Pope Francis took the unusual decision Wednesday to expel ten people – a bishop, priests and laypeople – from a troubled Catholic movement in Peru after a Vatican investigation uncovered “sadistic” abuses of power, authority and spirituality.
The move against the leadership of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, or Sodalitium of Christian Life, followed Francis’ decision last month to expel the group’s founder, Luis Figari, after he was found to have been sexually abused his recruits.
It was announced by the Peruvian Bishops Conference, which posted a statement from the Vatican embassy on its website.
The statement was astonishing because it listed abuses uncovered by the Vatican investigation that have rarely if ever been punished canonically — such as hacking someone’s communications — and cited the people the pope held responsible.
The move is likely to be welcomed by some of the victims who spoke to CNN earlier this year and had urged the Vatican to take serious measures against the perpetrators after decades of impunity.
According to the statement, the Vatican investigators uncovered physical abuses “including with sadism and violence,” sect-like abuses of conscience, spiritual abuse, abuses of authority, economic abuses in administering church money and the “abuse in the exercise of the apostolate of journalism.”
The latter was presumably aimed at a Sodalitium-linked journalist who has attacked critics of the movement on social media.
Figari founded the movement in 1971 as a lay community to recruit “soldiers for God”, one of several Catholic societies born as a conservative reaction to the left-leaning liberation theology movement that swept through Latin America, starting in the 1960s. At its height, the group counted about 20 000 members across South America and the United States. It was enormously influential in Peru.
Victims of Figari’s abuses complained to the Lima archdiocese in 2011, though other claims against him reportedly date to 2000. But neither the local church nor the Holy See took concrete action until one of the victims, Pedro Salinas, wrote a book along with journalist Paola Ugaz detailing the twisted practices of the Sodalitium in 2015, entitled “Half Monks, Half Soldiers.”
An outside investigation ordered by Sodalitium later determined that Figari was “narcissistic, paranoid, demeaning, vulgar, vindictive, manipulative, racist, sexist, elitist and obsessed with sexual issues and the sexual orientation” of Sodalitium’s members. (CNN)
