Letter to the Friends of the Aletti Center (24/07/2024)

Dear friends,

Thank you for the way you have accompanied us day after day during nearly 20 months of this time of trial we are passing through. This letter is meant for all of you who have never ceased to manifest your friendship and spiritual support to the Aletti Center as a whole, and to each of us personally. It is also because of your solidarity that, notwithstanding everything, we experience the strength and the light that grant us so much grace, communion between us and serene entrustment to the hands of God. And it is thanks to your friendship that we manage to turn the other cheek and to overcome our distress, when even art becomes the object of attack and the will to destroy. For this reason, in the face of this ongoing time of trial and testing, we feel the need to thank you all again for continuing to carry the weight of this hardship with us.

We await the results of the Vatican investigation currently underway; it is evaluating the consistency and veracity of the accusations directed at Fr. Marko Rupnik, who has always firmly denied, in the appropriate forums, having ever committed the abuses described by those accusing him. As we do so, we have, as you know, decided to abstain from any public defense, limiting ourselves to duly presenting the information in our possession to the competent authorities. We have acted thus out of respect for the accusers, for the investigation, and for the authoritative bodies responsible for them, avoiding participating in a mediatic trial.

Nevertheless, in the face of growing pressure for the removal of the works of art created by Centro Aletti, we feel obliged to express our great concern regarding the widespread diffusion of the so-called “cancel culture,” and of a way of thinking that legitimizes the “criminalization” of art. In this context, we would like to call to mind the following:

– One of the elementary juridical norms is the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. If we forget this, we arrive at the paradox of issuing a sentence without possibility of appeal before the judgment has been rendered, and asking for the sacrifice of a kind of scapegoat on behalf of victims, taken generically. In the concrete case of Fr. Rupnik, this means that anyone who has suffered a wrong or an act of violence on the part of any Church representative is legitimated in feeling offended by the art created by the Atelier, or art workshop, of the Aletti Center. But justice cannot be pursued by means of injustice. What does not have its origins in the good cannot bear good fruit.

– Everyone who has commissioned a work of art realized by the Aletti Center has experienced that this art does not bear the signature of just one person. Rather, the sole author of this art is the communion in prayer and creativity of dozens of artists and theologians, who participate actively in every single project, and who do so in cooperation from the first instance with the local ecclesial community that has desired this work of art, collaborated in its theological plan and then gathered its spiritual fruit. Since each work has an ecclesial and communal genesis like this, it finds in the Church its vital fulfillment.

– The removal of a work of art ought never to be thought of as a punishment or a cure. Nor can such a measure be imagined to be a kind of public punishment of one of the persons involved in a communal work. While pastoral care for suffering persons is of course necessary, this cannot become a justification for the removal or covering of works of art, for doing so creates other sufferings – not only of the artists and theologians who participated in their realization, but also of a great many believers who through these works of art have been able to contemplate the Word of God, oftentimes at a difficult moment in their life.

We continue, then, to live this time aware that the fundamental core of the Christian life is the Paschal mystery. As we remain in silence and prayer also for those who accuse us, we seek to draw ever closer, in a real and living way, to the Paschal Christ. We continue to trust in the Lord and to entrust ourselves to his hands, believing that in all this the design of his Providence is being carried out, and experiencing that the difficulties of the present moment have also been a way for us to become more aware of the communion that has been granted to us as a gift. It is this communion that sustains us, helping us to keep our hearts free of resentment. And it is what feeds our hope that one day, we will also come to understand more clearly what the Spirit has wanted to say through this story, for us and for the Church.

Maria Campatelli
and the team of the Aletti Center