(PERU)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
February 3, 2025
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
[Photo above: Jorge Mario Bergoglio and leaders of the Peruvian Sodalitium, ca. 2010.]
Although the decision to suppress the Peruvian Sodalitium is real, there are doubts as to how and when this will happen.
The Peruvian bishops tried to use the suppression of the Sodalitium to render themselves as close to the victims.
Besides the suppression of the Sodalitium, in Argentina, bishop Zanchetta’s case gives Pope Francis and Javier Milei a chance to prove how tough they are on an actual case of sexual abuse.
The most notable news as far as the clergy sexual abuse crisis is concerned is the confirmation, of sorts, of Pope Francis’s decision to suppress the so-called Sodalitium of Christian Life, a Peruvian religious organization, resembling an order on some aspects, but closer to a concern or a holding firm in the corporate world in others.
Over the last two years, Los Angeles Press has been following the development of the crisis in that “order”, so if you are interested in understanding what happened there you can go over the six stories in the table after this paragraph. 1 2 3 4 5 6
On January 31st, from Aparecida, Brazil, where they had scheduled their sixth General Assembly, the leaders of that organization issued a one-page, five-paragraphs, statement telling the world about Pope Francis’s decision to suppress them. The statement, is available here, came after a leak told the world about Pope Francis’s decision.
A more recent statement, available in English, acknowledges the Pope’s ruling. That statement is available here and appears as an image after this paragraph.
A Catholic Spanish-speaking far-right website, Infovaticana, published on January 18th the leak. Although effective in reaching its target audience, it backfired. If the expectation were that the leak would prevent the suppression from happening, it actually confirmed why the suppression is necessary.
In Spanish-speaking Roman Catholic circles, the leak emerged as a desperate attempt to keep portraying the Sodalitium as the perpetual victim of a wide conspiracy within the Church and against the Catholic Church. An attack from the “enemies of the Church” and that order.
The blurring of the differences between the Catholic Church at large and the Sodalitium has been a proven strategy of predatory priests and orders. Marcial Maciel did it repeatedly in Mexico, exaggerating the role of his family and even more his own role in the so-called Cristero War (1926-9).
Even if some of his relatives actually fought in that war, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, Maciel’s accounts of his alleged own role in the conflict had him as a 7-year-old fighter to the amusement of people willing to believe whatever lie he was able to articulate.
Blurring the differences
Attempts at blurring the differences between an order and the Church at large exist in the embellished accounts of the history of the Instituto of the Incarnate Word in Argentina or in the Opus Dei in Spain.
In rendering Pope Francis as an enemy of the Sodalitium they went from the idea of the Pontiff being under the influence of dangerous leftists or straight out for the “Peronista Pope” line of attack that the members of different exiles communities in Florida love to use as to render Bergoglio as a traitor when, in actuality, he has followed the steps of John Paul II or Benedict XVI when dealing with Cuba, Venezuela, and even Nicaragua.
When dealing with the Sodalitium it is harder to believe the notion of Bergoglio as a life-long enemy of the “order” because he was more than willing to welcome that organization in Buenos Aires.
In fact, if would be easier to prove how Bergoglio did his best to deflect and dismiss criticism towards the Sodalitium, assuming that they were actually “doing something” to deal with their many victims.
And the leaders of the now suppressed order used to display pictures with the Argentine Pope as some sort of trophy, as a proof of how close they were with him since his days as archbishop of Buenos Aires.
A key player in this process was another leading character in the developments in the clergy sexual abuse crisis over the last two weeks: the now emeritus archbishop of Lima, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne.
Putting aside the now confirmed accusations by an official Vatican source against the Peruvian Cardinal, the fact is that him played a key role in under estimating, dismissing, and even actively covering up the many instances of abuse at the Sodalitium.
As former head of the Archdiocese of Lima, the oldest city in South America, Cipriani was also the ultimate authority at the Church tribunal there. As it is frequently the case in many Latin American countries, when smaller dioceses are unable to set up their own Church tribunal, they can request an archdiocese to deal with their cases, whether they are formally suffragan or not to that archdiocese.
In that respect, Lima had the power not only to dismiss accusations against Cipriani, but also to know and eventually dismiss accusations against the Sodalitium even if the reports involved other dioceses in Peru.
Dismissing is the name of the game
Even if there are accounts of the personal differences between Cardinal Cipriani and Luis Figari, the founder of the now suppressed religious orders, they kept out of the public eye, and it would be only through insiders in the Roman Catholic Church in Peru that one would be aware of the existence of differences between them.
The differences had to do more with the tone than the substance of the issues. Both share similar spaces in the far-right of the Peruvian political spectrum. Their leaders and members are close to either Keiko Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular or Popular Force party or they are close to Rafael López Aliaga, Lima’s current mayor, party Popular Renewal or Renovación Popular. Both parties are close to each other, in the last presidential election in Peru, when Popular Renewal was unable to reach the ballotage, they endorsed Fujimori as their candidate.
A perfect example of how close are in actuality Opus Dei and the Sodalitium is López Aliaga himself. He is a full member of that Spaniard religious “order”, a so-called “numerary”, and an alum of the University of Piura, owned by the Opus Dei, with campuses at both Lima and Piura.
It should not surprise López Aliaga was the host of one of the public functions where Cipriani appeared in his most recent visit to his country. He presented the Cardinal with a medal on behalf of the City of Lima.
That happened a few days after one of Cipriani’s brothers, Javier, decided to join joined López Aliaga’s party after being a member and candidate for a Party already in the Peruvian far-right, the so-called Avanza País (Advance Country).
According to Infobae, Javier Cipriani got a contract for 50 thousand soles, a little over 13 thousand US dollars from the municipality of Lima.
In this respect, it is impossible to dismiss the notion that Cardinal Cipriani’s return to public activities in his native Peru was only an isolated activity and not an attempt to prepare López Aliaga’s party and, overall, the Peruvian far-right, for the 2026 presidential election there.
Back in 2022, already under Pope Francis’s “punishment”, a picture of the brothers Cipriani, Javier and Cardinal Juan Luis, graced Javier’s timeline at what used to be Twitter, as the post after this paragraph shows.
The post was already a challenge to the Pope’s terms, although, of course, it could be argued that it was an old picture of the two brothers or even that Javier was not aware of the Pope’s ruling regarding his brother as part of Rome’s rather chaotic response to the clergy sexual abuse crisis at the Roman Catholic Church in Peru.
Competing for alms and souls
It must be stressed that, as it happens in Mexico with the Legion of Christ and the Spaniard Opus Dei, where both “orders” compete for the favor of a limited set of rich families willing to play the role of Maecenas of whatever ideas go through their leaders’ minds, in Peru the Sodalitium has to compete with the same Opus Dei for the largesse of rich Peruvian families.
The Sodalitium tried to overcome this limit by becoming, through a complex operation, a major player in the business of death in Peru. Even if Peruvian law facilitates religious orders and churches to have businesses of their own, the Sodalitium was far more ambitious in that respect.
To achieve their goals, they needed people willing to work for free, hence the accusations, similar to those against the Legion of Christ in Mexico and the Opus Dei in Argentina and other countries.
More relevant for the specifics of the Sodalitium is that, to achieve their goals in the field of modern cemeteries in Peru, they needed land. To grab the land, they set up a series of civil and religious entities that exist only on paper as to allow the Sodalitium to avoid the legal, financial, tax, and canonical implications of owning the cemeteries.
It is impossible to go over the details of those operations. Peruvian journalist Daniel Yovera teamed up with Al-Jazeera English to publish back in 2016 a documentary in English, available at YouTube, where he provides the details of how the leaders of the Sodalitium did it.
Glaring contradictions
That is where some of the most glaring contradictions affecting the Sodalitium emerge. Despite the “law and order” approach that the leaders of the Sodalitium allegedly promote in Peruvian public life, supporting whatever repressive approach to law enforcement they can adapt to their country, they partnered with dangerous local criminal gangs to dispossess Peruvian First Nations from their lands to become a major player in the funerary services in Peru.
That on top of their willingness to use whatever chicanery was available for them when chastising Peruvian journalists willing to tell the stories of abuse, sexual or otherwise, in any of the many organizations of the Sodalitium.
Besides the cemeteries, hidden behind a very complex structure of ownership that is going to make very hard to accomplish a true suppression of the Sodalitium, they own the Universidad de San Pablo, at Arequipa. In a previous installment of this series, there are details of their ownership of that college. The story appears after this paragraph.
That story is relevant also because in that installment there are pictures of then archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, with the leaders of the Sodalitium then, in the first decade of this century, entering the Argentine religious market.
The idea that Bergoglio was somehow an enemy of the Peruvian order because of theological or political reasons stemming from his alleged relation with the left of the Catholic Church, if something like that actually exists, is a myth for the consumption of the readers of EWTN, CNA, The Pillar, and other entities in the English-speaking Catholic right and far-right monetizing the systematic attacks on the sitting pontiff for political reasons.
The myth is more evident when one takes into consideration that, as stressed on that previous installment of this series, the Sodalitium development of what is nowadays the University of Saint Paul (Universidad de San Pablo), at Arequipa happened when the archdiocese there was ruled by a Jesuit prelate very willing to support them.
Without the support of the now deceased Jesuit and former archbishop of Arequipa Fernando Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio it is hard to understand the development of the order, since he was a key player in dismissing the early criticism towards the Sodalitium. He accepted in his diocese priests who faced accusations of sexual abuse and who would be, ultimately, expelled by Pope Francis before his decision to suppress the order.
Without archbishop Vargas at Arequipa, it would be impossible to understand the role the Sodalitium played in that diocese and elsewhere in Peru and it is probable, although it is very hard to prove that he was willing to put out “good words” to favor the order’s growth in other Latin American countries, Argentina included.
Self-exoneration
Vargas’s support for the expansion of the Sodalitium also allows to better understand the contradictions in a statement issued, on January 25th, by the Peruvian Conference of Bishops.
Although there they express support for Pope Francis’s decisions for the Peruvian Church, they also exonerate themselves as they claim having no role in the abuses at the Sodalitium and even try to argue that they have been willing to hear and support the victims of that organization for “many years”.
The statement is available in full, as images, at their social media accounts, as in the case of what used to be Twitter, displayed after this paragraph.
Points eight and nine of their statement say:
8. In this context, we state our solidarity with the victims of the Sodalitium of Christian Life. We deeply regret that something so awful happened in the Church in Peru. We thank those who, bravely and perseveringly, made the abuse know and the bishops were made aware of them. We share the pain of the victims and their families and, once again, we state our sorrow to those who have not felt accompanied by us as they were unaware of the work we were doing before the Holy See for many years.
9. We thank Pope Francis for sending Archbishop Scicluna and Monsignor Bertomeu, that has allowed him to make the final decision to suppress the Sodalitium of Christian Life. While wait to receive the decrees finalizing the suppression and the adjacent rulings, we renew our commitment to collaborate with the Holy See as to accomplish the Pontiff’s goals.
It should not be a surprise that the statement was immediately criticized and rejected by survivors, their families, journalists, and observers who find it hard to figure out the gymnastics behind the statement.
Three days later, the Peruvian prelates added fuel to the fire after the Spaniard newspaper El País published a story about the reasons behind Cardinal Cipriani’s exit from the public eye in 2019, reviewed with some detail last week and linked after this paragraph, they published a new, shorter, statement decrying Cipriani’s decision to challenge both El País and Pope Francis.
That on top of the fact that new accusations emerged against Cipriani from victims in Lima and Ayacucho.
Standard Operating Procedure
As stated in last week’s piece, Cipriani followed the “standard operating procedure” of the Church in these cases as to deny any wrongdoing and to render himself as a victim of some kind of malfeasance.
Main problem is that in this case Cipriani is challenging Pope Francis. In doing so, he did what the leaders of the Sodalitium have been doing for the last 20 years or so since the first reports of abuse in their houses surfaced: denying any wrongdoing, claiming to be obedient, while challenging every step of the way the very authority he claims to respect.
Oddly enough, the Peruvian bishops’ statement, available as a message on their social media account after this paragraph, begins by quoting Saint John’s Gospel on truth setting us free.
From there they go into four relevant points. They are:
- We are ashamed about Cardinal Cipriani’s latest news.
- We regret the pain suffered by the victim of abuse, the Church’s community, and we ask the People of God to respect the victim’s choice to remain anonymous.
- We reaffirm our closeness with all victims of any kind of abuse.
- We acknowledge the Holy Father’s wise decision as it joins justice and mercy, to allow [Cardinal Cipriani] to leave the ministry as emeritus archbishop of Lima when he turned 75 and to set some limits to his ministry.
Main problem in this statement are points 3 and 4. The third point claims, as the bishops’ previous statement, the closeness with the victims. That is hard to believe when there is a public record of the Peruvian bishops, as the bishops in any other Latin American country, playing similar games to Cipriani and the leaders of the Sodalitium: denying any wrongdoing, claiming to be a victim of a wide conspiracy, aimed at the Church at large.
They do so, as it happens in other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, despite the self-inflicted wounds coming from the repeated contradictory nature of their statements and attitudes towards the victims, the people supporting them, and the journalists trying to figure out what is actually happening.
Putting aside the kind of boiler plate statements any diocesan curia has developed over the last 20 years or so in Latin America or elsewhere, it is hard to find examples of actual closeness or even attention to the victims of clergy sexual abuse in the region.
What is worse, as proven in the story linked above, the media close to the Sodalitium, the Opus Dei, and other conservative orders in the United States, constantly attack Francis’s timid decisions when dealing with abuse in his Church.
They would go hard on those close to Bergoglio, as in Cardinal Robert Prevost’s case, although he was one of the few bishops in Peru actually willing to advance on clergy sexual abuse prevention, while dismissing, ignoring, and even challenging accusations against clerics who they perceive as opposed to Francis’s timid reform agenda.
When there are commissions to deal with clergy sexual abuse, their faculties are, for the most part, limited to prevention. In the few instances where the commission provide other services, with very few of them having a majority of lay people working for them, so the actual chances of getting help are close to zero.
Some Mexican dioceses, as in the case of the city and port of Veracruz, the commission’s members are all of them male clergy and the fact is that even the three largest countries in the region, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, have not achieved full compliance on that issue, with many dioceses finding excuses to setting up their commissions to prevent clergy sexual abuse.
Self-inflicted wounds
It should not surprise the kind of reactions that the social media accounts of the Peruvian bishops got to their statements on clergy sexual abuse. What surprises, however, is their inability to acknowledge the kind of damage they inflict upon their own Church.
In that respect it is hard to believe that the suppression will bring a radical change to the situation as far as the victims of the Sodalitium is concerned. The issue is relevant not only because there has been no hint as to how far will the suppression go when dealing with the cemeteries, the University of Saint Paul in Arequipa or other businesses and Real Estate owned directly or indirectly by the Sodalitium.
Are the Peruvian authorities willing to provide some assistance to the victims on this point, at least to protect their interest in how the property and goods will be allocated to the parties with some claim to them?
It must be noted that if one follows the current procedures of the Catholic Church the suppression should come in the form of either a Motu Proprio, the equivalent in the Church of an Executive Order or a decree, or, if one goes back in time to the suppression of the Jesuits, in 1773, by what used to be called a brief, a short apostolic letter.
So far, even if the Sodalitium itself accepts the idea of its own suppression, there is no clue as to whether they will be allowed to create a new order, which would allow to address the many pending issues, or if their property and issues will be simply transferred to other Roman Catholic “order” (Opus Dei?), or if the suppression will be absolute, but then again, what will happen with the victims of that organization?
Zanchetta, Bergoglio’s bishop
On other issues, in Argentina, an appeals court confirmed a sentence on bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, the former bishop of Orán, a small diocese in the Province of Salta, in the Northernmost corner of Argentina, 83 miles or 130 kilometers South of the border with Bolivia.
Zanchetta was one of the first bishops appointed by Pope Francis. He did so in July 2013, less than six months after his own election as Roman Pontiff. Four years later the scandal was already striking the diocese and Rome itself, but the Vatican was unwilling to acknowledge any wrongdoing, so Pope Francis appointed Zanchetta as official of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See, a position within the so-called Roman Curia.
The accusations against Zanchetta kept piling up. By 2016, five priests at Orán were supporting the accusations raised by two former seminarians in that diocese, as this AP story, in English, from 2022 tells.
By October 2021, Rome demanded Zanchetta’s resignation from his post at the curia. His case was originally on trial in 2022 and a tribunal sentenced him to four and a half years of effective prison.
As usual, he was able to avoid prison while claiming to be sick. The Argentine authorities allowed Zanchetta to receive medical treatment in Rome, despite the opposition of the officials dealing with his case, and questions about who is paying for the travel and the treatment.
Despite the accusations and the now two sentences, he remains a bishop and keeps the title as “emeritus bishop of Orán.” His page at Catholic-Hierarchy.org reports his exit from the diocese as a resignation, so there is no trace there any wrongdoing.
As far as the Vatican is concerned it would be up to Argentine Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, the head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, to decide if Zanchetta remains a bishop.
As far as the Argentine government is concerned Zanchetta’s case is relevant because recently, during an address at Davos, Switzerland, on January 23rd, 2025, Javier Milei went into one of his now usual rants against gay individuals, claiming, without any evidence, that being gay and being pedophile are almost the same.
At Davos, Milei said:
- In fact, just a few weeks ago, there were headlines around the world regarding the case of two gay Americans who championed the banners of sexual diversity and were sentenced to 100 years in prison for abusing and filming their adopted children for more than two years. I want to be clear when I say abuse, this is no euphemism because in its most extreme forms, gender ideology is outright child abuse. They are pedophiles. So, I want to know who would support that kind of behavior.
Even if the case from the state of Georgia is real, there is no way to believe what Milei implies there: that all LGTBQ persons are predators.
In any case, with Zanchetta’s case he would have a good case for meaningful punishment of an actual case of sexual abuse, will he get involved in the issue?
https://losangelespress.org/english-edition/2025/feb/02/sodalitium-a-suppression-of-sorts-10966.html