Pope Leo XIV made plenty of enemies helping dismantle a powerful Catholic movement whose leaders physically, sexually, spiritually and psychologically abused members. As Leo’s past record of handling clergy sexual abuse cases comes under scrutiny, victims of the now-disgraced group are stepping up to defend his record.These survivors say that starting in 2018, when Robert Prevost was a bishop in Peru, he met with them. He took their claims seriously when others did not. He got the Vatican involved and worked concretely to provide financial reparations for the harm they had endured. They credit him with helping arrange the key 2022 meeting with Pope Francis that triggered a Vatican investigation into the group, known as the Sodalitium Christiane Vitae, that resulted in its suppression earlier this year.What can I say about him? That he listened to me, said Jos Rey de Castro, a teacher who spent 18 years in the Sodalitium as the personal cook for its leader, Luis Fernando Figari. It seems obvious for a priest. But that’s not the case, because the Sodalitium was very powerful. A conservative army for GodFigari founded the Sodalitium in Peru in 1971 as a lay community to recruit soldiers for God. It was 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 1,000 core members and several times that in three other branches across South America and the United States. It was enormously influential in Peru and has its US base in Denver.Starting in 2000, stories about Figari’s twisted practices began to filter out in Peru when a former member wrote a series of articles in the magazine Gente. A formal accusation was lodged with the Lima archdiocese in 2011 but neither the local church nor the Holy See took concrete action until former member Pedro Salinas and journalist Paola Ugaz exposed the practices of Sodalitium in their 2015 book Half Monks, Half Soldiers.In 2017, a report commissioned by the group’s new leadership determined that the charismatic Figari was narcissistic, paranoid, demeaning, vulgar, vindictive, manipulative, racist, sexist, elitist and obsessed with sexual issues and the sexual orientation of SCV members. The report found that Figari sodomized his recruits and forced them to fondle him and one another, that he liked to watch them experience pain, discomfort and fear, and humiliated them in front of others to enhance his control over them.Yet when members found the courage to escape and denounce the abuses they suffered, they say they often met a wall of silence and inaction from the Peruvian Catholic hierarchy and the Holy See. Both were slow to act against a movement that had been formally approved by St. John Paul II’s Vatican, which had looked fondly on conservative, wealthy movements in Latin America, like the similarly-disgraced Mexican-based Legion of Christ.Prevost stands outBut not Prevost, whom Francis made bishop of Chiclayo, Peru in 2014 and later was elected vice president of the Peruvian bishops conference. He headed the bishops’ commission created to listen to victims of abuse, and became a critical bridge between victims and Sodalitium, the victims say.Rey de Castro, the former Figari cook who got out in 2014 and now teaches public policy to Peruvian police, turned to Prevost in 2021. He had been critical of a 2016 Sodalitium reparations programme that, according to the group, provided some $6.5 million in academic, therapeutic and financial support to nearly 100 Sodalitium victims over the years.He and Prevost met in the offices of the Peruvian bishops conference and stayed in touch via text message up until Prevost’s election as pope. From the start, Rey de Castro said, Prevost was very clear in saying For me, Sodalitium doesn’t have a charism,’the church term for the fundamental inspiration and reason for a religious movement to exist. After their 2021 meeting, Prevost helped arrange a confidential settlement with Sodalitium, he said.For Prevost to get the Sodalitium to do something just was exceptional, which was more or less what happened, he said in an interview in Lima. Salinas and Ugaz, for their part, say Prevost also stepped in when the Sodalitium started retaliating against them with legal action for their continued investigative reporting on the group. After the Sodalitium’s archbishop of Piura, Jos Eguren, sued Salinas in 2018 for defamation, Prevost and the Vatican’s ambassador to Peru helped craft a statement from the Peruvian bishops conference backing the journalists.It was the first time that anyone had done anything against the Sodalitium publicly, Ugaz said. And not only did they make this declaration, but they communicated with Francis, told him what was happening and Francis got mad. Ugaz and Salinas provided years of emails, text messages and anecdotes dating back to 2018 to demonstrate how committed Prevost was to the cause of the Sodalitium victims. While not all his initiatives succeeded, Prevost stepped in at critical junctions.
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