Pope Francis took the unusual decision to expel 10 people – a bishop, priests, and laypeople – from a troubled Catholic movement in Peru after a Vatican investigation uncovered “sadistic” abuses of power, authority, and spirituality.
The move against the leadership of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, or Sodalitium of Christian Life, followed Francis’ decision last month to expel the group’s founder, Luis Figari, after he was found to have sodomized his recruits.
It was announced by the Peruvian Bishops Conference, which posted a statement from the Vatican embassy on its website.
The statement was astonishing because it listed abuses uncovered by the Vatican investigation that have rarely if ever been punished canonically — such as hacking someone’s communications — and cited the people the pope held responsible.
According to the statement, the Vatican investigators uncovered physical abuses “including with sadism and violence,” sect-like abuses of conscience, spiritual abuse, abuses of authority, economic abuses in administering church money and the “abuse in the exercise of the apostolate of journalism.”
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 abuses complained to the Lima archdiocese in 2011, though other claims against him reportedly 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 in 2015, entitled “Half Monks, Half Soldiers.”
