VATICAN CITY — The Vatican has featured a painting of disgraced Jesuit Father Marko Rupnik on the cover of a new volume comprising all the Vatican’s stamps issued last year, despite the artist being credibly accused of sexually abusing several women religious and excommunicated for violating the confessional.

Father Rupnik’s depiction of the Wedding at Cana in Galilee, which was used as the logo for the 10th World Meeting of Families in June 2022, is the cover of the newly-issued “Philatelic Volume — Vatican 2022.”

The Vatican released the volume on Dec. 22, three weeks after the Jesuit’s alleged abuse was first reported in Italian media.

“The [Vatican’s] Postal and Philatelic Service is pleased to offer collectors the traditional annual volume that brings together the entire Vatican philatelic production and cancelations [stamps defaced to prevent reuse] in use in 2022,” the Vatican said in a Dec. 22 press release.

Father Rupnik, a Slovenian priest known internationally for his mosaics and other artwork, is accused of serial psychological and sexual abuse of women religious, with most of the known abuse allegedly committed in the 1990s.

After the story broke in Italian media in early December, the Society of Jesus confirmed that an investigation had been initiated in 2021 into allegations that Father Rupnik had abused several women who were members of a Slovenian religious community he co-founded in the 1980s.

But in October 2022, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) — formerly known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) — ruled that the case would be closed because the allegations fell outside the canonical statute of limitations.

This response by the Jesuits’ leadership appeared to leave many questions unanswered, generating concerns that both the Society of Jesus and the Vatican were not being fully transparent about what was known about Father Rupnik’s actions, about the limitations that were placed on his activities as a consequence, and about whether Pope Francis was personally involved in the handling of the matter.

These concerns intensified Dec. 14 when Jesuit Father Arturo Sosa, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, disclosed that Father Rupnik had incurred an automatic excommunication for sacramentally absolving a woman in 2015 with whom he had sinned against the Sixth Commandment. After an investigation, he was convicted of the crime in January 2020 and yet preached at one of the Roman Curia’s Lenten retreats in the Apostolic Palace March 2020 in place of papal preacher Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, who was sick.

He was officially excommunicated in May 2020, but the penalty was lifted the same month, according to the Jesuits. The order had withheld any mention of the excommunication in its earlier public statements in December about Father Rupnik.

The Jesuits imposed “preliminary restrictions” on Father Rupnik in June 2019 after the investigation into his violation of the confessional began. These were tightened in July 2021 — around the same time he released his logo for the World Meeting of Families — to include the “field of public activity to avoid causing scandal to the victims,” according to his local superior, Jesuit Father Johan Verschueren.

But the Jesuits allowed him to continue his art, celebrate Mass and preach homilies. Up until the end of 2022, he had also been allowed to give spiritual retreats despite the strength of the allegations against him, including one graphic testimony made public in December by a former religious sister who had belonged to the Loyola Community he co-founded in the early 1980s.