Under the surface: What’s next now Rupnik’s art is offline?

Three other decisions remain on the pope’s desk which will weigh heavier on his mind.

Pillar subscribers can listen to this analysis here: The Pillar TL;DR

The Dicastery for Communications removed from Vatican websites artwork by the disgraced former Jesuit Fr. Marko Rupnik over the weekend.

Vatican media website prior to change, June 7, 2025.

The decision, which has not been officially acknowledged or explained by the dicastery, came as social media users highlighted again how works by the accused serial sexual abuser were displayed on the Vatican’s official website to illustrate upcoming feasts, like Monday’s memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church.

The cycle of outrage over the continued use of Rupnik’s work by official Vatican media had become a regular event, following the disclosure of the extent of allegations against the artist in 2022 — including that he sexually abused women religious as part of his creative process.

The Vatican’s continued use of the images was repeatedly cited by survivors of abuse and their advocates as a harmful and provocative act by the Church, though the communications dicastery’s own prefect explicitly dismissed the criticism and defended the practice last year.

The apparent policy reversal has already been hailed by Vatican watchers as a notable shift in policy following the election of Pope Leo XIV two months ago.

But while the removal of Rupnik’s art has made headlines and been hailed as a welcome shift in Vatican policy, it is literally a superficial change — albeit a highly visible one welcomed by survivors and their advocates.

As the Leonine pontificate continues to unfold, three other decisions remain on the pope’s desk which will weigh heavier on the pope’s mind, and ultimately the Church’s ongoing approach to clerical sexual abuse.

—

The insistence on using Rupnik’s artwork on the Vatican website had become, it can hardly be denied, an ongoing counter-sign to the reforms carried out during the Francis pontificate.

Defenders of the images, like Ruffini, variously insisted that the art could and should be separated from the personal failures of the artist and that it would be “premature” to remove them, or even call for their removal, while a canonical process against Rupnik was underway.

Neither of those defences held water either with survivors’ advocates or impartial observers — if there can be said to be such people on the issue of sexual abuse.

As his alleged victims have explained in stomach-churning detail, Rupnik was (allegedly) in the habit of incorporating violent, sadistic, blasphemous sexual abuse into the process he used to create his art, so the separation of art and artist is virtually impossible in his case.

More to the point, as was noted at the time of Ruffini’s remarks last year, while Rupnik is an alleged serial sexual abuser entitled to due process, he is also already a convicted sex criminal, having been found guilty previously (albeit initially not publicly) of sexual offenses against the sacrament of reconciliation and excommunicated.

But, while the grounds for removing Rupnik’s art would appear to many to be obvious and well established without prejudging the outcome of his pending canonical trial, the continued official use of his work served as an ongoing reminder of how long that process is taking.

Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, the prefect for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, has addressed the grindingly slow progress of Rupnik’s trial, saying it has proven difficult — to the point where months have gone by with no apparent change in status — to impanel a tribunal of qualified judges for the case.

That difficulty stems from the decision to try the case away from the Vatican and unconnected to the DDF’s internal roster of qualified canonists, according to the cardinal. It is unclear if that condition is self-imposed by the dicastery, to distance itself and the Vatican from the case, or a judicial necessity because of Rupnik’s personal Roman connections.

Leo could, at any point, revisit that decision taken by the DDF.

And, as a canonist-pope, he will be well aware of the legally coherent ways he could expedite things, even assuming there are prudent — rather than merely preferable — reasons to keep the case away from the curia.

In any event, it remains to be seen if taking Rupnik’s artwork off the Vatican website is the first step of a new urgency to resolve his situation once and for all, or an easy decision with the secondary benefit of removing something which perennially kept Rupnik in the news cycle.

But at some point Leo will have to consider how the Rupnik scandal erupted in the first place, and was allowed to drag on so long.

It is unclear, and likely to remain so, how much personal involvement Pope Francis had in the Rupnik case, in the decisions to not publicize his 2020 excommunication, to allow him to continue to serve in various curial consultancy positions, and to initially refuse to lift the canonical statute of limitations on the other allegations against the priest.

But the official narrative remains, at least for now, that all of those choices were taken by the DDF, most of them before Fernandez arrived as prefect, it should be noted. Nevertheless, the cardinal’s own position at the head of that dicastery has brought its own set of anomalies to the DDF’s disciplinary section.

When Francis appointed Fernandez to the role in 2023, he pointedly and publicly dispensed him from participation in the DDF’s disciplinary work involving the sexual abuse of minors, though not cases like Rupnik’s which involve adults and the sacraments.

That narrowly tailored carve-out in the prefect’s brief, keeping him involved in some but not all abuse cases, has raised questions about his role — active or absent — in recent high-profile cases which have raised serious canonical questions.

While it is customary for new popes to retain heads of dicasteries at least until the end of their five-year terms, many will be watching to see what Leo makes of Fernandez’s unique situation, whether it is a compromise he is willing to live with for three more years.

If Leo chooses to make bringing canonical coherence to the curia, especially on abuse cases, a priority, though, a change — or not — at the top of the DDF could be far more significant than expediting Rupnik’s case, or getting his art off the Vatican website.

Whatever the pope does or doesn’t do at the DDF, however, Leo does have a pressing appointment to make on the issue of clerical sexual abuse — a new president for the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.

The outgoing head, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, has served in post since the body’s creation by Francis in 2014. While no official announcement has been made, the cardinal turns 81 this month and has already begun referring to his tenure in the past tense during interviews.

Under O’Malley, the PCPM has operated as a self-consciously outsiders’ voice within the curia on the abuse crisis. Under the American cardinal’s leadership, the commission was publicly credited with convincing Francis to allow Rupnik’s prosecution to proceed.

And, given O’Malley had an audience with Pope Leo last month, it is at highly plausible that the issue or Rupnik came up again — including the communication’s dicastery’s continued use of his work, something the cardinal has lobbied for change on before.

Replacing Cardinal O’Malley at the PCPM may actually be the pope’s most pressing senior appointment to make, given the cardinal’s age, but also least straightforward.

Speaking to The Pillar last year, O’Malley was frank about continued resistance to the PCPM’s work, and even existence within the Vatican — a situation which has become more, not less complicated after Francis moved it under the umbrella of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

O’Malley was equally frank about the difficulty in describing an ideal successor for this reason. While admitting he had always considered the PCPM presidency to be a role best suited to a lay person — preferably a woman.

But he was pragmatic, too, about the need for the commission to be led by senior clerics if it is to command any respect within the curia. In fact, he noted the difference in effectiveness having a bishop serve as secretary, rather than a priest, had made.

We cannot know what recommendations O’Malley may have made to Leo about picking his successor, or boosting the effectiveness of the PCPM around the Vatican.

But whatever decisions Leo does make will be much scrutinized, and could end up saying as much about what the pope thinks of the state his curia more broadly on the issue of sexual abuse as it does about what he thinks of the commission itself.