Victims of Latin America’s latest Catholic leader-turned-sexual predator are denouncing the Vatican’s handling of the case, saying the six-year delay and final resolution are dissatisfactory for survivors of Luis Fernando Figari’s sexual, psychological and physical violence.
“It’s really shameful,” Pedro Salinas said. A victim of Figari’s, Salinas blew the whistle in 2015 on the twisted practices of the Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae.
Figari founded the SCV, or Sodalitium of Christian Life, 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.
Figari was a charismatic intellectual, but he was also “narcissistic, paranoid, demeaning, vulgar, vindictive, manipulative, racist, sexist, elitist and obsessed with sexual issues and the sexual orientation of SCV members,” according to a Feb. 10 investigative report commissioned by the SCV’s leadership.
The report 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.
Victims first complained to the Lima archdiocese in May 2011. The archdiocese said it turned the case over to the Vatican immediately, but neither the local church nor the Holy See took concrete action until Salinas’ book, “Half Monks, Half Soldiers,” was published in 2015.
That year, the Vatican appointed an investigator for the group, then a “delegate” to the community. And on Jan. 30, the Vatican ordered Figari to live apart from the community in Rome and cease all contact with it, declining the SCV’s request to expel him outright.
Salinas said the sanctions amount to a “golden exile, where he can live comfortably with all his needs taken care of.”
As a layman, Figari was not subject to the same defrocking punishment used to sanction abusive priests.
In the decree, the Vatican’s congregation for religious orders defended the six-year delay in acting by saying the information it received had gaps and was inconsistent.
Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said the initial complaints were anonymous, “no small matter with such serious charges.”
But Rocio Figueroa, a former SCV member, said if Vatican or Peruvian church authorities had really cared to investigate or help the victims, they could have followed up.
Figueroa, who worked in the Vatican’s office for laity and recently wrote an academic paper on the trauma SCV victims endured, said abuse doesn’t end when the actual violence stops.
“The abuse continues when the ones who have to respond with compassion, pastoral care and justice don’t care,” she said. In the case of the SCV, “They didn’t answer.”