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The Sodalicio of Christian life (SVC), a powerful Peruvian ultraconservative group in 1971, inspired by the Spanish phalanx, with sect features and that intended to form “soldiers of God”, it is already history. After 54 years of life, the scandal of numerous cases of pedophilia, sexual abuse and power uncovered by Peruvian journalists as of 2015 has ended the organization: finally, three months after the Pope issued the decree of suppression on January 14, its responsible have also signed this Monday, as announced by the sodalicio in a statement.
Although the decision was already known and now it is simply executed, it is a measure of great draft in the Vatican, because it is not frequent for a pontiff to reach the extreme case of eliminating an order. In similar previous cases, the organization had been saved after cleaning the guilty of abuse. But in this case Francisco has considered that there was nothing to save and that the sodalicio was rotten from the root.
“With pain and obedience we accept this decision approved specifically by Pope Francis that ends our society,” says the SCV statement. “Our look also addresses the victims, we reiterate our sincere order for forgiveness for the abuse and abuse committed in our community. We also apologize to the whole Church and society for the pain caused,” he continues. Of abuses since 1971 and claims to have already paid 5.3 million dollars in compensation, Paola Ugaz and Pedro Salinas, can exceed hundred.
In this way, the SCV has fulfilled the last process that remained to legally complete the process and to which it had resisted during the last weeks. As a group of victims had denounced, they tried to gain time to hide part of their assets before the end of the entity. In fact, the objective of the apostolic commissioner appointed by the Pope, the Spanish priest Jordi Bertomeu, is to liquidate the assets of the entity to collect the greatest possible sum of money to indemnify the victims.
The sodalicio was more than a religious group, a business empire calculated on 1,000 million dollars had been raised on it, with interest in the real estate, miners, agricultural and educational sectors, among others. They began their businesses with nine luxury private cemeteries as of 2000, which managed as “missions” free of tax thanks to a forced interpretation of the rules, endorsed by two canonical jurists, the Spanish Luis Martínez Sistach, then Cardinal and Archbishop of Barcelona, and the Italian Gianfranco Ghirland, now Cardinal.
The Sodalicio is currently investigated in the Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office for money laundering and tax crimes, after the revelations of the press that indicated the formation of companies in fiscal paradises of Panama, Virgin Islands and the United States. In fact its headquarters at this time is in Denver.
Like other ultraconservative ecclesial movements, it grew protected by John Paul II, which gave them their approval in 1997 as a laical apostolic life of Pontifical Law. It occurred in the context of the ideological clash of the Cold War and to contrast in Latin America the so -called liberation theology. With strong political connections, it became influential among the high Peruvian classes, extended by several Latin American countries and had 20,000 members, also with two female branches.
However, he concealed an infernal reality, similar to what happened in another of those movements, the legionaries of Christ of Marcial Maciel, a sexual predator. In this case, the charismatic sodalicio guru was a layman, who is now 77 years old and was then accused of pedophilia and sexual and psychological abuses: he sodomized the recruits who wanted to enter the organization. Other leaders of the Figari Trust Circle were also accused.
The first complaints, 25 years ago
The first internal complaints of abuse arose in 2000 and in 2011 several victims came to denounce the archbishop of Lima, Juan Luis Cipriani, without obtaining any response. Of abuses, something that only came to light last January, according to the country.
The scandal exploded definitively in 2015, with the publication of the research book Half monks, half soldiersof the journalists Paola Ugaz and Pedro Salinas, who revealed sexual abuse, humiliations and psychological control. Both reporters have suffered these ten years media and judicial harassment, but time has proved them right. The Vatican took to react. In 2012 Figari was separated from public life and in 2015, sent to reside in Rome. Only in 2018 the Vatican decided to chatter the sodalicio after “knowing the seriousness of the information about the internal regime, training and economic-financial management,” as the informative portal of the Holy See, Vatican News summarizes Monday.
Even so, as in other cases of pedophilia and abuse, the situation really only changed when the Pope met the information first hand, after several meetings in person with the Ugaz and Salinas journalists in 2022. In the summer of 2023 Francisco Francisco finally intervened. He sent two trusted researchers to Peru, the Maltese Charles J. Scicluna and the Spanish Jordi Bertomeu, who had already brought to light the truth of the abuses in Chile, a scandal that led the pontiff to force the entire dome of bishops of the country in 2018. The investigation confirmed the accusations and began to roll heads. Figari was expelled from the entity in August 2024 and then, including a bishop, José Antonio Eguren, of the Diocese of Piura. In the final phase, the Vatican researcher himself, Jordi Bertomeu, has been subject to these months of a discredit campaign with complaints and attacks in ultraconservative press media, the last attempt to avoid the final sentence.
