On the eve of Lourdes, five Rupnik accusers ask Leo XIV for justice

Five women who say they are victims of the priest Marko Ivan Rupnik — Gloria Branciani, Mirjam Kovač, Sister Samuelle, Vida Bernard, and one of them signing “Pia,” for fear of reprisals — have addressed an open letter to Pope Leo XIV, on the eve of his coming to France and his visit to Lourdes, where he is to meet victims of abuse. They say they learned only indirectly of the opening of a canonical trial against the accused, their repeated approaches to the competent dicastery having, they assert, gone unanswered. This silence, they write, “is experienced by us, the victims, as a further and continual violence, which is added, with the weight of a rock, to the violence we have already suffered.”

The Church has never separated mercy from justice. To render to each what is due to him, to defend the innocent, to confound the guilty and to bring the truth to light: such is the office of the judge, and the very foundation of all legitimate authority. “Justice and judgment are the preparation of thy throne,” sings the Psalmist. Where sin cloaks itself in the sacred and uses spiritual authority to enslave souls, it becomes sacrilege, and its malice is doubled. For the author of scandal the Lord has reserved the harshest of sentences: “Woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh; 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.”

It is this justice, and not a favour, that the signatories demand: a full and contradictory trial — clear, prompt, and judged by impartial and independent magistrates. A trial conducted in oblivion, they write, “offers guarantees to no one, neither to the accused nor to the victims, and is irreconcilable with the very concepts of law, truth, justice, equity and mercy.” They welcomed the decision of the Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, Msgr Jean-Marc Micas, to cover permanently the mosaics made by the accused on the façade of the basilica. And they recall that the truth is not needful to them alone: “We have need of Truth, but, as much as we, the Church too has great need of it.”

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the dignity of the priesthood and on the fifth commandment; Gospel according to Saint Matthew, XVIII, 6-7; Psalm LXXXVIII, 15.