The Italian website La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana broke a story March 3 (linked below) claiming that Marko Rupnik and his Centro Aletti confreres are moving into a convent in Montefiola, northeast of Rome. According to the report, the nuns currently there are being evicted. The website claims the whole process most likely enjoys the support of Cardinal Angelo de Donatis, formerly Vicar General of Rome (the Pope’s delegate to run his diocese) and now Major Penitentiary (the cardinal who heads the Church’s “internal forum” work, i.e., administration of the sacrament of Penance). Many regard de Donatis as a long Rupnik protector.

Predator but papal-pet Rupnik has long managed to evade sanctions for the canonical offense of absolving an accomplice in a sin against the Sixth Commandment. The Jesuits managed to wash their hands of him by expelling him for disobedience (kind of like getting thrown out of the Anglican Church for heresy). Free-agent Rupnik then got incardinated in a Slovenian diocese, with what looks like the understanding that he’d never actually be expected to serve there. (See how far you’d get with an American bishop, telling him you’d like to serve God’s people in a college or university rather than a parish setting!) Not actually expected to live in Slovenia, he’s now apparently gotten mountaintop digs not-too-far-but-far-enough from Rome to continue Aletti-style business as usual, seemingly with the indulgence of a cardinal protector. Meanwhile, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (under revised norms that exempt its Prefect, another papal-pet, from disciplinary work) grinds on with its investigation which, prolonged enough, might yet produce the magic “McCarrick effect” — everybody who knew anything is dead and anybody alive knew nothing! Vaticanistas report that Rupnik’s “false mysticism” is apparently not a clear-enough charge for canonical punishment; only canonists would cavil about whether a priest who is a member of a religious order once deemed the papacy’s intellectual shock troops and spiritual marines who talked a nun into a sexual tryst as a mystical spiritual experience might be criminally sinful enough to discipline him.

I raise all these points in light of a letter published February 26 by the Dicastery for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts (here) about the “good name” of “credibly accused” priest sexual predators, especially dead ones. With the usual Vatican “transparency,” the letter’s addressee is unspecified nor is there any explanation why the document written September 5, 2024 suddenly saw the light of day almost half a year later. Being part of Francis’s Roman Curia means never having to explain things.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that the letter came out just as the new Rupnik story is surfacing. More to the point, however, is: Should we perhaps question the letter’s arguments?

Let’s draw some clear methodological lines. This letter is a legal document, a response to a legal inquiry about what provisions of the Code of Canon Law require in such instances. As such, it is an interpretation of a positive law and at least theoretically distinct from the moral questions it implicates concerning good name, detraction, calumny, and transparency. Whether it should be so distinct is another question, but this pontificate has tended to wield the cudgel of canon law as both its weapon and shield irrespective of how well or ill the law serves good theology. Canon law should be rooted in and serve good theology; whether it has, particularly in recent years, is an independent question.

I write as a moral theologian and I will admit I am researching the logic behind what the Church teaches about good name, detraction, and calumny. I do so precisely because I think too many clerics, including far too many hierarchs, have taken refuge behind “detraction” and “good name” to justify both their negligence about and cover up of priestly sexual predators, especially homosexual ones.

This Holy See has tended to blow hot and cold on eradicating clerical sexual predation. Public accusations of abuse are met with criticisms of “detraction” and the need to “preserve the good name” of the accused. Those criticisms, of course, do not address why people go public, i.e., because they do not trust the Church’s clergy to conduct a timely and fair judgment in a closed, confidential setting. And, given the drip-drip-drip of sexual abuse cases bedeviling the Church since Boston 2002 and especially post-l’affaire McCarrick, no honest man should blame those people for their incredulity.

The Dicastery’s letter seems to come from a make-believe world in which (i) neither Boston 2002, the McCarrick affair, nor widespread civil prosecutions in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Australia, and France happened; (ii) social and secular media reporting about accusations of sexual abuse can be pretended neither to exist nor to have been usually the first cause in exposing this sinful rot; (iii) Catholics will generously suspend judgment pending “proof — judicial — to the contrary and definitive” (i.e., presumably a final and unappealable verdict); and (iv) the Church’s own credibility is not at stake. Earth to Bishops Iannone and Arrieta: That make-believe world ends at the boundary of the Vatican City State.

Rome appears to nurture a deep-seated belief that the only party with rights to a good name here are accused clergy. That’s just not true. The Church also has rights: rights to be credible in holding to account clergy whose sexual abuse makes a mockery of that Church and its priesthood. And when that abuse acquires the dimensions it has today, it seems that the full measure of a “legitimate and proportionate” reason for open talk was long ago filled: The Church also has a right and duty to be transparent so that her sons and daughters — especially her minor sons and daughters — can feel safe in the presence of an ordained person. If the Church does not attend to that right and duty, the civil authority will. Nor is attending to that right and duty merely a way of avoiding civil entanglement. The civil authority may not divert prosecutorial resources to convict or exonerate dead people (a key theme of the Dicastery’s letter) but that does not mean that conviction or exoneration should be ignored, suspended ad infinitum. That is the Church’s job, both as regards the accused who were her ministers as well as the alleged victims who were/are her sons and daughters.

In a normal society, most accusations sooner or later become public. The Dicastery’s vision seems to be that is some kind of injustice. An accusation is not proof, much less conviction; but neither is it nothing. The accusation exists. Rome’s mindset seems to be people should pretend it does not until it is fully and irreversibly adjudicated. Not only is that not realistic, it is not to the Church’s good, since experience shows it enables the possibility of a culture of cover-up. And, arguably, a case can be made that it is not absolutely morally required.

No doubt this mindset of not having to acknowledge anything until it is at least canonically inevitable and indisputable serves to shield against having to explain what might be going on atop Montefiola and who is involved in those goings-on. Until that mindset is gone, the Church’s behavior in matters of sexual abuse and its cover-up will be suspect and legitimately so. And if the Church won’t clean up its act legally, its faithful may force it to by starving it financially. Hitting Rome in the pocketbook usually has a salutary effect in fixing its attention on the essentials. But one shouldn’t become a “poor Church of the poor” in order to protect abusers.

[The La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana article link is here.]