Vatican Takes Over Troubled Catholic Group in Peru Ahead of Pope’s Visit

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/world/americas/peru-vatican-sexual-abuse.html

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VATICAN CITY — The Vatican on Wednesday took over a Peru-based Catholic movement whose founder has been accused of abusing its members sexually, physically and psychologically, just days before Pope Francis starts a trip to Chile and Peru.

A Vatican statement said the congregation for religious orders had issued a decree naming a commissioner to take over the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a conservative movement that has about 20,000 members and chapters throughout South America and the United States.

The move came just weeks after Peruvian prosecutors announced that they were seeking the arrest of Sodalitium’s founder, Luis Figari. Investigators have described him as a paranoid narcissist obsessed with sex and watching his underlings endure pain and humiliation.

The pope is expected to have to contend with the church’s sexual abuse scandal during his visit from Jan. 15 to Jan. 21, with protests planned amid recent revelations in Chile about the scandal there. On Wednesday, the online database BishopAccountability.org released research it said showed that 78 priests or members of religious orders had been credibly accused or convicted in Chile.

In Peru, a journalist and former member of the society began publicly accusing Mr. Figari of abuse in 2010. The case languished there and in the Vatican for years until a book was published in 2015 detailing the ways Mr. Figari humiliated his members.

While Mr. Figari was never charged, many of the allegations against him were eventually confirmed by a Vatican inquiry. He was ordered to cut contact with members of the society last year, and he has been living in Rome ever since.

Mr. Figari has never provided concrete responses to the accusations, though the society has said they were most likely true. His lawyer, Armando Lengua, has said he has not been in contact with Mr. Figari, describing him unreachable in the Sodalitium prayer and retreat house in Rome.

Some of the victims have denounced the Vatican’s handling of the case and the decision to allow Mr. Figari to live in comfortable retirement in Rome.

In the statement, the Vatican said that Francis had followed the Sodalitium saga for years, and that he had asked that the congregation pay particular attention to it. It said he was “particularly concerned about the seriousness of information about the internal regime, the training and financial management.”

The Vatican said the congregation had decided on the “commissioning” of the society, and the appointment of a Colombian bishop, Noel Antonio Londoño, as the commissioner, after the recent moves by Peruvian prosecutors to arrest Mr. Figari and a “profound analysis of all the documentation.”

The decision was the latest — and most significant — action by the Vatican since it first ordered an investigation into the society in 2015. After that, the Vatican named Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin to monitor Sodalitium.

The decree to place the society under a Vatican-appointed commissioner signals that the Holy See believes the Sodalitium is incapable of reforming itself despite a series of measures its new leadership had taken to try to make amends with victims, acknowledge past abuses and change its internal operations.

The society said it only learned of the takeover on Wednesday. In a statement, it thanked Francis, pledged to cooperate fully with the new commissioner and said it would accept whatever was decided in the future.

“We reaffirm once again our absolute obedience to the Holy Father and the Holy Mother Church,” a statement on the group’s website said.

Mr. Figari founded the society, known as SCV, in 1971 as a lay community to recruit “soldiers for God.” It was 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.

A 2017 investigative report commissioned by the society’s new leadership found that Mr. Figari was a charismatic intellectual but also “narcissistic, paranoid, demeaning, vulgar, vindictive, manipulative, racist, sexist, elitist and obsessed with sexual issues and the sexual orientation of SCV members.”

The report, by two Americans and an Irish expert in abuse, found that Mr. Figari sodomized his recruits and forced them to touch him and one another. He liked to watch them “experience pain, discomfort and fear,” and humiliated them to enhance his control over them, the report found.