Father Rupnik’s Mosaics that Even the Pope Wanted to Have

Mosaic in Sacred Heart Chapel.

It is hard to decide what is most remarkable about the chapel at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.: the art, the architecture or the idea of such a chapel in the first place.

The Rev. Marko Ivan Rupnik is a Slovene Jesuit priest and a world known artist from Idrija who founded the Centro Aletti, a place of study, work, and prayer established in Rome to build bridges between faith and art, and among Christians of long-divided rites in Eastern and Central Europe. Visiting the center in 1993, the Pope was so taken by Father Rupnik’s paintings, which seemed to revive the forms of ancient icons, adding intense modern color that he invited the priest to create mosaics for a papal chapel in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. 

Completed six years later, the papal Redemptoris Mater chapel reveals Father Rupnik’s progression from apprentice to master in the medium. 

Father Rupnik has brought these gifts and techniques to Sacred Heart, a 6,000-student university founded in 1963 by the Roman Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, CT, but led and staffed by laypeople. Astonishingly, the nearly 2,000 square feet of mosaic were installed in 12 days by Father Rupnik and 15 co-workers, both Eastern Orthodox Christians and Eastern- and Latin-rite Catholics.