PERU
Associated Press
BY NICOLE WINFIELD AND FRANKLIN BRICENO
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LIMA, Peru (AP) — Victims of Latin America’s latest charismatic Catholic leader-turned-sexual predator are denouncing the Vatican’s handling of the case, saying the six-year delay and final resolution are anything but satisfactory for survivors of his sexual, psychological and physical violence.
“It’s really shameful,” said Pedro Salinas, who blew the whistle in 2015 on the twisted practices of the Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, and was himself a victim of Luis Fernando Figari’s psychological abuse.
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.
The group counts some 20,000 members across South America and the U.S.
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.
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