Lourdes: all of Rupnik's mosaics covered for the visit of Leo XIV

All the mosaics made by Marko Rupnik and his workshop on the façade of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, at Lourdes, will be covered for the visit of Leo XIV, expected at the sanctuary on the evening of Saturday 26 September 2026. The Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes announced it, and states that the measure will be permanent: the works will remain covered after the pilgrimage, and not unveiled once the pope has left. "All the works of the façade will be covered, then decorated in connection with the apostolic journey of Leo XIV," he declared.

These mosaics had been set in 2008, for the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the apparitions. Their author, a Slovenian priest and mosaicist, a former Jesuit, is accused by many women, most of them religious sisters, of sexual, spiritual and psychological abuse committed from the 1990s onward; a canonical procedure remains open in Rome. Definitively expelled from the Society of Jesus in July 2023 and forbidden all public artistic activity, he is today a priest of the diocese of Koper, in Slovenia. The covering belongs to a process begun as early as 2023: in the summer of 2024, the mosaics ceased to be set off by the play of light of the evening Marian procession; on 31 March 2025, those of the entrance doors were masked by panels; now it is the whole façade.

The decision is presented as pastoral, and not as a recognition of guilt, which the canonical procedure alone will settle; it entails neither destruction nor immediate removal of the works. After the pilgrimage, a fresh reflection will be opened and the present commission enlarged to include artists and theologians, to rule on the future of the façade. "Those who are tried and wounded, who need consolation and reparation, must keep the first place at Lourdes," the bishop recalled.

What tradition teaches

The Lord has no harsher words than for scandal given to the little ones. "But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea," and again: "Woe to the world because of scandals... but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh."

The Catechism of the Council of Trent, expounding the fifth commandment, ranks scandal among the ways of killing — not the body, but the soul of one's neighbour — and teaches that the occasion of falling must be removed from the midst of the faithful. The house of God, where the weak and the wounded come to seek consolation, cannot raise before them a sign that scandalizes them.

The measure

To cover these works is to remove an occasion of scandal, and on this point tradition does not find fault. The act pronounces nothing upon the man: the accusation remains an accusation, the canonical procedure has not ruled, and we do not anticipate its judgment. Neither does it condemn art as such. It withdraws from a place of consolation what, in the eyes of the victims of violence, darkens it. The permanence announced is the bishop's decision within the charge that is his over this sanctuary; the ultimate future of the façade, for its part, remains open, entrusted to a commission that has not yet ruled. We report it as such, without giving it as closed.

For the faithful

Lourdes is the place where Our Lady calls the afflicted to come and draw grace and reparation. That nothing should turn them away from it belongs to justice and to charity, not to a fashion. The faithful will hold two things together without confusing them: the holiness owed to the house of God, which commands that every scandal be kept from it, and the restraint that leaves to the Church, through her procedure, the task of judging the fault of a man. One does not rejoice over a tomb; one rejoices that an obstacle has been removed from before the wounded.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment, on scandal; Gospel according to Saint Matthew, XVIII, 6-7 (Douay-Rheims).