Pope expels a bishop and 9 other people from a Peru movement over ‘sadistic’ abuses

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.

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 “experience pain, discomfort and fear,” and humiliated them in front of others to enhance his control over them, the report found.

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’t priests. Victims were outraged.

But according to the findings of the latest Vatican investigation, the abuses went beyond Figari. They included Sodalitium clergy and also involved harassing and hacking the communications of their victims, all while covering up crimes committed as part of their official duties, according to the statement.

The investigation was carried out by the Vatican’s 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.

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.

In addition to Figari’s own abuses, their reporting had exposed the alleged forced eviction of peasants on lands in Eguren’s diocese by a Sodalitium-linked real estate developer.

Ugaz, the journalist, welcomed the expulsions 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’s off-shore holdings and other financial dealings, and said she believed the group was trying to identify her sources.

“It 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,” she said in a statement to The Associated Press.

Salinas, for his part, repeated that the group should be dissolved entirely and that some key figures were not included on the list.

“It’s very good news after 24 years of impunity,” he said in a message to AP. “It is to be hoped that this historic and memorable news is only the first of more, perhaps more impactful than what we know today.”

https://apnews.com/article/pope-abuse-peru-sodalicio-068c8f57dfc37aa86f14198ad08f9157