PERU
Crux
August 6, 2018
By Elise Harris
[Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of a three-part series exploring ties between Cardinal Francisco Errázuriz of Chile, a close papal confidante, and Peruvian layman Luis Fernando Figari, who’s now accused of sexual abuse and abuses of power and conscience within the prominent lay movement he founded.]
At the beginning of the sexual abuse scandals in Catholicism, the best-known perpetrators were priests whose names quickly became notorious, such as John Geoghan, Lawrence Murphy and Oliver O’Grady, and the burning challenge was establishing detection and disciplinary systems to prevent such predator clergy from going undetected and unpunished.
Two decades later, those goals remain a work in progress, as the recent case of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick illustrates. However, where the new systems for vigilance established in the years since work, they’re considered state of the art, and many child protection experts now regard the Catholic Church as a pacesetter.
Yet Catholicism is not composed entirely of priests and bishops, nor is the Church’s institutional infrastructure entirely defined by clerical organizations, dioceses and religious orders. There’s also a vast galaxy of lay movements and mixed clerical and lay institutes, which, many observers say, haven’t quite reckoned with the implications of the sexual abuse crisis in the same way as other Catholic institutions.
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