A month into Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, images of artwork created by the disgraced priest Marko Rupnik began disappearing from the Vatican News website—a departure from the Vatican’s earlier stated policy of keeping the artwork visible on the website until a decision had been made in Rupnik’s trial.
Rupnik, a Slovenian priest and former Jesuit who was accused of sexually and spiritually abusing some 20 women, has thus far not been tried by the Vatican. The investigation into his alleged crimes was reopened in 2023 when Pope Francis lifted the statute of limitations on the allegations. In late March, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, revealed that the Vatican was having difficulty finding judges for the trial.
In a statement responding to the unannounced removal of the artwork, Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the information resource BishopAccountability.org, said, “Let’s hope this is just the beginning,” calling for “a speedy conclusion to the canonical case against Rupnik.”
Writing in Crux, Christopher J. Altieri noted that the disappearance of the artwork came just days after Pope Leo’s June 5 meeting with the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Mr. Altieri reported that the meeting lasted twice as long as it was scheduled to—a full hour rather than the planned half-hour—and that it pushed back a meeting with the Secretariat of State.
[Related: An early test for Pope Leo: Addressing the intersection of sexual and spiritual abuse]
The commission’s president, Cardinal Seán O’Malley, was present at the meeting. Cardinal O’Malley had been a vocal critic of the Vatican communications dicastery’s use of Rupnik artwork and denounced it in a public letter.
It is unclear whose decision it was to remove the art from the website, but in an interview with America, Ms. Barrett Doyle said: “It might be a significant signal. We’ll just have to see what follows.”
Universalizing policies from the U.S. church
Ms. Barrett Doyle and others contacted for this story expressed a mix of tentative hopes and low expectations for how Pope Leo might address the ongoing issues of disciplining clerical sexual abuse, communicating with victims and ensuring that the church is a safe environment for all.
On the eve of the conclave, Ms. Barrett Doyle wrote an opinion piece for the National Catholic Reporter headlined “Why the next pope should be an American,” arguing that U.S. bishops are accustomed to two practices that she and some victim-advocates would like to see universalized: “zero tolerance,” that is, removing a priest from ministry after he is found guilty of sexually abusing a minor; and the public disclosure of the names of those credibly accused.
Speaking to America after the conclave, Ms. Barrett Doyle said, “When I wrote that up at NCR, I did not have Cardinal [Robert] Prevost in mind because in many ways, as you know, he’s so atypical as an American,” referring to the pope’s many years of ministry in Peru, which caused some conclave watchers to dub him “the least American of the Americans.”
Still, she said, “I hope he’s absorbed enough of the American sensibility around zero tolerance and around disclosure, too, that he might apply those practices in addressing abuse in the global church.”
Laurence Gien, an opera singer who was sexually abused by a priest when he was 11 years old, and who spoke about his experience at a Vatican penitential service in 2024, said he believed the pope’s American background might help him listen to abuse survivors and understand “what needs to be done.”
“With our late pope, I had the feeling that there was a cultural gap…. But I’m sure that if I would be able to talk to Leo for half an hour, he would understand exactly what I’m saying to him,” Mr. Gien said. “I think that he’s probably grown up in the world that you and I have probably grown up in. That means that he’s very in tune with what needs to be done. And I just hope that he has the power and the ability to part the waves to find a way forward.”
Pope Leo’s canonical background
Kieran Tapsell, an Australian civil lawyer and victims’ advocate who has written two editions of a book on the Vatican’s response to child sexual abuse, described Pope Leo’s background as a canon lawyer as a reason for optimism for change. “I’m reasonably confident he might do something,” he told America.
Ms. Barrett Doyle, on the other hand, said the pope’s background makes her “more wary because he may be too sympathetic” to the canon law system, which she described as “really slanted toward preserving priesthood and rehabilitating the priests” who are found guilty.
Mr. Tapsell said, “You think that might be a bit of a disadvantage in some ways, but in some ways it isn’t because he would see the disadvantages of the system much better than, say, perhaps even Francis did.”
Both Ms. Barrett Doyle and Mr. Tapsell said that Pope Leo should look to the final report of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, issued in 2017, for recommendations on changes to canon law and the church’s processes for handling sexual abuse.
Mr. Tapsell said that the first change he would like to see Pope Leo make is to require church officials to report criminal abuse to civil authorities. He said the counter-argument to this is that such reports could be used as a pretext to persecute the church under oppressive regimes and argued that exceptions could be made to church law in those places.
He and Ms. Barrett Doyle both said that the new pope should ensure that disciplinary decisions in abuse cases and the names of those found guilty are published. “It would be a huge public service globally for them to release the names. If a priest is found guilty under canon law, he has met such a high standard of proof, and you know moral certainty is pretty high,” Ms. Barrett Doyle said.
Mr. Gien, the South African abuse survivor, disagreed with the idea of disclosing the names of those found guilty, saying he was “not for scapegoating human beings” but he wanted “a sincere apology combined with action” and policy change.
Coming at the issue from a legal perspective, Mr. Tapsell said that anonymized versions of abuse case decisions should be published so that canon lawyers know how church laws are being applied in practice. Citing a 2021 revision of canon law to include “grooming” as a crime, Mr. Tapsell asked, “How do we apply ‘grooming,’ for example?” He said that Canon 489, which requires that case files be destroyed when the guilty party dies or 10 years after the guilty verdict is handed down, “has got to go.”
Mr. Gien called for greater independent oversight of the church’s handling of abuse cases. “It is a hugely important thing that it must be out of the hands of the church, which they find very difficult to do,” Mr. Gien said.
Inclusion of victims
Mr. Gien said that survivors like him “need structural reform, we need innovation, we need urgency, we need all these things. But there’s one small little thing that one doesn’t really often talk about, and that is inclusion. And if you want to get really down to the meat of the thing, the gist of it is, I would say, that the act of abuse, that very act is also an act of exclusion.”
“I think that any interaction that I’ve had so far with different people in different positions in the church, I’ve never, ever, ever felt included,” he continued. He said that when survivors are invited to participate, it feels like it is “only on certain terms, under certain conditions that make life fine for everyone instead of having a permanent seat at the family table.”
Mr. Gien is currently working on an initiative in Germany, where he lives, to bring clerical sexual abuse victims together, particularly through communal experiences of art. As a singer, Mr. Gien said, “all my strength in my life has been given to me, often, by art.”
Organizing such experiences, though, is not simple. Mr. Gien said that it was difficult to connect with victims and he had hoped the church might facilitate his contact with others. “They have the infrastructure in place,” he said. He also hoped that the church might help provide resources for psychological support during such outings.
“If I were to speak to the pope, I would really plead for him to be as inclusive as possible and to let decisions be [made] with victims, together with victims,” Mr. Gien said.
