Pope Francis took the unusual decision Wednesday to expel 10 people \u2013 a bishop, priests and laypeople \u2013 from a troubled Catholic movement in Peru after a Vatican investigation uncovered \u201csadistic\u201d abuses of power, authority and spirituality. <\/p>\n
The move against the leadership of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, or Sodalitium of Christian Life, followed Francis\u2019 decision last month to expel the group\u2019s founder, Luis Figari, after he was found to have sodomized his recruits. <\/p>\n
It was announced by the Peruvian Bishops Conference, which posted a statement from the Vatican embassy on its website. <\/p>\n
The statement was astonishing because it listed abuses uncovered by the Vatican investigation that have rarely if ever been punished canonically \u2014 such as hacking someone\u2019s communications \u2014 and cited the people the pope held responsible. <\/p>\n
According to the statement, the Vatican investigators uncovered physical abuses \u201cincluding with sadism and violence,\u201d sect-like abuses of conscience, spiritual abuse, abuses of authority, economic abuses in administering church money and the \u201cabuse in the exercise of the apostolate of journalism.\u201d <\/p>\n
The latter was presumably aimed at a Sodalitium-linked journalist who has attacked critics of the movement on social media. <\/p>\n
Figari founded the movement in 1971 as a lay community to recruit \u201csoldiers for God,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
Victims of Figari\u2019s 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 \u201cHalf Monks, Half Soldiers.\u201d <\/p>\n
An outside investigation ordered by Sodalitium later determined that Figari was \u201cnarcissistic, paranoid, demeaning, vulgar, vindictive, manipulative, racist, sexist, elitist and obsessed with sexual issues and the sexual orientation\u201d of Sodalitium\u2019s members. <\/p>\n
The investigation, published in 2017, found that Figari sodomized his recruits and forced them to fondle him and one another. He liked to watch them \u201cexperience pain, discomfort and fear,\u201d and humiliated them in front of others to enhance his control over them, the report found. <\/p>\n
Still, the Holy See declined to expel Figari from the movement in 2017 and merely ordered him to live apart from the Sodalitium community in Rome and cease all contact with it. The Vatican was seemingly tied in knots by canon law that did not foresee such punishments for founders of religious communities who weren\u2019t priests. Victims were outraged. <\/p>\n
But according to the findings of the latest Vatican investigation, the abuses went beyond Figari, included Sodalitium clergy and also involved harassing and hacking the communications of their victims all the while covering up crimes committed as part of their official duties, according to the statement. <\/p>\n
The investigation was carried out by the Vatican\u2019s top sex crimes investigators, Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, who travelled to Lima last year to take testimony from victims. <\/p>\n
The highest-ranking person ordered expelled was Archbishop Jose Antonio Eguren, whom Francis already forced to resign as bishop of Piura in April over his record, after he sued Salinas and Ugaz for their reporting. <\/p>\n
In addition to Figari\u2019s own abuses, their reporting had exposed the alleged forced eviction of peasants on lands in Eguren\u2019s diocese by a Sodalitium-linked real estate developer. <\/p>\n
Ugaz, the journalist, welcomed the move to expel the 10 people and said the reference to Sodalitium hacking referred to her: She said her communications had been hacked in 2023 after she reported on the Sodalitium\u2019s off-shore holdings and other financial dealings, and said she believed the group was trying to find out her sources. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a demonstration that in Peru, the survivors would never have found justice and reparation (without Bertomeo and Scicluna) because the Sodalitium is an organization with a lot of political, social and economic power,\u201d she said in a statement to The Associated Press. <\/p>\n
The Vatican, in the statement, said the Peruvian bishops joined Francis in \u201cseeking the forgiveness of the victims\u201d while calling on the troubled movement to initiate a journey of justice and reparation. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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