Famous ex-Jesuit artist faces abuse trial at Vatican

The Vatican took the unusual step Monday of announcing that it had named judges to decide the fate of a famous former Jesuit artist whose mosaics decorate basilicas around the world and who was accused by more than two dozen women of sexual, spiritual and psychological abuse.

- BY NICOLE WINFIELD

The case of the Rev. Marko Ivan Rupnik badly tarnished the legacy of Pope Francis, given suggestions that the Jesuit pope, the Jesuit religious order and the Jesuit-headed Vatican sex abuse office protected one of their own over decades by dismissing allegations of misconduct against him.

The Vatican office that manages clergy sex abuse cases, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the five judges named to hear the Rupnik case in a canonical court include women and priests who don't hold jobs in the Vatican bureaucracy.

It said such a composition was “done in order to better guarantee, as in any judicial process, the autonomy and independence of the aforementioned court.”

The statement suggested an implicit recognition that before now, the Vatican's handling of the Rupnik file had been anything but autonomous or independent.

A famous artist

Rupnik’s mosaics grace some of the Catholic Church’s most-visited shrines and sanctuaries around the world, including at the shrine in Lourdes, France; in the Vatican; at a new basilica in Aparecida, Brazil, and in the chapel of Pope Leo XIV’s own Augustinian religious order in Rome.

The Rupnik scandal first exploded publicly in late 2022 when Italian blogs started reporting the claims of nuns and other women who said they had been sexually, spiritually and psychologically abused by him, including during the production of his artwork.

Rupnik’s Jesuit religious order soon admitted that he had been excommunicated briefly in 2020 for having committed one of the Catholic Church’s most serious crimes: using the confessional to absolve a woman with whom he had engaged in sex. But he continued working and preaching.