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Pope Francis has taken the remarkable step of dissolving a Peruvian-based Catholic movement, the Sodalitium of Christian Life (SCV), after years of attempts at reform and a Vatican investigation. The investigation uncovered sexual abuses by its founder, financial mismanagement by its leaders and spiritual abuses by its top members.
The Sodalitium on Monday confirmed the dissolution, which was conveyed to an assembly of its members in Aparecida, Brazil at the weekend by the pope’s top legal adviser, Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda. In revealing the dissolution in a statement, the group lamented that news of Francis’s decision had been leaked by two members attending the assembly, who were “definitively expelled”.
It provided no details, saying only that the “central information” about the dissolution that was reported by the Spanish-language site Infovaticana “was true but it contained several inaccuracies”. It did not say what the inaccuracies were.
The Vatican has not responded to several requests for comment. Dissolution – or suppression – of a pontifically recognised religious movement is a significant undertaking for a pope, all the more so for a Jesuit pope, given the Jesuit religious order was itself suppressed in the 1700s.
The SCV dissolution, which had been rumoured, marks an end to what has amounted to a slow death of the movement, which was founded in 1971. It was one of several Catholic societies born as a conservative reaction to the left-leaning liberation theology movement that swept through Latin America.
At its height, the group counted about 20,000 members across South America and the US. It was enormously influential in Peru.
Former members complained to the Lima archdiocese in 2011 about abuses by its founder, Luis Figari, and other claims date back 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 practices of the Sodalitium in 2015, entitled Half Monks, Half Soldiers.
In 2017, a report commissioned by the group’s leadership determined that Figari subjected his recruits to humiliating sexual and psychological abuse.
After an attempt at reform, Francis sent his two most trusted investigators, Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, to look into the Sodalitium abuses. Their report uncovered “sadistic” sect-like abuses of power, authority and spirituality; economic abuses in administering church money; and even journalistic abuses of harassing critics.
The report resulted in the expulsions last year of Figari and 10 top members, including an archbishop who had sued Salinas and Ugaz for their reporting and was earlier forced to retire early.
Salinas, who has long called for the SCV to be suppressed, said word of Francis’s decree was “extraordinary”, albeit belated since the first denunciations dated from 25 years ago. He praised Scicluna and Bertomeu, as well as the new prefect of the Vatican’s office for religious orders, Sister Simona Brambilla, since she is ultimately responsible for the SCV.
“And of course without the personal commitment of Pope Francis in this long history of impunity, nothing would have happened,” Salinas said, identifying complicit Peruvian institutions and bishops who “preferred to look the other way instead of accompanying the Argentine pontiff in his struggle for a Catholic church without abuse”.
It remains unknown what will become of the assets of the Sodalitium, which victims want to be used as compensation for their trauma. According to the code of canon law, only the Holy See can suppress an institute such as the SCV and “a decision regarding the temporal goods of the institute is also reserved to the Apostolic See”.
