have the same effect in his – far less serious – case as the presumed repentance of Marko Rupnik did for him. Pavone is out the door faster than Kanye West’s career, but Rupnik is hanging round the papal kitchen with his hand out for the scraps.

All of which leads Catholics to wonder, what’s occurring here? Free pass for a rampant Jesuit, new job opportunities for a loyal, if somewhat volatile priest. Go figure. And what many of us are figuring is that, were he around today, Ignatius Loyola would not be happy.

In 2017, Dan Hitchens wrote a column for the American religious site, First Things, in which he did a quick pen sketch of the renowned/infamous (delete as appropriate) Jesuit, Fr James Martin. Martin’s views on the issue of homosexuality are well known and are not really the point of this essay. What is important, however, is the way that Martin presents those views. Essentially, he does not overtly deny any doctrine or tenet of the Church, but he’s not what you’d call a noted traditionalist, either. He goes right up to the border of Church dogma, then stares wistfully out into what we might call the badlands beyond. It’s not exactly an invitation to strike out into the desert, but neither is he clicking his heels together three times and chanting “no place like home”. There’s been a lot of that since Vatican II. And unfortunately, an awful lot from the Jesuits.

Founded by Loyola as a kind of spiritual army (He’d been a soldier before becoming a priest) to battle the Protestant revolt, their weapon of choice was always the intellect, the nemesis of our estranged brethren’s doctrine of salvation by faith alone, and they were very, very good at it, reclaiming vast tracts of Europe for the Faith, and extending it on out to Asia, Africa and the Americas. The Jesuit identification of that key weakness of Protestantism, however (faith alone), served to obscure the Achilles heel of the order itself: you still needed faith; intellect alone won’t do it either. Today the Jesuits are the biggest single order within the Church – although their lead is narrowing – and I don’t for a second mean to suggest that every member lacks faith. What I am suggesting, however, is that the more devotion an individual Jesuit is seen to show to the Faith as it was handed down from the Apostles, the less likely he is to rise in either the order itself or the Church in general. To an extent, this is a problem not unique to the Jesuits. The Church has always marked out certain men for advancement from as early as the seminary, but the Jesuits are on steroids. An autonomous order, they’re hugely influential through their educational establishments, they have  massive cachet as the “Guards Battalion” of Catholicism and, if I’m reading it right, they’ve lost their balance between faith and intellect, and when that happens, you can justify anything, including calling a three-way sexual encounter a reflection of the Trinity.

Put this all together and you start to understand how Marko Rupnik stayed ahead of the posse for so long. The posse wasn’t really trying, at least not in Rupnik’s case. On the other hand, Pavone was binned without possibility of appeal. As the reader will know, the Catholic Church is the last absolute monarchy on Earth (although I prefer to think of it as a viceroyalty), so if there is no possibility of appeal, then the laicisation must have come from Francis himself. Logic admits no other possibility. Perhaps Pavone should have become a Jesuit. The job does seem to come with perks. I don’t know how it came to this pass, but I can venture as to the when, and the name Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is often mentioned in this context. Teilhard was a philosopher, theologian, palaeontologist and, of course, a member of the order. His body of work, both religious and scientific, is far too extensive and detailed to go into, but he is chiefly associated with the Omega Point concept. What is controversial about this idea is that it seems to imply that God is evolving. What is important for our purposes is that if he is implying it, then it’s flat-out heresy. There’s really no way around it. One of the defining characteristics of God is, of course, His immutability. As it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be. God doesn’t change. We are, of course, all free to believe as we see fit, but the Catholic Church has been defining and refining its beliefs for 2000 years. We’ve got them polished up like the Koh-i-Noor, and there really isn’t any doubt about what we stand for. The Jesuits themselves were instrumental in this, and yet, by the time of Teilhard, an open heresy was no longer enough to get you thrown out of the order. Something happened about this time, and it’s not entirely clear what. Whatever it was, it was fomenting below the waterline of the Church until it burst out at Vatican II, a council which,by the way, changed nothing of Church doctrine.

It did, however, change attitudes, and allowed the Teilhard types out into the sunlight. The late Pope Benedict, identified with the reformers at the time of Vatican II, saw this within a few years of the close of the Council, lamenting, “they changed wine into water and called it ‘aggiornamento’ (reform)”. His career thereafter can reasonably be described as getting the poop back into the horse, a thankless and doomed enterprise, or at least one impossible in a single lifetime. But that is what separates faith from intellect. The man of faith tries anyway, and hopes for God’s forgiveness if he fails; the man of intellect does not see beyond his own single lifetime, which is why “reform” is so vitally important to him – as it will be to his successor. Sub specie aeternitatis isn’t really a thing with him. And in all of this, the order has been front and centre, at least since the time of Teilhard. Can an entity lose its faith? Think back to all the companies you’ve worked for in your life. Did they have a corporate identity? Were the people you worked with sometimes more liberal and permissive in their personal attitudes than the company was in its business dealings, or vice versa? Did you find that those who got promotion or advancement were usually the ones who were personally more reflective of the company’s ethos? Entities can have persona, separate from the people who fill its rank and file, the Jesuits as much as anybody.

But the order is not the Magisterium. It is not protected from error, and yes, it can lose its faith, at least at the corporate level, and I don’t see how anything else can account for the career of Marko Rupnik, and it’s influence is increasingly pernicious. As goes the Church, so goes the world. We watch as tight coteries of people who speak only to each other, who are influence only by the opinions of their fellows, and who just know better than the rest of us proceed by osmosis up through the bodies of whatever institution they enter, heedless of its history or purpose, blind to the desires of its founder, concerned only with “the current year” and obsessed with “reform”. In the Church, they are identified by, at best, a raging concern for “the poor”, but a concern marked by the utter inability to understand that the theological virtue of charity defines concern for others as incidental to the love of God; we love our neighbour for the sake of God, not for his own sake. Ultimately, I think that’s what the Jesuits have forgotten, and without God as their focus, and with those tremendous intellects to propel them, the likes of Rupnik.

Dodo the Dude: You'll find all of Jules Gomes' articles here.