The following essay appeared last year, but I'd missed it before. Its overall tone and content are probably too parochial (in every sense of that word) to interest non-Catholics, but I can't resist quoting the following two paragraphs, with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Marko Rupnik: Modern Iconographer or Denier of the Incarnation?
(Anthony Visco,
The Institute for Sacred Architecture, Volume 45, Spring 2024)
Quote:
As church communities discuss what to do with Rupnik’s work, I hope that those who commissioned them will reflect on the fact that major commissions at Lourdes, the Vatican, and many others, could have been international competitions. Instead, these great Catholic churches supported Rupnik and his art rather than others more worthy. Considering that his large works are housed in over two hundred churches around the world, one can only wonder and lament over the artists whose work was left behind or failed to be considered. If, as Pope Francis has insisted, “clericalism” is a problem, then we must ask whether Father Rupnik would have ever gotten the amount of work he received if he had been simply Mr. Marko Rupnik and not a Jesuit priest. It is more likely that, as a layman, he would never have received so many commissions for such important places within the Catholic Church. It was not that the vineyards were ripe and the workers few, but rather that the workers were ready, but they were locked out of the vineyards.
[...]
Rupnik has been expelled from the Jesuits, but his works remain on display. Perhaps Rupnik’s work remains so devoid of beauty because his life was so devoid of truth and goodness. Decisions about what to do with those works should take into consideration both his moral failures as a priest and his aesthetic and theological failures as a Christian artist. The moral failures were enough to get him expelled from the Jesuits; the aesthetic failures should be enough to get his art expelled from the churches they neither beautify nor ennoble.
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