Pope dissolves Peru-based Catholic movement after Vatican investigation
Pope dissolves Peru-based Catholic movement after Vatican investigation
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Report uncovered ‘sadistic’ sect-like abuses of power at Sodalitium of Christian Life. Pope Francis has taken the remarkable step of dissolving a Peruvian-based Catholic movement, the Sodalitium of Christian Life (SCV), after years of attempts at reform and a Vatican investigation. The investigation uncovered sexual abuses by its founder, financial mismanagement by its leaders and spiritual abuses by its top members.
The Sodalitium on Monday confirmed the dissolution, which was conveyed to an assembly of its members in Aparecida, Brazil, at the weekend by the pope’s top legal adviser, Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda. In revealing the dissolution in a statement, the group lamented that news of Francis’s decision had been leaked by two members attending the assembly, who were “definitively expelled”.
It 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 did not say what the inaccuracies were. The Vatican has not responded to several requests for comment. Dissolution – or suppression – of a pontifically recognised religious movement is a significant 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, which had been rumoured, marks an 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.
