Fr Marko Rupnik, recently expelled from the Jesuit order, is pictured in a 2015 photo in Rome. Photo: OSV News/Cristian Gennari, KNA The head of the Vatican’s communications department is defending his office’s use of an accused sexual abuser’s art on its website. The Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication of the Holy See, Italian layman Paolo Ruffini, offered his defence last Friday, in response to questions from journalists attending his keynote address at the annual Catholic Media Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
“We did not put any new photos,” Mr Ruffini said, “we just left what [images] there were.” “I think this is the reason,” Mr Ruffini said. “We didn’t decide what – what wasn’t in our charge to decide.”
The artist in question is ex-Jesuit Fr Marko Rupnik, who has been accused of abusing scores of victims – most of them women religious – over several decades, much of which he spent in Rome at the Centro Aletti art institute he founded in the early 1990s.
“We’re not talking about abuse of minors,” Mr Ruffini told a room of roughly 150 journalists and other media professionals. “We are talking [about] a story that we don’t know,” Mr Ruffini said. “Who am I to judge the Rupnik stories?”