Until last year, no one foreshadowed that he, that ultra -Catholic organization founded at the beginning of the seventies by the Peruvian layman Luis Fernando Figari, would be suppressed. More than one had lost the faith in justice that the Church teaches with whom they engage it by taking its name. But in January 2024, Pope Francis, after knowing the systematic violation against the human rights of dozens of people, dissolved the sodalicio in one of his last great decisions.
In a room of the National Human Rights Coordinator, on a small table with a poster where they demand justice, ten have joined for the first time for their voice to hear stronger. Six of them were part of this ultraconservative group during their adolescence and part of their youth, and were abused physically, psychologically, and sexually by their spiritual leaders. The other four are citizens of San Juan Bautista de Catacaos, a peasant community located in the Piura region, who have reported having been stripped of their lands for more than a decade by organizations linked to the sodalicio. These are 10,000 hectares that snatched them with fraudulent papers, complaints and shadow agreements.
“From here, we ask Pope Leo XIV to give us an opportunity to have an interview with him, and thus tell him the pain of the peasant. How we have been hit …” says Marcelino Inga before his voice breaks. Around 200 families have been affected by the San Juan Bautista Civil Association, an entity founded by the priest member of the Sodalicio, before being appointed Archbishop of Piura and Tumbes. In 2024, Francisco requested his resignation and Eguren was forced to accept. He was 68 years old, seven less than what is required to resign as bishop. Various sources have indicated that Pope Leo XIV, then prefect of the Dicastery of the Bishops, was decisive for his departure. Fact that unleashed the inch of the high sodálites spheres.
At another time of the press conference, he took the microphone Fiorella Martínez, the widow of Guadalupe Zapata Sosa, a community who was shot dead in 2011 for protecting ancestral territories in Piura. About two hundred subjects broke into the Human settlement Almirante Grau, in Piura, to evict dozens of families. “They killed my husband at age 26. The sodalicio snatched his life. I demand reparation for my two children, to stop criminalizing the community members of Catacaos and that we can know in its integrity the decree of suppression of the sodalicio,” says the widow.
Neither for the comuneros of Catacaos nor for the ex -Alites their stories of pain close with the dissolution of the sodalicio of Christian life. . They want to know what were the final conclusions of the Scicluna-Bertomeu mission report that determined its fall. In mid -2023, a papal mission landed in Lima and for a week he picked up testimonies of the sodalicio and his victims. It was integrated by the archbishop of Malta, Charles Scicluna, and the Spanish priest Jordi Bertomeu. The National Human Rights Coordinator has sent the request in writing to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State of the Holy See, and Sor Simona Brambilla, the prefect of the Dicastery for consecrated life and the societies of Apostolic Life. But they have not yet obtained an answer. That is why they now demand an audience with him, who knows the cases closely since his years as a bishop of Chiclayo and second vice president of the Peruvian Episcopal Conference.
“It is important that with Pope Leo XIV we come to what could not Free can continue to harm, ”says José Enrique Escardó, the first journalist who denounced the Sodalicio in the early 2000s. A lonely and intermittent struggle until in 2015 he published Half monks, half soldiersby Pedro Salinas and Paola Ugaz that removed the foundations of the ultraconservatives.
Escardó, who was difficult to admit that he also suffered sexual violence, said he met with Pope Francis on January 24 and that those “25 minutes where he felt heard” allowed him to trust again in the Church. The leader of a network of ecclesial abuse survivors has expressed the need for victims to be in the center of the sodalicio dissolution process. “Silence is a victim’s strategy. It is not possible that we do not know what is happening. The formation of a council of survivors to accompany the dissolution and filter everything that is for the benefit of the victims is crucial,” he added.
The priest Jordi Bertomeu was appointed by Francisco as the Pontifical Commissioner who will take care of the settlement of the sodalicio. This includes its companies and goods. In April, Bertomeu announced that the Holy See will take the case to US justice, because there were supposedly committed a sum of acts of corruption. Martín Pérez del Solar, another of the victims, recalled that in the formalicio formation houses they made him sleep six months on wood. “So far it hurts, I have problems sleeping. It is not possible for anyone to be imprisoned for all the lives they truncated. The Peruvian State must assume its responsibility and also the Church, which can make the difference,” he said. The final message of the ten people that this Thursday were one voice in the National Human Rights Coordinator was: “There are only two sides in this search for truth: or you are with the aggressors or with the victims.”
