Marko Rupnik

Biography

In 2000 the Prešeren Prize, Slovenia’s main state prize for culture, was awarded for a mosaic in the Redemptoris Mater Chapel in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. The other laureate that year, the writer Svetlana Makarovič, refused the prize. The author of the mosaic was Marko Rupnik.

He was born on 28 November 1954 in Zadlog, a village near Idrija in western Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia. After elementary school in Idrija he attended the Minor Seminary in Vipava.

In 1973 he joined the Society of Jesus. After his novitiate he studied philosophy in Ljubljana, and in 1977 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he studied painting, graduating in 1981. He then studied theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University. In 1985 he was ordained a priest in Koper, and in the same year he began to specialise in missiology. From 1987 to 1991 he lived in Gorizia, at the Jesuit centre Stella Matutina, where he worked with young people and wrote his dissertation. He also worked with the Loyola Community of sisters in Mengeš and was their spiritual director. In 1991 he received his doctorate in missiology, with a thesis on the theological and missionary meaning of art in the writings of Vyacheslav Ivanov.

In 1991 Rupnik returned to Rome, where the Czech theologian Tomáš Špidlík, a specialist in Eastern Christianity, had just taken up residence; he became Rupnik’s close friend and spiritual mentor. Centro Aletti was conceived as a place where scholars and artists from central and eastern Europe could meet their western counterparts. In 1995 Rupnik became director of its new Atelier of Spiritual Art, a department of the Pontifical Oriental Institute, and the centre turned to mosaic. The mosaics of this workshop are distinguished by their size: they cover the walls of cathedrals entirely, reaching hundreds or even thousands of square metres. Besides Europe, commissions were carried out in Syria and the United States, and by 2009 on other continents as well. In 1992 he began teaching at the Pontifical Oriental Institute, the Gregorian University and the Pontifical Liturgical Institute of Sant’Anselmo, and in 1999 he was appointed a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Culture.

Among his works are the façade of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary at Lourdes, the Basilica of the Holy Trinity at Fátima, the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C., the Blessed Sacrament chapel in the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid, the Sanctuary of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina at San Giovanni Rotondo, the Church of Saint John Paul II in Kraków, the Holy Family Chapel at the Knights of Columbus headquarters in New Haven, and churches in Mostar and Niš. By 2008 Slovenia had more than twelve of his mosaics, often with gold backgrounds and figures with large eyes. In 2002 he received the Golden Order of Freedom of the Republic of Slovenia, and in 2003 the international Beato Angelico Prize for Europe. He is the author of books on spiritual theology, some of them published in English, among them “Discernment” (2006).

In December 2022 it became known that a canonical investigation had taken place. The Society of Jesus confirmed that, at the request of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, a complaint received in 2021 about abuse of nuns in 1995 had been investigated; the case was closed because the statute of limitations had expired. Later the order’s superior general, Arturo Sosa, reported that after a complaint in 2019 the Holy See had found Rupnik guilty of an ecclesiastical crime, the absolution of an accomplice. His excommunication was lifted soon afterwards. Restrictions were placed on Rupnik: he could not hear confessions, give spiritual direction or take part in public activities without the permission of a local superior.

On 15 June 2023 Rupnik was expelled from the Society of Jesus for “stubborn refusal to observe the vow of obedience”; in July the decision became final, since no appeal was made. In August he was accepted into the Diocese of Koper in Slovenia. On 27 October 2023 Pope Francis lifted the statute of limitations, and the case was reopened. In December 2023 the Vatican ordered the dissolution of the Loyola Community of sisters. In February 2024 two former nuns, the Italian Gloria Branciani and the Slovenian Mirjam Kovač, publicly said that they had suffered psychological and sexual abuse by Rupnik. The Jesuits offered reparations to twenty women. In 2025 the Dicastery began selecting judges for a canonical trial; by October 2025 five judges had been appointed. No verdict has been announced. In 2025 the documentary “Nuns vs the Vatican” about the case was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival.