A Vatican official noted that the case of Father Marko Rupnik, expelled from the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) for disobedience and accused since 2018 of abusing more than 20 women in the congregation he co-founded, is “delicate” but is in a advanced phase.
This was indicated by the secretary of the disciplinary section of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican, Mons. John Joseph Kennedy, about the well-known Slovenian priest and artist, according to reports Europa Press.
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“It is a really delicate case and we are working on it, we started well and we are really continuing step by step, keeping all the aspects in mind, because there is the aspect of the accusations against him, there is the aspect of the victims, there is the aspect of the impact on the Church, so it is delicate,” the priest explained in statements to the press on May 30, within the framework of a conference on the prevention of sexual abuse, held at the Italian embassy to the Holy See.
Eight months have passed since in September 2023, Pope Francis lifted the prescription of the case and ordered the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to initiate a new process against Rupnik, since the previous one had already been closed.
Recently, the Uruguayan Jesuit priest Julio Fernández Techera published a document in which he assures that the Society of Jesus is in “profound decline” and criticizes its handling of what he called the Tsunami Rupnik.
The priest regretted that the members of the Society of Jesus were informed of the accusations against Rupnik only in December 2022 and that there was no clear communication, especially “in the face of the serious accusations made by the media about the actions of the General Curia in the last thirty years, in relation to Father Rupnik.”
According to a chronology of the Society of Jesus, The first accusations against Rupnik were in relation to the acquittal of an accomplice for a sin against the sixth commandment in October 2018.
In June 2019, the Jesuits imposed the first restrictions on the priest, although they did not specify which ones. In December 2022, he was prohibited from confessing, spiritual direction, and performing spiritual exercises, as well as participating in public activities without the permission of his local superior.
After being expelled from the Jesuits, Rupnik was accepted in October 2023 by a diocese in Slovenia to continue exercising his priestly ministry.
Father Marko Rupnik continues to appear as a Jesuit and Vatican consultant in the 2024 Pontifical Yearbook.
Walter Sánchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.