Tearing Down the Rupnik Idol

The Catholic Thing

By Anthony Esolen The website Pray Tell recently published an article, temperate in spirit and labyrinthine in reasoning, defending the preservation of the art of Marko Rupnik, the priest disgraced for having used his art ministry as a vehicle for satanic abuse of women he had spiritually seduced. The author, Father James Hadley, suggests that the desire to remove Rupnik's art smacks of Donatism. The site has run another article, by the Catholic composer Paul Inwood, who makes the crucial point that Father Hadley overlooked, namely that it was not just that Rupnik was a sinner. All artists are sinners, nor would it be comfortable, as Father Hadley points out, to inquire too closely into the lives of Bernini and Caravaggio. The point is that in Rupnik's case, as in that of the composer David Haas, the artistic enterprise was central to the sin - as if you were to set up a home for wayward boys, perhaps initially for love alone, but then to use it as the opportunity and means for luring them into Sodom. I am guessing that Hadley would not want extracts of the wit and wisdom of Bruce Ritter to decorate the corridors of Covenant House. The Donatists were schismatic. They rejected the episcopacy of several men who, they claimed, surrendered sacred books and instruments to authorities under the persecutor, Diocletian, all while thousands of faithful Christians were undergoing the pains and the terrors of martyrdom. That meant that the Donatists also rejected the ordination of priests by those bishops. The dispute raged for a hundred years throughout the Roman Empire. It is not germane here, since we are not talking about the validity of any sacrament, nor about any succession of bishops. The question, as Hadley knows, has to do with the status of art, with how it communicates itself in what he calls its "afterlife," when audiences have forgotten in what context the art was produced, and perhaps forgotten what the artist originally meant to convey. I have spent my whole career trying to teach students how to respect the mind of an author, and how, by an act of the imagination, to "hear" its language in the dialect that gave his work its birth. It is too easy to forget this, and, for example, to try to read Shakespeare's Tempest as if Prospero and his treacherous brother Antonio had a real human existence apart from their roles in that specific work of art, presented by the artist to the people of his time. I readily grant that no great artist can ever be conscious of the meaning of all that he has done, and the greatest artists are themselves aware that their work exceeds their own grasp. In this sense, a future audience may find in the work itself suggestions the artist himself has made; and he too, the artist, may return to the work for inspiration, as if it had assumed, in part, a life and an authority of its own. But even such suggestions and inspirations are governed by what the language of the work obviously means. That language is public. As for Rupnik, once you are made aware of the satanism, it is hard to unsee it, since his figures themselves, with their large blacked-out eyes and their almost completely featureless countenances, are wrong, in the etymological sense. There is something about their pseudo-primitivism that is all awry, not to mention blank and chilly. Even if you do not share my low opinion of their technical quality as art, you cannot help but sense a connection between the art and its having been produced in and for a haven of evil, as a lure for the gullible, and a seal upon their wicked deeds. Caravaggio the sinner could portray the penitent Magdalene, with a single tear trickling down her cheek, while baubles of her trade lie scattered on the floor, because he knew what sin was. He could portray the anguish he must sometimes have felt. Rembrandt could portray himself as the Prodigal Son, drunken and in the throes of a fallacious happiness, with a smile that is strangely uneasy and disjointed. With Rup...