By John M. Grondelski.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Today, a story about something that has ended well, even if the usual figures put up resistance. It's because this site and others like it report on the slow-walking of scandalous cases in the Vatican that things, occasionally, change. We're ready to continue that work. Are you ready to help?

Now for today's column...

Yesterday was the Memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church, a relatively new feast for a very old theological reality. Until last Saturday, the Vatican News website was still featuring the work of Marko Rupnik, the notorious abuser of nearly thirty religious women, who still somehow functions as a priest, seemingly protected by someone high up in Rome.

Sometime between Saturday night and Sunday morning, his work disappeared, replaced by a mosaic similar to the "Mater Ecclesiae" mosaic looking down on St. Peter's Square, erected by Pope St. John Paul II in gratitude to Our Lady for saving his life from an assassin's bullet.

It wasn't that hard to replace the irreplaceable Marko Rupnik. And perhaps this is a sign that Rome may finally deal with this scandal.

But it did cause Pope Francis biographer and apologist Austen Ivereigh to defend Rupnik's art. Ivereigh opposes "iconoclasm" and explains that many shrines had only "covered up" Rupnik art rather than removed it. And in a strained comparison, he argued that just as sacraments work ex opere operato, so mutatis mutandis, Rupnik's works stand independently of him.

Where to start?

"Iconoclasm" was about visual art in general, not any particular artist. The Iconoclasts did not say, "Let's smash Greek icons, but Cretan ones are OK!"

As to "cover-ups" at shrines, well, the biggest cover-up of Rupnik was in Francis's Vatican. Rupnik was excommunicated, then rehabilitated, although we still do not know officially by whom. He was immune from prosecution until the pope, after great delay, decided otherwise. Rupnik's erstwhile Jesuit confreres washed their hands of him, but nobody saw a problem with incardinating him into a diocese in Slovenia. And we still have no idea when Cardinal Fernández and the DDF might assemble a panel of judges to try Rupnik.

Have shrines "covered up" Rupnik art? Yes, because unlike paintings on walls in papal apartments, removing mosaics is not a five-minute or a single day's job. And stripping a mosaic off a shrine wall will leave - until replaced - a blank space of rough stone.

But the most repulsive argument in all this mess is Ivereigh's invocation of ex opere operato. Ex opere operato is a concept of sacramental theology that affirms that sacraments have their effect by virtue of doing them, not by who does them.

The concept arose - apropos of our Augustinian pope - from a controversy in Augustine's day. During one of the periodic Roman persecutions of Christians, priests in North Africa apostatized: faced with torture and death, they denied the faith. When the persecution was over, they sought to resume acting as priests. Some Christians contended that the sacraments they ministered would all be invalid because of their prior apostasy.

St. Augustine rejected this argument. Christ is the real minister of every sacrament. The priest acts alter Christus, in Christ's name. But the sacrament and its effect remain Christ's. If you made sacramental efficacy dependent on moral rectitude, given that we are all sinners, what human being could be a valid minister of any sacrament? Sacraments work ex opere operato, "by the doing of the work," not ex opere operantis, "by the doer's doing."

To stretch a principle applied to sacred realities - sacraments instituted by Christ - to any merely human product borders on sacrilege. The sacraments are ultimately God's work, not man's. It is His fidelity that stands behind them "for us and for our salvation." To compare what is necessary for our salvation to a work of art is an inexcusable conflation of radically different realities.

Dostoyevsky said t...