Vatican expels founder of religious movement after probe

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ROME — The Vatican on Wednesday expelled the founder of an influential Peruvian religious movement, the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, after more than a decade of downplaying allegations of sexual and psychological abuse and financial corruption.

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The decree from the Vatican’s office for religious orders came after Pope Francis last year ordered a high-level investigation into the Sodalitium by the Vatican’s top sex abuse experts to get to the bottom of the scandal. Previous commissions and investigations had failed to fully address the group’s problems.

According to the decree, which was posted on the website of the Peruvian bishops conference, Francis gave his explicit authorization to expel Luis Fernando Figari from the movement, even though canon law didn’t precisely cover his alleged misconduct.

Figari’s behaviour was “incompatible and therefore unacceptable in a member of a church institution, as well as causing scandal and serious damage to the good of the church and of the individual members of the faithful,” it said. The expulsion would restore justice harmed by Figari’s behaviour “over many years, and would protect in the future the individual good of the faithful and the church,” it said.

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Figari founded the movement in 1971 as a lay community to recruit “soldiers for God,” 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. At its height, the group counted about 20,000 members across South America and the United States. It was enormously influential in Peru.

Victims of Figari’s abuse complained to the Lima archdiocese in 2011, though other claims against him 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, Half Monks, Half Soldiers, in 2015.

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The Sodalitium later commissioned an outside investigation that found 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 outside 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. Salinas called it a “golden exile.”

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Wednesday’s expulsion also puts into question the very foundation and continued existence of the Sodalitium, since such religious movements are always tightly bound to their founder and the original inspiration for the movement.

It remained unclear if any more decisions about the Sodalitium, which controls significant economic interests, would follow.

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Figari’s expulsion is the second personnel step by Francis after the Vatican abuse investigators returned from Peru last year. In April, Francis accepted the resignation of a Peruvian archbishop and Sodalitium member, Piura Archbishop Jose Eguren, who had sued Salinas and another journalist over their reports about the Sodalitium.

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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.

In comments to The Associated Press, Ugaz called the decision to expel Figari of “paramount importance” since it exposed how the Peruvian church — with a few exceptions — “did nothing to listen to the victims who have been denouncing the Sodalitium since 2000.”

She said it was a validation of journalism and should serve as a lesson to church organizations that enriched themselves thanks to the church’s special privileges in Peru “and perhaps it will serve to give reparations to their victims.”

Sodalitium has said in the past that it was collaborating with the Vatican investigation. It has quoted Figari as saying he is innocent, but has called the allegations in Half Monks, Half Soldiers plausible.

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