Dead Eyes Wide Shut : What to do with Rupnik's Art? Destroy it all. It Sucks.
Which is the Rupnik?
I didn’t know his name until news that he was a predator broke, but I have always hated Marko Ivan Rupnik’s art. I never knew his name until news of his odious Dead Eyes Wide Shut Centro Aletti cult broke. I don’t doubt that Runik is a deft mosaics craftsman, but the drafting of human figures of the Slovenian (former) Jesuit (still) priest just sucks. It’s creepy, mawkish, derivative, and reflective the worst of Vatican II aesthetic sensibility. I have not seen all of it, obviously, but once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen enough of it, and Rupnik’s cartoonish, bug-eyed, lacrymose Jesuses and Maries with big flat hockey puck eyes are unimaginatively conceived by a sexual offending man-baby who dined out on S.J. vatican insider credentials and provided ideal fodder to to those Medieval fetishist trads who mock Vatican II design and exploit the obvious problem with Vatican II art. When I nosed around about Rupnik, I found myself almost as interested in his artistic derangement as in his sexual abuse profile and the clear connection between the two. How does a person spend four years in art school in Rome and emerge with so much impulse to draft figures with such perfect and invariable lack of dimension?
I have friends who study iconography and produce exquisite religious work. Art schools today all over the world are filled with contemporary artists working on paintings of Mary and Christ. How did this creep gain such foothold — and generate so much funding for his projects? When it comes to church art I tend to rest with a “chacon son gouts” analysis. I like high Renaissance religious art but I also adore folk art and and Our Lady shrines and such. And I’m a Catholic radical. I loved Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and Chris Offill’s Holy Mother Virgin. When I look at a Rupnik’s work I don’t see modern or contemporary art. I see self-portrait after self-portrait of a sad shady man-baby with a Napoleon complex. And look at the Centro Aletti website a shrine to the alter christus sex offender ipse. Have a peek at the smug team of holy art appreciators at the center surrounded on all sides by epic Rupniks. Notice the A weird flatness, a pervy patina over the whole operation. Think any of them weren’t holding Rupnik’s … omertà for him? From where did all that money come? Don’t Jesuits take vows or poverty? Isn’t being paid in tons of Narcissistic feed a violation of that vow? It should be. Recently someone asked me what should happen to Rupnik’s art? Really? Really? For me the answer is easy. Why was it there in the first place? Tear it all down. Rip it out. It sucks.
Novice portrait painters learn to paint the face by painting their own faces. It is not all that unusual for visual artists to incorporate themselves, whether intentionally or not, into their work. How often have patrons been turned into saints in Renaissance paintings? Are the dimensionless, over-sized dead eyes Rupnik’s own eyes? Yes!
This former painter and Metropolitan Museum of Art staffer —me — can’t begin to fathom why a church that owns so much fine art would ever have thought it worthwhile to commission or use anything by Ivan Marko Rupnik. How and why did Rupnik score so much opportunity? Is this explained by the failure of contemporary artists to take substantive interest in Catholic art? The fast-shrinking myth of the prestige and intellectual superiority of the Jesuit order?
Bad taste is not a crime, and Rupnik has been a VIP in the Vatican/Jesuit circles for a long time. Lots of men at the top of this hierarchy — The Rev. Arturo Sosa, the Jesuit Superior General, for example, has been holding the omertà relative to Rupnik for at least two years, and likely for much longer. The official investigation of the Jesuit predator began in 2019. He was automatically excommunicated in 2020 when he used the Sacrament of Reconciliation and his magical forgiveness powers to absolve one of his sex partners or, more probably, a victim. This particular sin of using the confessional to clean up his sin was seen by Rupnik’s brother Jesuits as the worst crime of all, more grave than torturing and sexually violating women.
In her brilliant bestselling book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, author Claire Dederer takes a good look at what she calls “art monsters,” and responds to the question: “What to do with the art?” In the chapter about Michael Jackson, Dederer writes about “the stain”:
When someone says we ought to separate the art from artist, they’re saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that’s not how stains work… “I Want You Back” sounds as good as it ever did.
Putting the Dederer’s stain analysis on clergy rape makes sense. The stain metaphor encapsulates the tension between how clergy abuse victims experience the stain and how clergy abusers count on the mighty abracadabric stain-removing powers of absolution. Survivors and victims bear the stain the perps and their accomplices and protectors absolve. stain.
Rupnik’s shitty art is itself a stain. His sad dog-eyed faces a reminder to the women he violated of the violations, a reminder of the Jesuit order’s readiness to hide him, and it a reminder of how well-tolerated misogyny and acting on it are in the clerical hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.
So what did Rupnik do?
What follows is excerpted from an interview given by “Anna,” one of Rupnik’s alleged victims, who spoke to the Catholic online publication The Pillar. appeared on December 19, 2023.
I strongly recommend reading The Pillar’s coverage of this matter.
You have to understand how Ignatian discernment works: you are called to total availability and openness, and it is your spiritual father who guides you in understanding what is good and what is evil.
If the one who guides you says God wants it and you do not obey, you are setting yourself against God. That is precisely where manipulation can creep in, as it did with Father Rupnik…
There Father Marko asked me to have threesomes with another sister of the community, because sexuality had to be, in his opinion, free from possession, in the image of the Trinity where, he said, “the third person would welcome the relationship between the two.” On those occasions, he would ask me to live out my femininity in an aggressive and dominant way, and since I could not do so, he would deeply humiliate me with phrases that I cannot repeat…
In 1992, while I was in my fourth year of philosophy at the Gregorian, he also took me twice to see pornographic films in Rome on Via Tuscolana and near Termini station…
Did Rupnik only abuse you or also other women?
At that time, Father Marko had openly started to duress other sisters in the community with the usual psycho-spiritual strategies he had already used with me, with the goal of having sex with as many women as possible.
At the beginning of the 1990s there were 41 sisters and, from what I know, Father Rupnik managed to abuse almost 20. Sometimes at great cost: one of them, in an attempt to resist, fell and broke her arm. He was brazen and talked openly about his tactics to “soften up” those who resisted him.
Rupnik obtained lots of license to make use of women from his church. His church has low regard for women, and its practices and teaching often fetishize women’s suffering. Forcing a woman to suffer can magnify and cleanse a woman. Those who suffer are close to Christ. Rupnik waned to see that dolorous hangdog sorrow and big-eyed submission in the faces of figures in his “art”— and on the women he tortured. One could well argue it was a “turn-on” for him.
“Anna'“ sought a meeting with the Rupnik’s “spiritual advisor, Father Tomáš Špidlík.”
I reached him at the shrine near Livorno where he was staying during the summer and asked him to hear my confession.
I then started to tell [Špidlík] about the abuse, and he stopped me, saying that those were my things and that he did not want to listen to me. I was upset; for a priest to refuse confession is a grave sin.
Misogyny so deep that they often don’t give it any thought. John Paul II made Špidlík a cardinal in 2003. Among priests holding the omertà is to some degree automatic. It is a norm:
In September 1993, I therefore returned to Mengeš with Ivanka as a provisional councilor pending internal elections, scheduled for Easter of the following year. The climate of hostility towards me was palpable, but I remember that a sister, whom I still knew nothing about, came in tears to confide in me that Father Marko had abused her, too. No one, however, dared speak openly, and we lived in an atmosphere of omertà…
Is it possible that the Jesuits did not know about the accusations?
No, it is not possible.
The Church and the Jesuit order knew about the facts since 1994, when I personally brought my request for a dispensation of vows to the Archbishop of Ljubljana, in which I denounced Father Rupnik’s abuse. The archbishop on that occasion only told me that the Society of Jesus had severely sanctioned him, which was not very credible given that the work of the Aletti Centre was being established and consolidated in those years.
If “Anna” is telling the truth, Rupnik fans were throwing a fortune at the building of an elaborate art center worship space in Rome devoted to Rupnik and God as his Jesuit order and Anna’s confessor prelate all held the silence.
Rupnik’s sexual assaults and the Vatican’s continued determination to preserve all-male priesthood are related. The lack of embarrassment on the parts of Catholics who would otherwise be horrified to think of themselves as bigots exhibit when they speak of all-male priesthood is an outward sign of how deep the misogyny runs. The natural ends of most bigotry based on race, creed, gender, and sexual orientation are domination and abomination. Most men who hate women don’t go all the way there. But some do. Rupnik is one such man.
The idea that sex as intrinsically sinful no matter who has it runs deep in Catholic teaching, as is the concept of women as sources of sexual sin. Sex is a necessary evil. Sex inside sacramental marriage is not technically sinful bit it is potential to procreate which elevates it. A de facto “Madonna whore” ethos is still alive and well in the Roman Catholic institutional church and culture. “Better to marry than to burn.” (1 Corinthians 7). This is a religion that had to turn Mary of Magdala into a whore in order to keep her. The Roman Catholic vision of Mary the mother Jesus requires that she not bear “the stain” of sex. The institutional Roman Catholic Church leadership today is caught in a bind between the driving thirst to increase the fold and managing the “necessary evil” that is womankind. But some of our best friends are women! Women in the institutional Catholic view of things — are for service.
One prevalent feature, by the way, of strident forced birther clerics on social media is the Mommy issue feature. One knows them by their brandishing of radiant camera- ready blushing Maries holding newborn infant Jesuses. All women who give birth, as they see it, glow, because motherhood itself is idealized. But grown men with healthy psyches do not look at becoming mothers that way.
Rupnik’s brother Jesuits and other priests, all the way to the top, probably, unfortunately, covered up for him to protect the institution. This is the rationale embraced by accessories and accomplices to the wide-scale, world-wide multi-generational clergy child rape crisis that is ongoing today. It follows that one who believes the Mother Church must always to be protected from scandal, and that women are sources of sin — and therefore less valuable — should confess or absolve “the sins” in the interest of safeguarding Mother Church.
Rupnik’s direct ties to the Vatican insulated him. Aletti Center was a theology and art center that enjoyed the favor and support of Pope Benedict XVI. Runik was an artist/ Even in ecclesiological context, the myth of artists as concupiscent rule-breaking libertines may have applied in the excusing of Rupnik’s misconduct. The warped developmentally sexually arrested character of a majority of priests may explain the desire to keep Rupnik’s secret. Many men are young, gay and closeted, or in crisis when they enter seminaries. Many young men enter seminaries because they are young, Catholic and gay! Men whose sexual growth stops at the age of 16 or 20 comprise much of the Roman Catholic priesthood all over the globe are too sexually unsophisticated to understand how “the stain” of sexual assault can permeate a victim’s life.
It became clear in the McCarrick Report, that Pope Francis made a distinction in his own thinking about abuse between the rape of minors and the sexual abuse of people old enough to offer consent. In other words, he likely knew about McCarrick’s musical beds at the Jersey beach house via which a seminarian got stuck in a bed with him, or maybe he heard about the night in the Waldorff when McCarrick was observed groping the crotch of one (of his seminarians). However unconscious it is in its operations, the valorization of suffering and by humility and by extension, humiliation, figures in. The sexual assault is unfortunate but clerics must be preserved at almost any cost. Seminarians earn their reward for forbearance when they are admitted into the ontologically special hocus pocus hands-of-a-priest club. Women are just women. Children are not full people and grow out of it.
Roman Catholicism still enshrines a tradition of self-mortification. The “pope saint” John Paul II himself was a self-flaggellator. As in the world beyond the Roman Catholic Church, rape is nothing new, but to what degree was this violent tradition of mortification, abuse, humiliation, submission reshaped to provide disordered men who vow to live without healthy adult sexual relationships accomplices and accessories to child rape, willing to both facilitate and hide it for the greater good of Mother Church?
Any analysis of the malfeasance perpetrated by the institutional Roman Catholic Church must always take into account that for the men in charge, the Roman Catholic Church is both earthly/temporal and heavenly / eternal. To many of them, terrestrial malfeasance doesn’t fully count. In the view of many Catholics, priests and others, because this misconduct can be absolved, it is neither an impediment to salvation. Sacrifice and martyrdom. Under this rubric, the duplicity of Rupnik’s superiors and brother Jesuits makes sense. In protecting Rupnik, they safeguarded the reputation of the church and made holy martyrs of the women he assaulted. Win win.
It appears that the Vatican and likely Rupnik’s Superior General have known he was torturing women religious since the 1990s, and that some kind of temporary excommunication was imposed, lifted then re-imposed when Rupnik did the unthinkable — He used the sacrament of reconciliation to absolve a woman whe had sexually abused or with whom he’d had sex . The only person who can lift an excommunication is the pope. It’s clear at this point, that Pope Francis likely knew about Rupnik. In September of this year, long after the news about Rupnik broke, Pope Francis met with Rupnik apologist and Aletti Center head Maria Campatelli, after she threw Rupnik’s victims under the bus, claiming that the claims against hm were “defamatory” and amounted to a form of “lynching.”
While Rupnik’s crimes against the women were not evidently serious enough to lead to his brother Jesuits, possibly all the way up the chain to the current pope, to interfere with his rapey “Dead Eyes Wide Shut” cult, Rupnik crossed a the Holy Roman Rubicon when he used a sacrament to manage his sexual assault problem. (Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, S.J. (Jesuit) who heads up the Dicastery of the Doctrine of Faith (DDF) and who has presided over the Rupnik case, ditched the synod, possibly because he is implicated.) Some kind of excommunication was imposed or happened automatically and was later lifted. The Jesuits ejected Rupnik from the order because Rupnik failed to obey, not because he assaulted women. His order wanted him to enter into a reconciliation process with his alleged victims and Rupnik refused. It is also critical to bear in mind that Rupnik was excommunicated, whether automatically or not, for using the confession to mop of his mess, someone failed to be held accountable and his excommunication was “lifted” anyway, by one Jesuit priest or another. Was it the Superior General of the Jesuits or the pope?
The synod itself is, of course, eclipsing the Rupnik case. One development over which synod frisson has thrown a veil is Pope Francis’s appointment of a new DDF prefect who admits to keeping rapist clergy in place. Appointing an admitted clergy child rape accessory with a cute nickname (“Tucho”) to lead the vatican office which presides over clergy rape cases should be an enormous news story. But the truly stunning news, which has been under the noses of all Catholics who follow church developments at all, is that the clergy rape crisis and cover-up so deeply permeate the Roman Catholic hierarchy that Pope Francis may literally have no choice but to appoint a bishop to this post who has not kept a predator in ministry. In other words, there are no clean bishops to appoint to this post. Keeping predators in ministry was until twenty years ago their norm. Having kept predators supplied with victims is not disqualifying.
Over the past three years Catholic media has chased Synod when they ought to have been chasing other news. Papal fandom reporters are more culpable in this than the trads and conservative Catholics. The Eucharistic Revival Shakedown will do the same. Synod news forestalled of the coverage of the Rupnik matter.
The fish — as I have been insisting regularly, via my three or four Indie Theology iterations over the past 15 years — rots from the head.
MMS
Sept 26, 2023 — Revised October 22, 2023
Cambridge, MA