As a missionary and bishop in Peru, the future Pope Leo came face-to-face with one of the most serious and far-reaching scandals in the church in Latin America.
For years, there were allegations of abuse within the hugely influential Catholic society Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), which had deep ties to Peru’s powerful and wealthy.
The scandal came to a head in 2015, the year after Leo, then known as Robert Prevost, was appointed bishop in the northern city of Chiclayo. A book written by one of the victims, Pedro Salinas, with journalist Paola Ugaz, “Half Monks, Half Soldiers,” described alleged beatings, humiliation and sexual assault in stark detail from 30 anonymous victims that enflamed the country.
Several survivors in Peru, Ugaz and a Vatican source closely involved in the case told CNN that Leo’s eventual intervention – after a key meeting in 2019 and a crucial promotion in Rome – is what finally kicked the Church into taking dramatic action.
A secret brotherhood
When Oscar Osterling formally joined SCV in 1992, he was instructed not to tell his parents about his loyalty oath – a secrecy that appealed to the then-teenager. He would go on to spend more than two decades with SCV, only breaking out in his mid-thirties as the first allegations began to surface.
Founded in 1971 in Peru as a lay group, the Sodalitium was politically driven as a fight back against the rise of liberation theology in Latin America, a radical movement which began in the 1960s and focused on supporting the poor. The society controlled several communities and ran religious schools in the southern part of the country, its members and students mostly drawn from the country’s elite.
At one point, SCV had 20,000 members across South America and parts of the United States – and went on to develop strong ties with Denver and Colorado, including links with conservative Catholic media.
Victims complained of abuses by founder Luis Fernando Figari to the archdiocese in Peru’s capital city Lima as early as 2011, and possibly before. Figari has always maintained his innocence with his lawyer telling CNN in January that Figari has not been convicted in a court of law for the allegations.
But hearing the others’ accounts, Osterling says he realized the strangeness of his own experience; he alleges that Figari would film him and other young converts standing in their underpants in the middle of the night during a spiritual retreat.
“In my case it did not escalate to a full sexual assault,” he says. He now believes he and his cohort were being groomed.
Another alleged victim told CNN that he was raped by Figari at least three times in the 1970s, when he turned 17. It was “the only way to correctly see his aura,” he recalls the older man telling him.
While dozens of young Peruvians have alleged they were victimized or bullied by Figari and other senior members of SVC, the topic remains taboo in ultra-Catholic Peru, and only a few have chosen to make details of their allegations public.
Prevost, who lived in Peru as a missionary in the 1980s and the 1990s, would have heard about these accounts while serving as Bishop of Chiclayo starting in 2014, especially following the publication of Ugaz and Salinas’ bombshell book.
Ugaz and Salinas also accused José Antonio Eguren, an archbishop in the coastal diocese of Piura – where Prevost worked as a young priest and which neighbors his diocese of Chiclayo – of protecting the SCV despite knowing about alleged abuses within it.
Eguren fought back with a defamation lawsuit alleging this was untrue and harmed his honor and reputation, though he later dropped the case.
According to Ugaz, who has faced a long campaign of legal actions and death threats around her reporting on the Sodalitium case, she received a message of solidarity during this time from Prevost and two other bishops.