Rupnik and St Stanislav Institution Chapel

, originally uploaded by blazz980.

St. Stanislav Institution Chapel in Ljubljana, by f. Marko Ivan Rupnik & co-workers from Aletti Center, Rome

 

, originally uploaded by blazz980.

So who is Rupnik?

Marko Ivan Rupnik was born in Zadlog, Slovenia in 1954. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1973. After working on philosophy, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, finishing with a dissertation entitled “Luigi Montanarini and the Problem of Interpretation”. He then studied theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome where he specialized in missiology, writing a license thesis on “Wassily Kandinsky as an Approach to a Reading of the Theological Significance of Modern Art in Light of Russian Theology”. He became a priest in 1985. In 1991 he obtained a doctorate from the department of missiology at the Gregorian University with a dissertation guided by Fr. Tomáš Špidlík entitled “The Theological Missionary Significance of Art in the Essayist Vyacheslav Ivanovi Ivanov”. Since September of 1991 he has lived and worked in Rome at the Ezio Aletti Study and Research Center, which he directs, of the Pontifical Oriental Institute. The center’s aim is the study of the impact of the eastern traditions of Christianity on modernity and post-modernity and the interaction between them, both in the west as well as in that created by the fall of communism, and how to respond to the contemporary human questions that confront Christians. He teaches at the Pontifical Oriental Institute and at the Gregorian University. Since 1995 he has been the director of the Centro Aletti workshop of spiritual art and since 1999 he has been a consultant of the Pontifical Council for Culture. In 1999, with the Centro Aletti art workshop, he completed the renovation of the mosaic of the Redemptoris Mater Chapel entrusted to him by His Holiness John Paul II.

If you want to see more of the Centro Aletti’s  work in this location, go here.