As John Paul II reminds us in his 1999 Letter to Artists — written as Fr. Rupnik was completing the Pope’s private Redemptoris Mater Chapel — “in shaping a masterpiece, the artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it”

By Christina Deardurff

Slovenian ex-Jesuit artist Marko Rupnik in front of one of his typical mosaics.

Irish Bishop John Joseph Kennedy commented to reporters, while attending an Italian meeting on the “Fr. Marko Rupnik abuse crisis” on May 29, that the canonical inquiry into famed, now disgraced, Slovenian ex-Jesuit artist Marko Rupnik, 69, is nearing completion.

“It’s a delicate case, really, and we are working on it,” he told Catholic news outlet Crux, saying “we started well, and we are really continuing step after step, keeping all aspects in mind, because there is the aspect of the allegations against him, there is the aspect of the victims, there is the aspect of the impact on the Church, so it’s delicate.”

Fr. Rupnik was once a favorite of his fellow Jesuit, Pope Francis.

The Vatican initially declined in 2022 to proceed with an investigation into abuse allegations, due, it said, to the expiration of its statute of limitations. However, in 2023 the Vatican reversed itself by waiving the time limit and beginning a formal inquiry into the sometimes grotesque sexual abuse accusations of what now amounts to two dozen women religious over a 40-year timespan.

Fr. Rupnik was dismissed from the Jesuit order in June 2023 for “stubborn refusal to observe the vow of obedience” in connection with the order’s demand that Rupnik make restitution to his victims. As late as August 2023, however, he was incardinated in a diocese in his native Slovenia.

Whatever the final outcome of the Vatican’s inquiry, however, the fact remains that the works of art of Fr. Marko Rupnik, primarily mosaics located in churches around the world, remain before the public eye, and many wonder what the Church is going to do about it — if anything.

Rupnik’s style is distinctive and well-known: it favors black-eyed figures depicted in a manner reminiscent of Byzantine art. And Rupnik’s work has been a staple of post-Vatican II Catholic churches and shrines — as well as gracing the covers of countless Church publications and graphics for events like the “official image” of the 2022 World Meeting of Families and the logo for the 2016 Year of Mercy — for more than 30 years.

Now people are taking another look at Fr. Rupnik’s art, and do not like what they find. Many are calling for the removal of his artwork (the website of his studio, Centro Aletti, shows photos of more than 200 locations).

There seem to be two main reasons contributing to this call: 1) that “art is the artist’s signature, and his signature implies his presence” (blogger Fr. Dwight Longenecker); and 2) that “Rupnik’s work isn’t just bad art, but a deliberate subversive parody and mockery of Byzantine art and of its spiritual purpose and nature” (artist and art historian Hilary White). Regarding the first claim, the Bishop of Lourdes, John-Marc Micas, said in a press release March 31 that “Lourdes is a place where many victims turn to the Immaculate Conception for comfort and healing. Their anguish is great before the mosaics of Father Rupnik in this very place: We cannot ignore it.” Rupnik mosaics were installed in the sanctuary at the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in 2008, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Marian apparitions there in 1858.

Rupnik’s mosaics in the John Paul II Shrine in Washington, originally sponsored by the Knights of Columbus. The Cardinal O’Boyle Council 11302 passed a resolution on April 9 calling on Knights leadership to remove Rupnik’s 2015 artwork from the shrine’s Redemptor Hominis Church and the Luminous Mysteries Chapel (photo: Lawrence, OP, via Flickr)

David Torchala, director of communications at the Lourdes Sanctuary, explained in a March interview, “At first, we might have thought that we had to distinguish between the man and the work, but now, after digging deeper, we realize that we cannot leave it at that,” he said.

An April 15 editorial in the National Catholic Register elaborated on the point: “His distinctive mosaics were commissioned for a purpose: to lift minds and hearts toward God. They are no longer capable (if they ever were) of achieving that purpose. Those long faces, those black eyes — they send our minds and hearts elsewhere now, causing scandal. Whatever beauty and religiosity they once possessed is lost; the allegations against Father Rupnik are too numerous and too dark.”

The second reason for removing Rupnik’s art from public view is more complex and more revealing of the fault lines beneath the whole edifice of the post-Vatican II “modernized” Church: its subversive abandonment of beauty and order, leading, at last, to an abandonment of faith.

As Hilary White describes Rupnik’s art on her Substack blog, World of Hilarity, “What characterizes it? In a single word? Childishness. It’s deliberately intended to look ‘primitive’… This comported well with the social fad at the end of the 1960s to reject previous standards of behavior and adopt a child-like, ‘groovy,’ care-free approach to life, including religion. Rules, in art and religion, are for squares, man.”

Specifically, for example, the empty black discs characteristic of almost all Rupnik’s figures’ eyes foil the attempt to communicate the spiritual through art: “Antonis [Kosmadakis, contemporary Byzantine iconographer] says the ‘eyes are of course the alpha and the omega of iconography.’ The one rule: ‘get the eyes right,’ can be extended to all figure and portrait painting. Human beings from infancy learn to judge the disposition of the other person by the eyes. We look at a face and we see the eyes most of all.

“Here’s the serious artistic reason why the eyes in Rupnik’s work are wrong, and most decidedly not in keeping with either the eastern or western traditions of sacred art: they’re expressionless. The blank Rupnik stare is the expression of a lifeless doll.”

Black, lifeless eyes: Rupnik mosaic of the Madonna and Child, Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord, Petrinja, Croatia

Monsignor Nicola Bux, in an interview last year in the Italian Quotidiana Bussola, identified the adoption of “modern art” in general, and Fr. Rupnik’s “no rules” modernist take on Byzantine art in particular, with the general post-Vatican II loss of faith: “The situation of sacred art has contributed to secularization and the loss of faith. And Rupnik stepped into this void. The commissioning bishops should ask themselves whether the faithful, faced with Rupnik’s art, are led to prayer or rather to dancing around the golden calf, which is ourselves.”

A partial list of Marko Rupnik’s major mosaics

Spiritual exercises for the Curia by Cardinal Ravasi in the chapel Redemptoris Mater Chapel in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. The mosaics are by Rupnik

  • Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C.
  • Blessed Sacrament chapel in the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid, Spain
  • Facade of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary at Lourdes, France
  • Holy Family Chapel, Knights of Columbus headquarters, New Haven, Connecticut
  • Church of Saint Peter and Paul in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
  • Redemptoris Mater Chapel in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace
  • The Sanctuary of Holy Trinity Basilica in Fátima, Portugal
  • Sanctuary of Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina shrine

Justice delayed?

Critics of Pope Francis have wondered aloud why Fr. Rupnik’s reckoning has been so long in coming. One answer is that Pope Francis does not easily forget his friends.

As journalist Damian Thompson observed in an April 2024 post on the website Unherd.com, “Last year, facing an explosion of rage on Catholic social media — mainstream media were strangely silent — Pope Francis said he would act against his friend Rupnik. He hasn’t done so. Nor has he explained why, when Rupnik was facing excommunication for abusing the confessional to ‘absolve’ one of his female sexual victims, he was invited to conduct a retreat at the Vatican, or why his subsequent excommunication was mysteriously lifted within weeks with the approval of the Pope.

“This month Fr. Rupnik was listed in the 2024 Vatican directory as a consultant on Divine Worship, of all things. Meanwhile Bishop Daniele Libanori, the Jesuit who investigated the women’s claims and found them credible, has been removed from his position as an auxiliary bishop in the diocese of Rome.”

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