Pope Dissolves Conservative Catholic Movement

Pope Francis has taken the remarkable step of dissolving a Peruvian-based Catholic movement, the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, after years of attempts at reform and a Vatican investigation. The probe uncovered sexual abuses by its founder, financial mismanagement by its leaders, and spiritual abuses by its top members, the AP reports.

• The Sodalitium on Monday confirmed the dissolution, which was conveyed to an assembly of its members by Francis' top legal adviser, Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda. In revealing the dissolution in a statement, the group lamented that news of Francis' decision had been leaked by two members attending the assembly who were "definitively expelled."

• The group provided no details, saying only that the "central information" about the dissolution that was reported by Spanish-language site Infovaticana "was true but it contained several inaccuracies." It didn't say what the inaccuracies were.
• Dissolution, or suppression, of a pontifically recognized religious movement is a major undertaking for a pope, all the more so for a Jesuit pope given the Jesuit religious order was itself suppressed in the 1700s.
• The SCV dissolution marks a final end to what has amounted to a slow death of the movement, which was founded in 1971 as one of several Catholic societies born as a conservative reaction to the left-leaning liberation theology movement that swept through Latin America. At its height, the group counted about 20,000 members across South America and the US. It was enormously influential in Peru.

• But former members complained to the Lima archdiocese in 2011 about abuses by its founder, Luis Figari, and other claims that 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.
• In 2017, a report commissioned by the group's leadership determined that Figari sodomized his recruits and subjected them to humiliating psychological and other sexual abuses.
• After an attempt at reform, Francis sent his two most trusted investigators, Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, to look into the Sodalitium abuses. Their report uncovered "sadistic" sect-like abuses of power, authority, and spirituality, as well as economic abuses in administering church money.

(More Pope Francis stories.)