Vatican expels founder of religious movement in Peru after investigation of Archbishop Scicluna

The Vatican on Wednesday expelled the founder of an influential Peruvian religious movement, the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, after the Catholic hierarchy downplayed allegations of sexual and psychological abuse and financial corruption against him and his community for more than a decade.

The decree against Luis Fernando Figari came after Pope Francis last year ordered an investigation into the Sodalitium by the Vatican’s top experts on sex abuse to get to the bottom of the scandals. Previous commissions and investigations had failed to fully address the group’s problems.

Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith interviewed spokespeople for the association, alleged victims of abuse and journalists who wrote about the case last year.

According to the decree from the Vatican’s department of religious orders, posted on the website of the Peruvian bishops’ conference, Francis explicitly authorized Figari’s expulsion from the movement, even though his alleged misconduct was not precisely covered by canon law.

Figari’s behavior was “incompatible and therefore unacceptable for a member of an ecclesiastical institution, and caused scandal and serious harm to the well-being of the Church and of the individual members of the faithful,” the report said. The expulsion would restore the justice that had been damaged by Figari’s behavior “for many years” and would protect the individual well-being of the faithful and the Church in the future, the report said.

Figari founded the movement in 1971 as a lay community to recruit “soldiers for God,” one of several Catholic societies that emerged as a conservative response to the left-wing liberation theology movement that was sweeping Latin America beginning in the 1960s. At its peak, the group had about 20,000 members in South America and the United States. The group was hugely influential in Peru.

Victims of Figari’s abuse complained to the Archdiocese of Lima in 2011, although other charges against him reportedly date back to 2000. But neither the local church nor the Holy See took concrete action until one of the victims, Pedro Salinas, co-authored a book with journalist Paola Ugaz in 2015 detailing the Sodalitium’s sick practices, titled “Half Monks, Half Soldiers.”

Sodalitium later commissioned an external investigation which found that Figari was “narcissistic, paranoid, demeaning, vulgar, vindictive, manipulative, racist, sexist, elitist and obsessed with sexual issues and the sexual orientation” of Sodalitium members.

The external investigation, published in 2017, found that Figari sodomized his recruits and forced them to fondle him and each other. He enjoyed watching them “experience pain, discomfort and fear” and humiliated them in front of others to increase his control over them, the report found.

However, in 2017 the Holy See refused to expel Figari from the movement, ordering him only to live apart from the Sodalitium community in Rome and to cease all contact with it. The Vatican was apparently at odds with canon law, which did not provide for such punishments for founders of religious communities who were not priests. Salinas called it a “golden exile” at the time.

Salinas called Figari’s final deportation good news on Wednesday.

“I hope this is the beginning of more important news that will lead to the suppression of this mafia-like sect,” he told The Associated Press.

It is still unclear whether further decisions will be made regarding Sodalitium, which manages significant economic interests.

However, the exclusion casts doubt on the existence and foundation of the Sodalitium. Such religious movements are always closely linked to their founder and his original source of inspiration for the movement.

Sodalitium distanced itself from Figari in a statement on Wednesday, welcoming the decision to expel him and saying it had already sought to expel him in 2019. The group insisted it was undergoing a renewal process that would allow it to continue without Figari or his influence.

“Figari is the historical founder of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, but he is not a spiritual reference for our community,” the current superior, José David Correa González, said in a statement. “We want to continue working so that this gift can be at the service of the evangelizing mission of the Church.”

Such sentiment is similar to that of the religious order Legion of Christ. The Vatican chose in 2010 to allow the Mexican order to undergo a Vatican-mandated reform process rather than suppress it after it was determined that its founder, the Reverend Marcial Maciel, was a pedophile, drug addict and religious fraud who had created a cult-like movement to hide his double life.

Figari’s expulsion is Francis’ second personal move since Vatican investigators into abuse, the Rev. Jordi Bertomeu and Archbishop Charles Scicluna, returned from Peru last year. In April, Francis accepted the resignation of a Peruvian archbishop and Sodalitium member, Piura Archbishop José Eguren, who had denounced Salinas and Ugaz over their reports on Sodalitium.

In addition to Figari’s own abuses, their reporting also exposed the alleged forced eviction of farmers from land in the diocese of Eguren by a real estate developer with ties to Sodalitium.

In a statement to the AP, Ugaz called the decision to expel Figari “of the utmost importance” because it exposed how the Peruvian church – with a few exceptions – “has done nothing to listen to the victims who have been condemning the Sodalitium since 2000.”

She said it is also a recognition of journalism, “and maybe it can also help to give redress to the victims.”