(PERU)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
May 25, 2026
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
In Peru, Cardinal Carlos Castillo, with Pope Leo XIV’s support, acknowledged the scale of abuse at the Sodalitium of Christian Life.
But gestures from the Catholic Church leadership are dime a dozen. Without real commitment from the governments, it is hard to put an end to abuse.
Whether in Peru with the Sodalitium, in Mexico with the Luz del Mundo Church or elsewhere, abuse is only possible if the government allows it to happen.
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May is coming to an end with an avalanche of news and developments hard to dismiss if one wants to understand the reach of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Latin America. Sadly, unlike what happens in the United States, Canada, France, Germany and more recently Spain, the news is not always auspicious.
For the most part, as the last two installments of this series proved, the key issue is how Latin American countries lack the tools, perhaps the political will one finds elsewhere, to tackle the root causes of sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise, which is not the Catholic Church’s sexual morals, but the inability of the region’s systems of justice to solve the issue.
That the issue is not the Catholic Church’s theology can be seen in the strikingly different responses one finds when comparing the diocese of San Diego, California, to the archdiocese of Tijuana, Baja California or the dioceses of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.
Regardless of the ongoing political crisis in the United States, the worst since the Civil War, it is clear that the U.S. system of justice is still able to force Catholic dioceses and any other religious organization into a practice of accountability and transparency one is unable to find when crossing the border to Mexico.
Recently, the Mexican government, in the midst of an alley fight with its U.S. counterpart over the future of Rubén Rocha Moya, the now former governor of Sinaloa and nine local celebrities in that Mexican state, was forced by the sheer absurdity of its behavior into changing its take when dealing with the Luz del Mundo Church.
Despite the 2022 conviction in California of Naasón Joaquín García, the leader of that religious organization, the Mexican government had been less than willing to touch him and his inner circle.
Even the U.S. federal government 2025 decision to pursue federal charges against Joaquín García and his accomplices in the Luz del Mundo leadership was not enough, on its own, for the Mexican government to go after that religious organization.
Absurd decisions
For unknown reasons, it was only after Spanish-speaking media showcased the absurdity of the imminent decision of the Mexican government in late 2025 to dismiss any charge in Mexico, that Claudia Sheinbaum’s government forced the allegedly autonomous Nation’s Attorney to visit the issue and use what the authorities in California had already uncovered about Joaquín García’s binational networks of clergy sexual abuse and human trafficking to pursue criminal charges in Mexico.
Some would say that it is relatively easy to understand why the Mexican government was unwilling to go after Naasón Joaquín García and his accomplices, since the Luz del Mundo Church has been a key player in Mexican states such as Jalisco or Baja California, where Sheinbaum’s party benefits from the sect-like behavior of the Luz del Mundo members when it comes to casting a vote.
But even if one is willing to concede that, the issue remains: sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise is hardly a priority for the Mexican government as it happens with other violations of human rights, and Mexico is by no accounts an outlier when thinking about what happens in the rest of Latin America.
That is why the last two installments of this series paid attention to what is happening these days in Chile and Argentina when the governments there try to decide what to do with the many pending cases clogging the courthouses.
Not that nothing happens in Latin America. The liturgies to ask for forgiveness and to promise swift action when dealing with clergy sexual abuse are a dime a dozen. When writing these lines in Mexico City it is possible to follow the social media of the Archdiocese of Lima, whose leader, Cardinal Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio is trying to atone for the many sins of his predecessor at the Peruvian capital, Opus Dei Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani.
Over Saturday it was possible to see how Cardinal Castillo, other Peruvian prelates and noticeably Spaniard priest Jordi Bertomeu, a high-ranking officer at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and now Leo XIV’s “special envoy” in Lima to deal, among other issues with the suppression of the so-called Sodalitium of Christian Life, a predatory order-like organization that has been the subject of several installments of this series.
Unlike other times or cases, where the media has a hard time trying to extract a statement from Church officials dealing with these issues, on Saturday, Bertomeu was more than willing to entertain a series of questions from a local radio station that almost immediately uploaded the soundbite to its social media, letting the world know that, for now, and at least as far as Leo XIV and those closer to him in the Peruvian Conference of Catholic Bishops, they are aware of how much damage the Sodalitium caused in Catacaos and other Peruvian towns and regions.
Complexity
The situation in Catacaos reveals a level of structural crisis hard to find elsewhere, as there the Sodalitium engaged in the kind of activity one usually finds in Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia and other Latin American countries suffering from the effects of large-scale drug production.
The Sodalitium tried to use to its benefit the very generous Peruvian laws and regulations dealing with cemeteries, to do so, they needed land, the way clandestine mining operations and drug cartels need full control of the land, so they targeted marginalized communities in Catacaos.
As it is usually the case all over Latin America, resistance movements emerge and, as it is also usually the case, people trying to defend their ancestral lands died. That was the case of Guadalupe Zapata Sosa who, 15 years after his death, became the main focus of a funeral Mass presided by Cardinal Castillo Mattasoglio among other members of the Peruvian Catholic hierarchy.
Zapata Sosa died back in December 2011 and even if there is enough evidence of the kind of violence the groups linked to the Sodalitium exerted to seize roughly 1,200 hectares, roughly over 4.6 square miles or the equivalent of 211 full-sized Yankee Stadiums from New York City or 187 Azteca Stadium buildings from Mexico City, there is little or no evidence of enough will to address and solve the extremely complex dispute involving the peasants of Catacaos and the groups linked to the Sodalitium.
In that respect, Cardinal Castillo’s trip to Catacaos, his will to preside over the funeral Mass of Zapata Sosa and his message stressing the Catholic leadership’s 20-year delay in acknowledging the scale of the abuse are signs that the incoming Peruvian government may not be equipped to acknowledge or handle this level of complexity.
Keiko Fujimori won with relative ease her ticket to the second round of the presidential election; however, at this point it is impossible for her to win without, at least, the acquiescence of Opus Dei member Rafael López Aliaga.
López Aliaga, the current mayor of Lima, Porky, as he likes to call himself, came third in the first round of the election and he has been less than willing to openly endorse Fujimori, who represents, on the one hand, her father’s own brand of Authoritarian and Populist rule, but also the Peruvian right’s last hope to avoid a second consecutive win by Pedro Castillo’s party in a presidential election.
Scorched-earth approaches
Even if there are differences between Fujimori’s and López Aliaga’s brands of conservative Peruvian politics, there is a scorched-earth approach in the ways both Fujimori and Roberto Sánchez, the other presidential candidate in the second round, approach the election. If you read Spanish, Gonzalo Banda’s take on the election offers a good insight from its very title: “Voting in the ruins”.
In framing the presidential election once again as an apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil, both Fujimori and Sánchez invite the extremes of their political coalitions to blackmail them, exchanging votes for impunity as the Luz del Mundo Church has been doing in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the last 40 years or so.
Pedro Castillo is currently in jail, accused of having attempted a Coup. Even if removing him was relatively easy for a Congress where Keiko Fujimori is the undisputed real leader, more than a decade of political instability has had devastating effects on Peruvian public life. The last President able to end his term was Ollanta Humala, who took office in 2011, a few months before Zapata Sosa was killed in Catacaos, and ended, in the midst of a scandal and with a deeply divided Congress in 2016.
Since then, both Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (elected in 2016) and Pedro Castillo (elected in 2021) have been forced out of office. Depending on the criteria one follows, since 2006, when Alan García was reelected to office, Peru has been ruled by eleven different presidents, and that is something it is impossible to dismiss when thinking about the kind of major decision making required to deal with the Sodalitium legacy.
Again, the religious suppression of it already happened in Rome back in April 2025. What is unclear is whether the incoming Peruvian government would dismantle the structures that made possible what happened back in 2011 in Catacaos.
Rome can dissolve a religious order, but it cannot dissolve civil property deeds or freeze corporate assets shielded by Peruvian law. That requires a political and judicial will currently held hostage by the mechanics of the runoff.
With Rafael López Aliaga’s legislative bloc poised to act as a crucial swing vote for whoever wins the Presidency, his lawmakers become the ultimate shield to protect his allies within the suppressed organization, transforming judicial accountability into a tradable currency on the floor of the Peruvian Congress.
Notable among Porky’s allies are the members of the Sodalitium. Back in 2021, Porky’s vice president candidate was Neldy Mendoza, a female with close ties with the structures and operation of the Sodalitium at more than one level. She was so intransigent in her own brand of conservatism that she became dead weight for the campaign, but those loyalties are not ephemeral, much less in the kind of hyper-polarized Peruvian political landscape, reminiscent of those in Buenos Aires and Washington, D.C., these days.
As it has been stressed over several installments of this series, formally the Sodalitium is anything but willing to acknowledge having any link with the firms involved in Catacaos and how they came to seize that land. It would be impossible to go over more than 15 years of violence and legal and political disputes here, suffice to say at this point that even if Zapata Sosa is the only Peruvian murdered directly as a consequence of this dispute, there are other victims.
Catacaos is roughly 125 miles or 200 kilometers north of Chiclayo, the Peruvian town where Robert Prevost came to be bishop back in 2015, so he is well aware of the extent of the abuses, the kind of violence that the partners of the Sodalitium were willing to exert in that rather isolated region of Peru.
The Vatican itself
When looking at Cardinal Castillo’s atonement liturgy at Catacaos Saint John the Baptist parish it is impossible not to wonder why those who actively favored the Sodalitium predatory practices were not there.
Some would see a silver lining in the fact that the Church’s leadership was willing to come forward and publicly and openly admit the many mistakes made when allowing and even furthering the growth of the Sodalitium and its many façades, whether as ghost-like non-for-profit or as firms.
And to be clear, the relationship between Zapata Sosa’s death in 2011 and the groups and firms linked, directly or indirectly, to the Sodalitium was acknowledged by Vatican News itself.
On Saturday May 23 and Sunday 24, when the Vatican’s own media usually pushes the standard mix of news with details of Pope Leo XIV’s activities during Sunday Mass and the Angelus, especially on Pentecost Sunday, the Holy See’s media operation published a couple of stories openly naming, even in their titles, the Sodalitium as the entity behind the abuses in Catacaos.
Although both stories are available only in Spanish, it is impossible to miss how the very titles immediately blame the Sodalitium as the responsible party for what happened there.
An unsigned story on Saturday was already setting the tone as the title reads: “In Peru a mass is celebrated on behalf of the peasant victims of the Sodalitium (“En Perú se celebra una misa por los campesinos víctimas del Sodalicio”, available here only in Spanish).
On Sunday, a more detailed piece signed by Salvatore Cernuzio, a major contributor to Vatican News as a sign of how relevant the issue is for the Dicastery of Communications, offered more details about the mass, the messages from the concelebrants, and about the Sodalitium’s role in what happened starting in the first decade of this century in Catacaos and how that eventually led to Zapata Sosa’s death.
Cernuzio titled his piece: “Peru. Cardinals and bishops kneel before victims of the Sodalitium: Pardon us” (Perú. Cardenales y obispos se arrodillan ante víctimas del Sodalicio: «Perdón» available only in Spanish here).
Cernuzio’s story uses a picture where Cardinal Castillo and his fellow Peruvian bishops, joined by Bertomeu, are on their knees and before Zapata Sosa’s relatives. But the very picture, available after this paragraph, tells the other side of the story: the current president, the first and second vice president of the Peruvian Conference of Catholic Bishops are nowhere to be seen.
Granted, the bishop of Lurín, Carlos Enrique García Camader, the current president of the Peruvian conference is in the middle of his own scandal stemming from the mismanagement of at least one case of clergy sexual abuse in his diocese, as the story linked after this paragraph told a few weeks ago.
However, that is not the case of Jorge Enrique Izaguirre Rafael, bishop of Chosica and Luis Alberto Barrera Pacheco, bishop of Callao, first and second vice presidents of that body respectively, and for reasons only they know, they were not there.
Cardinal Castillo’s homily is available in Spanish here at his diocese’s website.
Boosters
Also, none of the main supporters, boosters in more than one respect of the Sodalitium during its rise, were there. That is the case of Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, and José Antonio Eguren Anselmi, the former archbishop of Piura and former member of the Sodalitium who, as far as it is possible to know, were not at the parish of Saint John the Baptist in Catacaos.
Neither Cipriani nor Eguren have acknowledged any wrong doing. In Cipriani’s case, his reluctance to acknowledge mistakes is most notable because he openly challenged a “punishment” set by Pope Francis. Far from acknowledging that he abused a male minor who was under his care while he was a rising star in Opus Dei, Cipriani went back to Lima in January 2025 to receive a medal issued by his fellow Opus Dei member Rafael López Aliaga.
Eguren Anselmi, as many other members of the Sodalitium, has been more than willing to use any chance he has to play the victim and to criticize Pope Francis’s decision to expel him from the Sodalitium and later to suppress that order-like organization. He has not been as vocal or pugnacious as Giuliana Caccia, who was about to be excommunicated by Pope Francis, but the differences are of tone, not of substance.
In that respect, it is really hard to believe that, despite the Vatican’s will to stress how relevant this issue is to Leo XIV, there is a similar interest from the Peruvian bishops on this specific aspect of the many abuses perpetrated by the Sodalitium.
Contingent suppression?
Because of that, it is impossible not to wonder if the future of the actual suppression is contingent on whether the remains of the Peruvian Sodalitium, as much as the Mexican Luz del Mundo Church, can strike deals in the upcoming second round of the Peruvian presidential election as to find some favor from the next Peruvian government.
What should remain clear is that despite the express desire of both Pope Francis and Leo XIV, the Peruvian Sodalitium, as much as any predatory religious organization anywhere in the world, has friends in high places, willing to pull strings for them.
One only needs to go back to the ongoing conflict between Opus Dei and the diocese of Barbastro-Monzón, Spain over the control of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels, the so-called Sanctuary of Torreciudad (content in Spanish or here in French), to understand how even the Catholic dioceses and the bishops themselves are at risk when trying to assert their authority over Church buildings and property controlled by organizations with known sectarian and predatory practices.
It is clear that there is the need for some will from the Catholic Church to address the issues. One only needs to see what is about to happen in Spain today, with the opening statements at the trial of Francisco Javier Cuenca Villalba.
He is accused of using drugs to sexually abuse at least four adult females who sought his help and ended up subjected to a drug he used to rape them.
His superior, the bishop of Málaga, José Antonio Satué Huerto, acknowledged that, even if the judge was unwilling to ask for reparations, his diocese would pay for them, as the bishop himself says so in the video after this paragraph.
Granted, there is a chance that the bishop is trying to overplay his hand and it is hard to expect a similar take from all the other Catholic Bishops in Spain, but the fact remains: a trial is about to happen. In that respect, the authorities are doing what authorities in Latin America remain for the most part openly unwilling to do, or try to do without being open about such approach to the issue.
There will be time to see if the bishop actually delivers on his promise but also to see if the statute of limitations plays a role in this case. The reported abuse originally happened between 2014 and 2018, and the authorities in Spain only arrested Cuenca Villalba as recently as 2023, so there is a chance that there are other victims.
Something similar could be said of France where the survivors of the horrors at the former Catholic school of Our Lady of Bétharram are asking for a meeting with Pope Leo XIV during his upcoming visit to that European country in September of this year. It is unclear if there will be such a meeting, but so far Pope Prevost has been willing to meet with other survivors.
A prize?
In Mexico, there is expectation about what will happen with the diocese of Ciudad Juárez. José Guadalupe Torres Campos, who had been the bishop there since 2015, got a message from Rome sending him to Ecatepec, near Mexico City. It is unclear how to interpret such a change.
His tenure in Juárez was marred by several pitfalls, including the appointment of a local priest who is a Mexican and United States double citizen with open sympathies for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement as the diocese’s spokesperson.
What resulted from that was the permanent contradiction between the U.S. diocese of El Paso, with bishop Mark Seitz as one of Trump’s main critics there and the Mexican diocese of Juárez, whose spokesperson was more than willing to sprinkle holy water over Trump’s racist policies.
Torres Campos was never actually willing to comply with Pope Francis’s order to create a commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse in the diocese, and did nothing worth mentioning to address the many pending cases of clergy sexual abuse there, besides helping the clergy accused in those cases.
It is impossible to see his appointment to Ecatepec as a promotion, unless Rome is trying to send all the wrong messages with the imminent appointment of successors in the archdioceses of Tlalnepantla and Mexico City.
In Tlalnepantla, José Antonio Fernández Hurtado is less than two years away from sending his resignation letter to Rome. In Mexico City, Cardinal Carlos Aguiar Retes has been playing overtime for the last two years now, so any minute he could get news from Rome about the appointment of a successor.
Chances are he is doing his best to influence Joseph Spiteri, the current nuncio to Mexico, as much as Italian archbishop Filippo Iannone, the current head of the Dicastery for Bishops in Rome, about who should succeed him in the country’s capital.
Oddly enough, when recently the diocese of Azcapotzalco, suffragan of Mexico City, was declared vacant, the appointment of an apostolic administrator there went to Fernández Hurtado and not to Aguiar Retes. Perhaps it is a quiet sign letting the Aguiar Retes know how his run as one of the most effective “king” makers in the Mexican episcopate is about to end.
In any case, next week this series will go into more details about what happened before Torres Campos’s uneventful exit from Ciudad Juárez to Ecatepec.