Whistleblower asked for action on Peruvian founder 14 years ago

VALLECORSA – After news broke last week about the expulsion of the founder of an influential Peruvian lay group from the community, the original whistleblower on his abuses said she had asked that action be taken against him in 2010.

Speaking to Crux, Peruvian theologian Rocio Figueroa, who at the time belonged to the women’s branch of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV) founded by Peruvian layman Luis Fernando Figari, said she had asked that Figari be removed from leadership while still part of the community.

“In that moment, this was in 2010 and it was more or less in July. I said to him, I’m going to Lima and [Figari] must not be the superior of the SCV…I asked for three things: I asked to close the cause of beatification for Germán Doig; remove Figari as superior; and third, investigate Figari.”

The SCV, Figueroa said, “did the first two, [they] didn’t do the third…The same year December 2010 I went to Lima, and I had a meeting with Pedro Salinas, and we decided to investigate.”

The SCV saga

Figueroa, essentially the ‘deep throat’ of the SCV saga, is a former member of the Marian Community of Reconciliation (MCR), which until 2022 formed part of the broader SCV family. She is currently a professor of Systematic Theology at Catholic Theological College in Auckland.

She was one of five original members of the MCR and at one point served as superior general of the community, and she also worked as head of the women’s section in the former Vatican Council for Laity before uncovering abuses inside the SCV and, according to her account, being railroaded and bullied into silence for trying to sound the alarm.

The largest ecclesial lay movement in Peru, the SCV was founded by Figari in 1971. Born in Lima in 1947, Figari in addition to the SCV and the MCR also founded community of women religious, the Servants of the Plan of God; and an ecclesial movement, called the “Christian Life Movement,” all of which share the same spirituality.

Figari in 2017 was sanctioned by the Vatican after facing various allegations of sexual, physical, spiritual and psychological abuse against members of the group.

Last week Figari was expelled from the SCV after Pope Francis last year sent his top two investigators – Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, adjunct secretary of the disciplinary section of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), and Spanish Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, an official of that office – to inquire into ongoing allegations of misconduct, including financial corruption.

Allegations of abuse against the group were first made in 2000 by former SCV member José Enrique Escardó Steck, however, scandals involving the SCV did not explode until 2015, when former SCV member and journalist Pedro Salians and Peruvian journalist Paola Ugaz co-authored a book that detailed decades of alleged abuse in the SCV titled, Half Monks, Half Soldiers.

After Figari’s expulsion, the SCV issued a statement saying they welcomed the gesture as “an act of pastoral charity, justice, and reconciliation” for the community, and for victims, noting that they had asked the Vatican to expel Figari from the community in 2019.

However, Figueroa in her comments to Crux said it was wrong for the SCV to take credit for Figari’s ouster, saying she herself was the one who forced them to take initial action against him in 2010 for abuse of authority, before she realized he had also sexually abused members.

Uncovering a problem

Figueroa said she herself had been sexually abused by a high-ranking member of the SCV named Germán Doig Klinge, who for years was Figari’s second in command, serving as Vicar General of the SCV until his death in 2001.

In 2006, Figueroa said she confided to a fellow sister being inappropriately groped by Doig during yoga exercises apparently meant to teach her to control her sexuality. That sister, Figueroa said, told her another member of the SCV had had a similar experience, and that when he spoke out about it, “Figari said he’s crazy.”

“It was in that moment that I began to have the idea that something was wrong,” Figueroa said.

Figueroa said she and her fellow sister spent the next two years trying to identify other victims of Doig, and that once they had identified three, she went to Figari about it in 2008, holding a private meeting with him in Rome.

By that time, the SCV had opened a beatification cause for Doig and Figueroa had been asked by Figari to write a biography of Doig to aid in the process.

“I said I can’t do that biography because Germán is not a saint. He said, ‘what are you saying? Come to me.’ And I went to the community to have a personal meeting with Figari, and I told my story, I took the courage and told him my story.”

In response, Figueroa said Figari grew angry and accused her of being “a traitor,” a liar, of trying to seduce Doig and of wanting to “destroy the Sodalicio.” He forbade her from speaking about the matter further, saying the SCV needed a saint.

Figueroa said the next day she became sick and was eventually diagnosed with a tumor that required both treatment and surgery – treatment Figari forbade her from having at home in Lima, and which she instead received in Milan.

During that time, she said, Figari “was saying that I was crazy, that I couldn’t go to anybody, that nobody could call me. He obliged me to resign from my job in the Vatican. I was so weak physically that I couldn’t do anything. So, I said to myself, I will recover, and I will do something.”

It was two years later, Figueroa said, that she finally compiled a report on her findings on the allegations against Doig and on Figari’s abuse of authority and presented them to the SCV.

In July 2010, she travelled to Lima and met with the then-Vicar General of the SCV, Eduardo Regal, who had taken over the position after Doig’s death, and presented him with her report, demanding that Doig’s beatification cause be halted, that Figari step down for coverup and abuse of authority, and that he be investigated.

“I said to him, if you don’t to it, if you don’t make Figari resign, I will do it myself, I will go to the media, so it’s better that you do it with me,” she said, saying that in response, Regal referred to Figari’s denial of the allegations, claiming innocence.

When she reminded Regal of Doig’s inappropriate yoga exercises, Figueroa said that Regal argued, “that doesn’t mean that it’s abuse.”

“So, he didn’t really want to investigate,” she said, saying she also challenged him on whether he had reached out to the victims she identified in her report, and he said that he had not.

“I was furious because in that trip I found a new victim, and you are saying to me that you cannot find victims, when I just ring the telephone, I call, and I can find a victim, and you are not doing anything?” she said.

Figueroa said she had asked that Figari be investigated because during her conversation with him in 2006, after becoming agitated with her, Figari had said “he will be accused also, and he gave me a last name” of a victim.

It was only later, she said, that she realized that Figari was also an abuser, and that the name he’d given her was one of his victims.

“That is why I asked Regal to investigate Figari,” she said, saying that after she threatened to go to the media, Regal did halt the beatification cause for Doig “so I would be quiet,” and he did have Figari step down as superior general, but said it was for health reasons.

Figueroa said they never investigated Figari, and they never sent her report to the Vatican, which is why she began filtering information to Salinas that was eventually published in he and Ugaz’s 2015 book.

She also assisted Santiago, an anonymous contributor to Salinas and Ugaz’s book and the first victim to lodge a formal complaint against Figari for the sexual abuse of a minor, in writing his testimony and sending it to the ecclesial tribunal in Lima in 2011.

The 2010 report

Figueroa’s report, which Crux has seen, includes the names of accused sexual abusers, including high-ranking members, and their victims. It also detailed alleged coverup efforts by Figari and other top SCV members.

In total, the report identified 16 confirmed and potential victims, five abusers, and at least one member who intentionally covered up the abuse.

Figueroa in her report also noted that none of the victims had received assistance or professional help after their abuse, and that the SCV had allowed “calumny against the victims” and had failed to report sexual abuse to civil authorities.

Her proposals included making an apology to victims and providing them the necessary support; investigating potential cases of abuse; contacting victims who had left the SCV and to cease “isolating” them; and allowing victims to pursue civil justice unimpeded.

She also cited several instances of abuse of authority on the part of Figari, including psychological pressure and manipulation, and problems in how they lived their vows of chastity and of obedience, with an overly “rigid” and “exaggerated” insistence on both.

She also cited concerns in the SCV’s interaction with and treatment of women, saying there was a tendency toward misogyny and a problematic repression of emotions.

A problem with authority

After Figari stepped down in 2010, Regal was elected superior general in January 2011. He served as superior general for just a year, until former SCV member Alessandro Moroni was elected in January 2012. Moroni left the community after Figari was sanctioned in 2017.

Over the years Regal has also faced charges of coverup and of obstructing justice in relation to the case of notorious SCV abuser Daniel Bernardo Murguía Ward, who was arrested in 2007 after being found in a hotel room with a half-naked young boy and a digital camera containing nude photos of that boy and several other minors.

A handful of former members of the SCV accused Regal of ordering the confiscation of Murguía’s laptop and the destruction of an SD card containing lewd images of minors when he found out that Murguía had been arrested. When Murguía’s family came to the community house to collect his things, Regal failed to return the laptop.

The former SCV members who made these allegations did so as part of their testimony for a Peruvian Parliamentary Investigatory Commission on the Sexual Abuse of Minors in Organizations, which published a lengthy report on the SCV last year.

RELATED: Parliamentary inquest in Peru revives accusations of abuse cover-up against lay group

Regal never testified before the commission despite receiving several summonses to appear, with the SCV failing to respond to requests for his address and contact information until their investigation was over.

Earlier this year, Regal, who is currently superior of the SCV community house in Denver, Co, was one of several top-ranking SCV members to receive a punitive letter from the Vatican as part of its ongoing investigation into the SCV.

RELATED: Vatican ‘007’ back in Peru to continue probe of scandal-plagued groups

He remains under investigation and is one of three SCV members with ties to the SCV’s Denver community, which is attached to Holy Name parish in Englewood, to receive punitive letters from the Vatican.

In her comments to Crux, Rocio condemned the SCV statement for claiming credit for Figari’s expulsion, saying it is representative of “the gaslighting that these guys use” against victims.

“All the time they were just not doing anything. It was just because of fear, because of the victims, because we were pushing, not because they wanted to do anything,” she said.

It is thanks to the victims, she said, that “things have moved, and these guys have no respect, they don’t give a voice to the victims. It’s the same bulls***t all the time.”

Follow Elise Ann Allen on X: @eliseannallen