Good times! Summer vibes up next!
I chose a title that accurately reflects the seriousness with which the Vatican is handling the Rupnik case.
“I don’t think we have to throw stones thinking that this is the way of healing.”
-Louis CK in 2006
“I'm not condoning rape, obviously. You should never rape anyone, unless you have a reason to, like you want to fuck someone and they won't let you. In which case, uh, what other option do you have?”
-Paolo Ruffini, prefect for the Vatican Dicastery of Communication, in 2024
When you think about it, it is kind of ridiculous that G.O.T.H.S. has gone this long without even mentioning the ongoing rap beef between superstars Drake and Kendrick Lamar. So let’s start with a summary of the highlights: Drake released two tracks in April expressing, in essence, that Lamar was not a very good rapper, was kind of corny, and was short. The lyrical shots had been fired.
In response, Lamar - the only rapper who is also a Pulitzer laureate - rapidly released a series of tracks expressing, in essence, that Drake was running a sex trafficking operation out of his mansion, that Drake had a secret daughter, that it was an open secret that everyone in the music industry hated Drake, that Drake had received multiple plastic surgeries and was taking Ozempic to manage his weight, that multiple members of Drake’s entourage, along with Drake himself, were sexually abusing children, that Lamar had photographic evidence of all of this, and that Lamar had all of this information in the first place because multiple members of Drake's inner circle were leaking to him. The rapid escalation was astonishing; Drake had said something silly and stupid to a man who, apparently, had been sitting on strata of hatred for years, and finally had an excuse to let it all out. Reaction videos to Lamar’s “Not Like Us” usually start with YouTubers yelling “Kendrick's on fire!” and then - right around the time Lamar delivers a series of absurd triple entendres ending with “tryna strike a chord/and it's prolly A-MINORRRR” - slowly moving into silent open-mouthed horror at how vicious Lamar could be (time codes 5:20-5:30 or 7:10-7:45 being my favorite stretch of prolonged discomfort):
Drake, for his part, bungled pretty much every chance he had to offer a rebuttal. He tried accusing Lamar of lurid things, but nothing stuck. He, unprompted, brought up his friendship with Millie Bobbie Brown as proof that he wasn't a creep, even though he befriended her when she was 14 and he was 22. He released a diss track that included a guest verse from an AI-generated copy of Tupac's voice, and then had to take the track down when Tupac's estate threatened legal action. Drake could not top “Not Like Us”. “Not Like Us,” a track which could have been titled “Drake Molests Children,” debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and broke streaming records on Spotify that had been previously set by Drake. Clubs in Los Angeles played “Not Like Us” the night it came out. There are videos of people singing along to every word of “Not Like Us” at weddings. Hand to God, I took my daughters to a city playground and grade school kids were there yelling lines from “Not Like Us” at each other as insults. While I was a big fan of Drake's music from the early 2010s, the guy was never known for his technical skill or ability to sound menacing, and Kendrick was, and the feud became one-sided in a hurry.
To Drake's credit, he eventually figured out that his only winning move was to stop playing. So his most recent drop in the feud was this image, on his Instagram:
Good times. Summer vibes up next. Hey guys, okay, we all had fun, and it's not important who won or lost and please let's stop talking about who won or lost and let's just move on to having fun this summer! It's stupid, but it was an oblique way to cry uncle, it was Drake’s only remaining option, he had to just tell everyone he was moving on and didn’t want to play this game anymore.
[Deep breath] In response,
In what feels like a gag from a golden age South Park episode, Kendrick Lamar played a massive concert at the Kia Forum on June 19th, which was also livestreamed on Amazon Prime, where he closed with “Not Like Us,” which was introduced by Dr. Dre. The response from the crowd was so rapturous that Kendrick, for an encore, performed “Not Like Us” five more times in a row JESUS CHRIST. Drake had gotten completely steamrolled, made every attempt to save himself, eventually tried to go with a message of “let's just move on and have fun”, and then got steamrolled again by a giant six-in-a-row performance, joined by seventeen thousand audience members, of the track calling him a “certified lover boy, certified pedophile”.
And yet - and yet! - Drake’s breezy response to his own image crisis was way better than that of Paolo Ruffini, head of the Vatican Dicastery for Communication.
We’ve talked about the Marko Rupnik case before, but to recap: this is probably the highest-profile abuse case in the church from the past five years, given that Rupnik is a prolific mosaic artist with works on display at the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, as well as the shrines at Lourdes and Fatima, the John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, and other prominent places in global Catholicism. Perhaps even longer than his list of works is his list of sexual and spiritual abuse allegations, which were brought by dozens of women and compiled in a 150-page report by Rupnik’s bosses in the Jesuits, who kicked him out of the order entirely when Rupnik refused to cooperate with their investigation. Pope Francis waved off any further investigations since only adults and not children had alleged abuse - even though, as it turns out, sexually assaulting an adult is still very bad, even when you’re a priest! - and eventually had to backtrack and reopen an investigation after widespread media outrage in late 2023.
But here’s something completely bonkers: even though Rupnik has been kicked out of the Jesuits and is in the process of an abuse investigation, the Vatican’s own websites are happy to continue promoting his work as stock images for their communications, as if the Vatican somehow was very low on images of Saint Joseph and had to use the one from the alleged abuser artist because it’s not like there are over two thousand years of art in the Vatican’s attic. Victims have been repeatedly asking the Vatican to stop doing this, and that brings us to June 21st, when Paolo Ruffini, the prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Communication, did a Q&A at the Catholic Media Conference in Atlanta, and apparently did not expect anyone to ask him about this at all. But they did, starting with America’s Vatican reporter Colleen Dulle. Now, remember, Ruffini is the head of the office that oversees all of the Vatican media organs; it is safe to assume that he is going to deliver the company line. He is, presumably, media trained. He has lived through over two decades of global abuse crises and has witnessed every possible shortfall in communications from the Vatican in the course of those crises, and has had the opportunity to learn from each of those shortfalls so that he does not repeat them himself. Let’s see how he did in a room full of journalists.
Paolo Ruffini, who is named after the famous dog escape artist, started with “As Christian(s), we are asked not to judge,” although once an order of priests compiles a 150-page file on all of the women you abused, we’ve moved past the process of “judgment” and into “reading the overwhelming evidence of someone's actions in horror”. Ruffini said that not choosing this guy’s art to put on the website instead of the countless other options the Vatican would have “is not a Christian response.” Nobody asked “why haven’t you personally, the communications guy, done anything to fire Rupnik”, they asked “why are you putting his art on the website when you clearly don’t have to, when it would be very easy to stop, and when the victims are begging you not to?” We have already set the bar so low for the Catholic church, we have asked them to do the easiest possible things to respond to abuse allegations, and they still can't figure it out. Paulina Gusik of OSV asked Ruffini what he would say to Rupnik's alleged victims about his choice, and got the insane reponse “The closeness of the church to any victims is clear. But it’s clear also that there is a procedure going on. So we have to wait (for) the procedure…We are not talking about abuse of minors. We are talking (about) a story that we don’t know.”
To state the obvious, every part of this is wrong and incoherent. The closeness of the church to victims of abuse is not clear because shit like this keeps happening and this is how the Vatican - and specifically Paolo Ruffini, the guy whose job it is to lead communications for the global Catholic church - chooses to talk about it. The only reason there is a procedure going on in the first place is because of media outrage; if it were entirely up to the Vatican, Rupnik would still be a celebrated artist today, and I know that because Vatican websites are still celebrating him as an artist. It’s true that we’re not talking about abuse of minors, but again, abusing adults is still bad, and it turns out that priests are actually not allowed to do that, either. And whatever we don’t know yet of this story, we know an awful lot from the victims. Was Ruffini just waiting to hear what these women were wearing before he made a decision about the stock images on his website? Some of them were wearing habits, if that helps.
In perhaps the most astonishing moment in the reports, Ruffini concluded his response with what he clearly thought was an argument-winning rhetorical flourish: “Do you think that if I put away a photo of an art (away) from … our website, I will be more close to the victims? Do you think so?” Perhaps he thought the room would be stunned into silence, but instead the general consensus of the room full of journalists appeared to be “yeah, dude, you will!” So he had to awkwardly add to the end of his Q&A “Well…I think you’re wrong.”
On May 22 2002, in the wake of the Boston scandal, The Onion ran a headline that, in four words, is better than anything I’ve ever done in hundreds of thousands of words of G.O.T.H.S.:
“Pope Forgives Molested Children”. It’s so perfect. I can never top it. Because that’s the church’s response, every time. It was in 20021, it was in 2018, it is in 2024. The response is never “how do we prevent this from happening again,” it is always “all you people do is bitch, bitch, bitch.” We’re the sinners for bringing it up, see; they're not the sinners for covering up to abuse or committing it in the first place. I mean, I just saw this all happen last year in Chicago, when the state Attorney General delivered a detailed and exhaustive report on clergy sexual abuse in the state, and my archbishop was left saying “maybe he’s just doing this because of anti-Catholic bias”. The archbishop didn’t deny anything from the report, because there’s nothing he can deny; the AG spent five years writing the thing and he didn’t publish anything that he didn’t have enough credible testimony to substantiate. But someone daring to notice sexual abuse of children, or bringing up that the church still falls far below any sort of standard for transparency and accountability that could earn the public’s trust, is committing the sin of damaging the church’s reputation, apparently a far worse sin than committing the abuse in the first place. Hell, it even works outside of the abuse crisis: in 2020, when protestors tore down statues of Junipero Serra in California, the response from the local archbishop wasn’t an uncomfortable acknowledgement or reckoning of the church’s colonial history, it was “all you people do is bitch, bitch, bitch, and also it’s possible you’re being controlled by Satan.” Ruffini’s response, similarly, wasn’t contrition, it wasn’t shame, it wasn’t denial or deflection or discomfort (although he was certainly uncomfortable by the end), it was defiance. All of these people - in some cases, journalists who had been reporting on the abuse crisis and hearing from victims for years - were wrong and he was right. We were desperately in need of his forgiveness for our wrath, and of his explanations for why he’s doing what he’s doing. It’s not even a case of empty rhetoric that isn’t accompanied by meaningful action to prevent abuse; the rhetoric isn’t even there! Ruffini could have said “oh wow I wasn't aware of that, I'll look into that and see what we can do” and then done nothing; that would have been shitty, but in line with meaningless corporate responses. Instead, he said “I am aware of it, I'm the one doing it, I'm going to keep doing it, I'm a good person because I'm doing it, and you're bad for asking questions about it,” which is baffling, and a response I can only imagine coming from the Catholic church. But what do we think will happen when people like Ruffini have to manage communications around the next abuse case? Would we expect the church to change when the church is telling us, explicitly, that it does not want to change and will work very hard to avoid changing?
My note for Ruffini: next time you get questions about this, just go with “Good times! Summer vibes up next!” The next time someone asks about why you’re publicly defending and promoting Rupnik’s art when you have absolutely no need to, why you seem committed to saying and doing the worst possible thing at every possible moment in the highest-profile abuse crisis in the church in five years, why you seem to be actually expending effort to celebrate abusers in the church, just say “nope, I’m off that now, it’s all Summer Vibes.” And then when journalists ask “but what would you say to vic-” you can just respond with “SUMMER. VIBES.” and run out of the room as quickly as possible. You will be steamrolled anyways, and you will deserve it, but it is more of an admission of failure than whatever the hell you were trying to do, and at least you will avoid having to mumble “well…I think you’re wrong” at the end of your imagined West Wing moment.
What I am currently experiencing is not struggle to reconcile myself with my church. Using language like that suggests two parties, a person and a church, that are both making an equal effort to find a home for each other. That is not the case here. I would like to be Catholic, I would like to raise my daughters in the Catholic church, and the church, which has much more power than I do, would like to preserve all of the structures that lead to widespread sexual abuse. Any other organization, with any other meaningful level of accountability in its leadership, would not let this keep happening, and would not keep saying these things. It is reasonable to assume, based on the words of the man who literally speaks for the Vatican, that the Catholic church has no real problem with this sort of abuse continuing to happen, and with abusers continuing to be in positions of power and influence throughout the church. If that idea offends you, the Catholic church does not appear to care very much whether you stay or go, and actually they probably find it annoying that you care about it at all. I would feel worse about all of this if I still thought that the people who ran the church were people capable of feeling discomfort or shame, people capable of seeing what had happened in the past and trying to do better in the future, people who really wanted the church to be someplace safe, people who realized there were more important things the church had to do than protect its own power, people who think there are changes worth making, people who want to try. People like us. But, as a Pulitzer laureate recently said six times in a row at the Kia Forum while performing a track whose artwork is a Google Maps shot of a mansion covered in registered sex offender flags: they not like us.