(PERU)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
October 7, 2024
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Why Pope Francis singled out the Sodalitium with a Special Mission to probe abuse and violence in that Peruvian organization?
Abuse wise, Mexico, Spain, and Argentina, would need similar probes, but on top of abuse, sexual and otherwise, the Sodalitium undermines its own church’s authority.
Politicization of religious practice is not new to Peru or Latin America, but at the Sodalitium it goes against the Church’s own interest and future.
What makes the Peruvian Sodalitium a catalog of sorts of the worst features of Roman Catholicism in Latin America? What made Pope Francis willing to act on that organization in ways that he has avoided up until now with the Mexican Legion of Christ, the Spanish Opus Dei, or the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word?
Those three organizations are as abusive as the Sodalitium; the Legion, the Opus, the Institute, and the Sodalitium all share a political theology marked by the attempt of the religious colonizing, even subjugating the political to the most authoritarian features of an understanding of Roman Catholicism going against the grain of the second Vatican Council (1962-5).
The politicization of Roman Catholicism is not new to Latin America. It has been a defining feature of the evolution of the Latin American countries, and it is in constant change.
Moreover, as argued in a previous installment of this series, the politicization of Latin American religious beliefs has crossed the border from Mexico into the United States allowing for the kidnapping of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
As to prove my point, back on September 8th, Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, and former President of the United States went as far as to post a congratulatory message on what used to be Twitter to “celebrate” Mary’s birthday using an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
His tweet was immediately reposted and amplified by Eduardo Verástegui, the Mexican soap-opera actor and politician wannabe who already played some minor role in Trump’s 2020 campaign, and who is eager to play it again this year.
Main problem in Peru is that the extreme politicization of Roman Catholicism goes against the self-preservation of the Church. If one goes with some caution over the excommunication issued by Pope Francis one will find that the Pope sees Giuliana Caccia Arana and his fellow cultural warrior Sebastián Blanco Eguiluz as prompting what the Roman Catholic Church has been desperately tying to avoid at all costs, from Mexico down to Chile and Argentina: civil authorities probing their church’s probes on sexual abuse.
Even in Canada, Thomas Rosica is fighting to keep civil authorities there from ruling on a sexual harassment case brought against him, as told in the last paragraphs of the story, linked below, of a Brazilian priest accused of abusing underage girls.
[English Edition: The crime of Father Araújo]
What is worse. Caccia Arana’s and Blanco Eguiluz’s complaint at the Peruvian Nation Attorney’s office had the potential to implicate Pope Francis himself as the excommunication decree states in one of its paragraphs.
Looking for Giuliana
Caccia Arana and Blanco Eguiluz are angry, also, because Pope Francis uncovered how they were willing to sabotage his probe on the Sodalitium by falsely claiming that both of them were victims of sexual abuse by some of the former members of that organization that have filed formal complaints with the civil authorities and the leaders of the Catholic Church.
What makes a woman like Caccia Arana do that?
The answer is right there in her Facebook profile where she renders herself as there to “wage cultural battles”. That, by the way, is not my translation of her Spanish-speaking profile. That is how Facebook automatically translates her profile into English.
As the piece published over here last week states, she would be the perfect cast member for the Trad Wives of Lima, if such a program ever existed. She relishes on displaying their allegiance to her understanding of Peruvian nationalism and Roman Catholicism as understood by Peruvian upper classes.
[English Edition: Excommunications, Pope Francis’s response to abuse cover-up]
Her Facebook profile provides another hint as to understand how she wages the “cultural battle” she is so proud to promote. That idea of being a player, a character, in a “cultural battle” is as close as the so-called “cultural wars” in the United States and other English-speaking countries as it could be.
Her as a character of a “cultural battle” follows a similar intuition about the role of religion in public life as the idea of the Sodalitium members as “half monks and half soldiers.”
Previous installments of this series devoted to the Sodalitium have provided details as to what that “double identity” entails, so you just need to click on any of them.
That is one of the reasons why Germán Doig Klinge and Luis Fernando Figari, the two “major” founders of the Sodalitium were so willing to exert violence against the recruits of their organization.
Religion and political violence
They normalized violent behavior in their “order” because they assumed that was the only way to confront the very violent reality of Peruvian public life back in the second half of the 20th century.
Political violence in Peru is not new. Sadly, it has been a feature of public life throughout its history. It is impossible to go over the underlying reasons for the kind of violence that Peru lived, hence the suggestion in the previous installment on this series to watch The dancer upstairs as a summary of how public life in the Andean country was engulfed by political violence when Shining Path, Tupac Amaru, and the Peruvian Armed Forces fought in the second half of the 20th century.
Other analysis of the roots of political violence there have been published recently by Human Rights Watch (available here in English and here in Spanish), by the so-called International Crisis Group (available here in English and here in Spanish), the North American Congress on Latin America (some of their pieces about Peru are either in English and/or Spanish here), among many others.
If you read Spanish, I encourage you to go over the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, the preeminent think-tank in the Andean country to read the many analyses they have published over 60 years of work.
Main problem as far as violence is concerned is that, despite the most ordinary understanding of Christianity and Roman Catholicism as a religion seeking peace and understanding, the Sodalitium bet was on developing a generation of more violent warriors (the idea of “half monks, half soldiers”); cultural warriors willing to do what Caccia Arana is doing nowadays.
[The trailer from The dancer upstairs, audio in English. Low resolution.]
It is unavoidable to trace parallelisms between what Caccia Arana did in Peru when using a lie (her as a victim of sexual abuse) to attack the Pope to prove her point that nothing actually happened in the Sodalitium with what Donald Trump and J. D. Vance are doing in the U.S. presidential campaign to use lies (“They are eating the cats!”) to—allegedly position an issue in the public agenda.
Main problem in Caccia Arana’s case is that what she is attempting is impossible to accept when one takes into consideration that Alessandro Moroni already acknowledged, almost 10 years ago, 66 victims of abuse, sexual or otherwise, at the Sodalitium despite the stringent requirements to be accepted as such by a commission managed and paid by the leaders of that organization.
Abuse in the name of God
It is not as if Pope Francis was trying to discredit the Sodalitium by pretending that there were victims there. Or that he was paying attention to what the Sodalitium and the media and organizations loyal to the order render as their enemies in Peruvian politics.
Actually, if the Roman Catholic Church has been doing something for the last 30 years or so, is trying to quash any account of what was actually happening at that religious “order”.
Pope Francis himself was unwilling to pay attention to the voices of the victims of clergy sexual abuse, as his pastoral trip to Chile and Peru back in January of 2018. If he was willing to bring the Chilean bishops back to Rome and get their early resignations, that was not the case in Peru.
One must credit, of course, the brave resistance put out by Chilean lay persons and a handful of priests and nuns in Osorno, who resisted the appointment of Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid, one of Fernando Karadima’s accomplices in the “saga” of sexual abuse at the parish of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Providencia, a posh neighborhood in the Chilean capital.
They resisted for almost three years Barros Madrid’s appointment to Osorno in ways that no other Latin American country has seen in their history, including Peru were calling out the abuses perpetrated by clergy is even harder than in Chile or elsewhere in Latin America because of the very restrictive legislation that protects sexual predators.
And it was not only Francis. John Paul II played the role of a deaf Pope when dealing with any accusation about religious sexual abuse in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, since accusations about Marcial Maciel and Carlos Miguel Buela emerged in the 1990s.
Bergoglio himself was a victim of John Paul II’s induced “deafness.” Bergoglio and all the Argentine Conference of Bishops asked Rome to suppress the Institute of the Incarnate Word.
Far from hearing them, Wojtyla dismissed the request. Noticeably, the only Argentine bishop supporting Buela and the Institute of the Incarnate Word was Opus Dei “associate” in Argentina, the archbishop of La Plata, Héctor Rubén Aguer.
[English Edition: El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, contrasting responses to sexual abuse]
Karol Wojtyla dealt with the reality of clergy sexual abuse in Canada and the United States only because the judiciary systems of those two countries are better suited to deal with that kind of allegations.
Previous installments of this series have proved that when comparing the cases of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, in the United States, linked two paragraphs above or then comparing the responses from the Roman Catholic dioceses in the state of California in the United States (linked above), when compared to those of the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur in Mexico, as the stories linked above show.
[English Edition: Baja California and the clergy sexual abuse crisis]
So, who is Giuliana?
In her Facebook profile page, Giuliana Caccia Arana claims to be a “social communicator” which is the odd way some people doing journalism-like activities use to describe their activities in Latin America.
That way to describe what a journalist does is part of what in Mexico is known as Burocrañol, a portmanteau of Burocracia (Bureaucracy) and Español (Spanish), a variety of Spanish used by the elites in Latin America to render themselves as different, distant, special, and better-educated than the populace in their countries.
But the main problem remains even when Caccia Arana renders herself a journalist, because what she does is not journalism, but an effort to amplify what the Peruvian far-right sees fit.
In her pieces and social media postings one finds and endless stream of attacks against the United Nations, the Interamerican Court of Human Rights, any foreign media paying attention to what happens Human Rights wise in the Andean country.
When the issue is sexual abuse in the Sodalitium her attitude has been the same as other leaders in the Roman Catholic Church. Rejecting that it happens; to minimize if it happens; blame gay clergy if in the cases when it happens and, more broadly, to render the issue as part of the attacks from the “enemies of the Church.”
The sole exception to that “rule” of sorts about dismissing accusations on clergy sexual abuse became known when current chair of the Vatican’s Commission on Latin America, U.S. Cardinal Robert Prevost, came under fire for his role on the case the story linked immediately below tells.
[English Edition: From Chicago to Chiclayo, sexual abuse victims are pawns]
In an unexpected turn of events, La Abeja (The Bee), a Peruvian medium close to Caccia Arana and the Peruvian far-right, sided with the victims in the diocese of Chiclayo (see here) the article is available only in Spanish, but many of the underlying assumption in La Abeja’s piece come from the pieces published in the English-speaking world by EWTN and their associates.
It should not surprise that Caccia Arana’s timelines in social media follow closely what that medium. La abeja publishes an endless stream of pieces rejecting any positions supported by Pope Francis. Their take on the clergy sexual abuse case in Chiclayo stems from the fact that Prevost is close to Francis.
In giving some voice to the victims in Chiclayo, La abeja and their Peruvian and foreign allies, as EWTN, were not helping the victims, but attacking Pope Francis. That was even more evident when dealing with Caccia Arana’s excommunication.
English Edition: Figari, the Sodalitium and sexual abuse: much ado about nothing
Luciano Revoredo, La abeja’s editor-in-chief, and José Romero, a contributor at that medium are the most visible defenders of Caccia Arana on this issue. Luciano Revoredo deserves a full profile on his own, suffice to say at this point that he and Caccia Arana are key figures in the Peruvian far-right.
A marker from Navarra
There is yet another marker of the way Caccia Arana understands her role in her church and in Peruvian public life at large in her Facebook profile. She renders herself as alum of a degree (magister) in “Marriage and Family” at the University of Navarra in Spain, an institution in the Pamplona metropolitan area in Northern Spain, close to the border with France, as the map after this paragraph shows.
The university is the global flagship institution of the Opus Dei. If someone, such as Caccia Arana, claims to be a student or an alum from that institution chances are, with the relative exception of Law, he or she attended that college because of the links, formal and informal, between the college and the Opus Dei and the peculiar take, even when compared to other Roman Catholic colleges, that university and order have of Catholic theology and tradition.
The University published, back in 2023, a pamphlet promoting their Founder’s Week, a week dedicated to Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, the Opus Dei founder. The pamphlet, available at the box after, mixes Spanish with some phrases in English, as the very title of “Founder’s week” hints.
A pamphlet from the University of Navarra on their relation with Opus Dei.
That mixing and matching of Spanish and English, is yet another marker of the elites in countries with a majority of Spanish-speakers, trying to mark themselves as different, and superior, because of their command of two or three languages, as in the case of Burocrañol.
A final marker of Caccia Arana is her relationship with the Asociación Origen, a think-tank of sorts, aligned with the radical far-right in Latin America. Origen describes itself as a “personalist think-tank generating strategies and vanguardist actions in the cultural battle.”
As in the case of her Facebook profile, the idea of “cultural battle” has multiple implications. On the one hand, it links her with the notion of the “half monk (half nun?), half soldier” so dear to the Sodalitium and more broadly to the Latin American far-right, as the idea of said mythological figure is present not only in the Sodalitium, but also in the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word, and the Mexican Legion of Christ, among other groups.
Personalist refers to a certain philosophy centered on the person, the human being, but the Latin American far right seized it to render itself as a credible alternative to other philosophies and ideologies.
In the English-speaking world an author pushing this tradition is Jonas Norgaard Mortensen. The introduction to his book The common good. An introduction to personalism is available here as PDF.
In the Spanish-speaking world, a leading proponent of this school is Juan Manuel Burgos. One chapter of his book Introducción al personalismo is available here, but unlike the English-speaking source, it requires registration to download.
Under the shadow of Fujimori
Despite their claims of being personalists, their political allegiances lie in the far right of the Latin American political spectrum. In the current map of political loyalties in Latin America they are firmly on Javier Milei’s side, the Argentine President.
In Peru, they were staunch supporters of Alberto Fujimori until his death. In that regard they were active supporters of the campaign that allowed to die in his house and not in jail as a tribunal had decided previously.
Even if it is impossible to find a consensus as to the cause of the current crises, some of it comes from the campaign to free and exonerate Fujimori in the Andean nation.
Over the last ten years, Peru has had eight Presidents: Ollanta Humala, 2011-6; Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, 2016-8; Martín Vizcarra, 2018-20; Mercedes Aráoz, 2019; Manuel Merino, 2020; Francisco Sagastegui, 2020-1; Pedro Castillo, 2021-2 y Dina Boluarte, since 2022.
Out of eleven former presidents since Fujimori, nine have gone through some judiciary process, four former presidents, including Fujimori, have spent some time in jail. Before going through a trial on corruption, Alan García, decided to kill himself back in 2019.
No party holds a clear control of the single-camera Peruvian congress. That allows for small parties exert exorbitant quotas of power when the larger parties try to secure votes on key issues. As a consequence, any reform is subject of blackmail from the smaller parliamentary groups in Lima.
As it happened recently in Mexico, the Peruvian Judiciary is slated to go through what the Congress and Dina Boluarte, the current Peruvian President, render as an improvement.
In both countries it is hard to forecast the potential outcomes of the reform of the Judiciary, but while in Mexico the new government has an overwhelming control of the Legislative branch, in Peru the opposite is true.
At this point, since Caccia Arana was willing to contact the Holy See to argue her case, the excommunication is only hanging over her head as a potential outcome if she goes back to attack the Special Mission headed by archbishop Charles J. Scicluna.
Over at what used to be Twitter she published the message that appears after this paragraph, although it is only available in Spanish. There she splits hairs trying to justify her attack on the Special Mission but declaring her loyalty to the Pope.
It is worth mentioning that she is not currently active in social media. At least for the time being, to avoid the appearance of confrontation with Pope Francis.
Her position stands in contrast with Alejandro Bermúdez Rosell’s the former boss at ACI Prensa, who still rejects the fact that abuse was common currency at the Sodalitium, as his posting over that social media proves.
Here is where the key difference lies. If something has prevented any meaningful action on other predatory Roman Catholic orders is that they have restrained from going where only the Sodalitium has gone: to openly challenge the reigning Pope.
New Cardinals
On Sunday morning, Roman Catholic media went into alert when Rome announced the new members of the College of Cardinals, the 120-member, all male, multinational body, that at some point will elect Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s successor.
As far as Peru is concerned, archbishop Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio will be a Cardinal, as the other 20 new members of the College of Cardinals, starting on December 8th.
Another new member will be Fernando Natalio Chomalí Garib, the archbishop of Santiago de Chile. He is known for his attacks on Chilean victims of clergy sexual abuse in social media, so whatever good will brought the appointment of Castillo Mattasoglio ends immediately by the sad reality coming from Chile.
Newly appointed archbishop of Santiago del Estero, Argentina, Vicente Bokalic Iglic, will have a red hat too. His is a special appointment since it used to be that Buenos Aires was the primate see of the Church in Argentina, as it is Mexico City in Mexico.
The fact, however, is that there was no historical evidence to support the position of Buenos Aires as the Argentine primate see. The elevation of Santiago del Estero, in the Northwest province of Tucumán, creates an odd situation in which the Archdiocese of Tucumán will have as its suffragan diocese the newly minted Archdiocese of Santiago del Estero.
Pope Francis is trying to send there a message to his church and to the politicians in Argentina but, as in Mexico and Peru, the political polarization makes it almost impossible to genuinely appreciate the meaning of this appointment.
Another bishop getting a red hat is the current archbishop of Guayaquil, Ecuador, Luis Gerardo Cabrera Herrera. This is the first time Guayaquil gets his archbishop to be a Cardinal instead of Quito, the capital of Ecuador.
In Brazil, Jaime Spengler, archbishop of Porto Alegre got the promotion. Another unusual pick for the College of Cardinals, although he is the current chair of CELAM, the Latin American Episcopal Council, an entity coordinating the work of the conferences of Roman Catholic Bishops, so he holds a key position in the global Church now.
Two absences are noteworthy: no Mexican got a red hat this time around. It looks like the chances of Rogelio Cabrera López to become a Cardinal are over, unless Pope Francis decides to promote him next year, which will be his last as archbishop of Monterrey.
Also, no archbishop from the United States got the promotion, more so in the case of José Horacio Gómez, the Mexican-born archbishop of Los Ángeles and member of the Opus Dei, who many in the Catholic far-right would like to see sporting the red hat.
Other new members of the College of Cardinals are:
From Canada: Francis Leo, archbishop of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, a 53-year-old.
From Asia: Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, Archbishop of Tōkyō, Japan, a 66-year-old; Pablo Virgilio Siongco David, bishop of Kalookan, Philippines, 65; Ladislav Nemet, archbishop of Beograd, Serbia, 68; Paskalis Bruno Syukur, bishop of Bogor, Indonesia, 62; Dominique Joseph Mathieu, archbishop of Teheran-Ispahan, Iran, 61.
From Australia: Mykola Bychok, bishop of Saints Peter and Paul of Melbourne, Ukrainian rite, Australia; the youngest in this cohort of Cardinals at 44, and a reminder of how relevant the Russian invasion of Ukraine is to Pope Francis.
From Africa: Ignace Bessi Dogbo, archbishop of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, 63. Jean-Paul Vesco, archbishop of Alger, Algeria, 62.
From Europe: Roberto Repole, archbishop of Torino (Turin), Italy, 57. Baldassare Reina, Vicar General of Rome, Italy, 54. Rolandas Makrickas, coadjutor archpriest of the Saint Mary Major Basilica, 52. Timothy Peter Joseph Radcliffe, priest of the Order of Friars Preachers (Dominicans) from the United Kingdom, 79. Fabio Baggio, Under Secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development in the Roman Curia, 59. George Jacob Koovakad, official of the Secretariat of State in the Roman Curia, Age: 51.
Also, Pope Francis appointed as Cardinal the former nuncio to Colombia Angelo Acerbi. He is already 99 years-old, so his is a symbolic gesture to a former aide to Pope Paul VI, who was the victim of a “soft” kidnapping in 1979.
The M-19 guerrilla kidnapped Acerbi and other diplomats representing their countries in Colombia. John Paul II sent him a letter that was published in 1980, available only in Italian and Spanish here.