U and Non-U Justice

Cathy Loerzel’s “U-diagram” is a visual representation of a basic, widely acknowledged, but uncomfortable truth of trauma therapy: after we have suffered, recovery requires us to engage with the facts. Loerzel, a Christian author and counselor, draws this path as a long, downward-looping line which resembles the letter U. The beginning of the line represents the point at which we revisit the trauma. The endpoint marks our state on the other side: psychological integration, physical wellbeing, and the capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation. The lowest point of the line—right in the middle of the U—delineates memories of unbearable suffering, complex and contradictory emotions, and the experience of betrayal, powerlessness, and shame. It is tempting to construct a shortcut to recovery that avoids this bottom part of the U entirely. But when we trace our finger along the U-shaped line we find that, in reality, the only way from the beginning to the end is through its depths.

I was introduced to the U-diagram several months ago, in the course of a week of intensive trauma therapy, and have found it useful in my personal life. But I have also found it useful in making sense of recent events in the Church. The case of Fr. Marko Rupnik, an artist, theologian, and former Jesuit accused of multiple acts of sexual and psychological abuse of religious sisters, has—as readers of THE LAMP no doubt already know—been a consistent feature of the ecclesial news cycle for almost two years. Over time, attention has focused on the question of what to do with Fr. Rupnik’s output of public artwork. Given the connection between his artistic process and his alleged abuse, is it appropriate to continue to publicly display his mosaics in sacred spaces across Europe and North America, or to use images of these mosaics online?

The summer of 2024 offered us an entire spectrum of answers to that question. In June, the Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication Dr. Paolo Ruffini made a series of ill-judged and widely reported comments defending his continued use of images from the Aletti Center (the Rome-based atelier founded by Rupnik) on the Vatican News website. Barely a week later, Cardinal Seán O’Malley wrote to all Vatican dicasteries asking them to cease using images of Aletti Center artwork. In July, Bishop Jean-Marc Micas of the Diocese of Tarbes-et-Lourdes, France, announced that Aletti Center mosaics decorating the façade of Lourdes’s lower basilica (more properly the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary) would no longer be illuminated during the shrine’s evening processions and would eventually be removed from the façade entirely. Later that same month, the Knights of Columbus issued a statement announcing that mosaics in the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C. and the Holy Family Chapel in Connecticut would be covered in fabric pending the Vatican’s verdict on Rupnik, with the possibility of permanent covering if he is found guilty. Then, in August, Maria Campatelli, director of the Aletti Center, wrote an open letter to the Center’s friends and benefactors expressing “great concern” that Rupnik had fallen foul of modernity’s “so-called ‘cancel culture’” and “‘criminalisation’ of art.”

Certainly an eventful summer; but what has it to do with the U-diagram? The U-diagram illustrates what needs to be done in the process of trauma recovery, but it also illustrates what needs to be avoided. The final component of the diagram is a dotted line drawn horizontally across the top of the U, joining its beginning and endpoints like a tightrope. This second line is the shortcut—and it symbolizes everything we do to avoid engaging with the hideous specifics of what we feel and remember. It represents distraction, dissociation, and avoidance. It passes over the depths of the U without ever actually touching them. It describes—to be frank—what most of us are tempted to do when we begin to engage with trauma. And it is also a fitting symbol of what is currently happening in our public discourse on Fr. Marko Rupnik.

The characters from my précis of this summer’s events—bishops and cardinals, prefects, knights, and theologians—hold a variety of opinions on Rupnik and his artwork. Some demonstrate a far greater understanding of the matter, and sympathy for the needs and concerns of the faithful, than others. But what they all have in common is that they speak of Rupnik as, first and foremost, a priest who has created (or helped create) a lot of public art. This understanding of Rupnik is widespread among the faithful, and it has the advantage of presenting us with a clear question on which to hang our debate about justice and reparation: what are we to do with Aletti Center mosaics during the investigation, and what are we to do with them if Rupnik is found guilty?

The problem with this view of Rupnik is that mosaic art is not the only thing, and certainly not the most important thing, that he has created. He has also helped create a (now defunct) religious community, and thus, through his direction and formation, has helped create religious sisters. When we view Rupnik as a director and formator of female religious life, and not simply as a creator of mosaic art, we begin to enter into the lowest depths of our U-diagram. It is here we find the frightening and uncomfortable specifics of the allegations against him, together with far more complex questions of healing and reparation, which the debate over his artwork allows us to minimize or simply avoid altogether.

If we are truly willing to go into those depths, we will find that the defining event of the summer in the complex and still-unfolding case actually has nothing to do with press releases or covered mosaics at all. It did not come from Lourdes, or Rome, or the U.S. It came instead from the Archdiocese of Braga, Portugal. There, a former religious by the name of Ivanka Hosta volunteers in her local parish, takes part in the archdiocesan synodal assemblies, is named in parish bulletins as “Sister” Ivanka, and lives—in the words of a Portuguese-language report on her recent activities—“as if nothing had happened.”

In reality, much has happened to Hosta over the past few years. Until the summer of 2023, Hosta was the superior of the Loyola Community, a group she co-founded with Rupnik around the late 1980s or early 1990s and which was erected as a religious congregation of diocesan right in 1994. The kind of semantic eggshell-stepping required when writing about Rupnik’s case—tiptoeing between highly credible and not yet proven and so on—is simply not necessary in the case of Hosta. In early 2020, an apostolic visitation of the Loyola Community concluded that deep and systemic issues with its governance—and, in particular, with Hosta’s authoritarian leadership—had caused severe spiritual and psychological damage to the community’s members. As a result, Hosta was presented with a disciplinary decree in June 2023 which stipulated that she move to a community-owned property in Portugal, be permanently barred from any position of governance within the Loyola Community, and refrain from contacting any members or former members for three years. (The decree also required Hosta to undertake acts of spiritual reparation for the victims of Rupnik; it is interesting to note that it did not exercise the caution of describing them as “alleged” victims.) Finally, a decree was issued to the Loyola Community in October 2023, ordering its dissolution and giving a period of one year for the process to be completed.

The respective cases of the Loyola Community and Fr. Marko Rupnik intersect at several crucial points. Firstly, many of the allegations of sexual and psychological abuse made against Rupnik date from the time when he was spiritual advisor and confessor to the community, before he parted ways with Hosta in 1993. The sisters whom he is alleged to have abused later, when working at the Aletti Center, are former Loyola Community members (including Maria Campatelli) who went with him to Rome after his split from the community. Finally, there is the apparent feedback loop between the community’s apostolic visitation and the events surrounding Rupnik’s brief period of latae sententiae excommunication, for the crime of absolving an accomplice in a sin against the Sixth Commandment, in 2019. (The “accomplice” here refers either to a sexual partner or a sexual victim.) The visitation was ordered at the same time—and possibly as a result of—the initial investigation into Rupnik’s conduct following his excommunication, and uncovered not only Hosta’s spiritual and psychological abuse of her own sisters but also further allegations against Rupnik.

Anybody for whom the name Fr. Marko Rupnik incites an immediate and visceral response should, therefore, also know the names of Ivanka Hosta and the Loyola Community. But in the years since the story first came to public attention, events at the Aletti Center have taken an increasingly prominent role in the reporting of the Rupnik case, while the process of the Loyola Community’s dissolution—and Hosta’s apparent disregard for that process—has been given a back seat. As a result, we very rarely find ourselves at the deepest and darkest point of our U-diagram. Rarely, in other words, do we have to contemplate the fact that Fr. Rupnik stands accused not only of violating consecrated women but of violating them within a relationship specifically intended for their growth in holiness, through the structures of a community which—as a matter of clear and legally established fact—was already riven with abuses made possible by its own disordered practices of authority and governance.

But let’s slide further down into the U: this is not a unique case. Rupnik, if he is found guilty of the charges against him, will not be the first priest to have taken advantage of the immense vulnerability inherent in a sister’s relationship with her formators and directors, nor will Hosta be the first sister to have aided and abetted such manipulation through grievous abuse of her own authority. When we view these two figures side by side, parallels with various other problematic religious communities and abusive priest-formators begin to swim into focus.

There is Fr. Marie-Dominique Philippe, for instance: a sexual predator who used a disordered theology of spiritual friendship to groom sisters and other young women in spiritual direction, yet continues to be referenced by a breakaway group of the female contemplative branch of his community as founder and source of their charism. This group has been required by the Holy See in recent years to reform its authoritarian, unregulated system of governance, but to little avail—and it continues to look for spiritual guidance to former sisters who abetted Philippe’s abuse and have since been dispensed from their vows.

There is also the convicted sexual predator Fr. Carlos Miguel Buela. The community that he founded, the Institute of the Incarnate Word, has been under regular investigation and sanction by the Holy See since its establishment for issues related to authority and governance and continues to endorse and promote Buela’s spiritual patrimony.

Then there are the cases of abuse documented by organizations such as the Association d’aide aux Victimes des dérives de mouvements Religieux en Europe et à leurs Familles (Association for the Aid of Victims of Religious Movements in Europe and their Families) and the Association Sentinelle (Sentinel Association), both founded by individuals with direct experience of Philippe’s predation, as well as in the extensive online support network for former sisters of Buela’s community. There are the patterns of manipulation and control described by Dom Dysmas de Lassus in his book Risques et dérives de la vie religieuse (translated into English as Abuses in the Religious Life and the Path to Healing). Finally, there are the synodal responses given by sisters in the developing world who, while synodal participants in Western Europe were busy debating the counterfactual theological voodoo of female ordination, were asking the Synod on Synodality if something could perhaps be done about the clerical abuse of consecrated women.

There are many lessons that could be learned from examining these parallels. Such lessons would inform our understanding of abuse within religious communities and strengthen our efforts to safeguard the young women who so generously and trustingly commit themselves to the religious life. Yet instead we have chosen to devote time and energy, and indeed a whole summer’s worth of news stories, to a different subject: Aletti Center artwork and its public display.

This is not to say the debate over this artwork is pointless. I do not believe, as some have argued, that the call for its removal is a modern iconoclasm demanding absolute moral purity from all Christian artists. Those who espouse it are clearly motivated by a straightforward, honorable, and reasonable desire for justice for abuse survivors—and such a desire should always be welcomed and respected. But our hyperfocus on mosaics is now a distraction from the deeper, truer demand for justice which the Rupnik case presents. To understand why, it is worth remembering what justice fundamentally is.

Justice is a relational virtue. It is defined in the Catechism as the constant, firm commitment to give to the other what he is due. It exists between persons and, unlike the other cardinal virtues, does not regulate our inner lives but our lives in society. This matters in the case of the Aletti Center mosaics because, of course, none of us are in personal relationship with artwork; instead, we are in personal relationship with other members of the Body of Christ. We are joined, through the communion of the Church, with founders and religious superiors who misuse their authority, with young sisters subjected to grooming and manipulation, and with bishops whose pastoral responsibilities include the investigation and disciplining of communities of diocesan right.

If we wish to live by the principle that the abuse of religious women cannot and will not be tolerated in today’s Church, then the thing we must urgently destroy is not mosaics but the corrupted structures in which that abuse took place. We must take our desires for justice, reparation, and reform further down our U-diagram and apply it not to inert objects but to living communities. But to do that we must first be willing to confront some unpleasant truths about religious life, its potential to be corrupted, and its critical, ongoing need for purification.

Long after the fate of Rupnik’s art has been decided, the demands of justice—the relational virtue—will remain. However we might choose to decorate our church buildings, the Catholics who live and worship within them will still be there: our communities still vulnerable to corruption, our relations with others still in need of purification and accountability. It is within these relationships, after all, that abuse takes place. It is in these relationships, too, that its pain will be healed and transformed.