Former member of Peru women’s group questions its viability

ROME – A former member of a Peru-based women’s lay consecrated group whose male branch is currently under Vatican investigation has expressed doubt about the group’s long-term future, voicing her belief that there was never any founding “charism” to begin with.

In an open letter published Monday in Spanish-language news platform Religion Digital, Rocio Figueroa, a former member of the Marian Community of Reconciliation (MCR), said the group’s recent effort to distance itself from allegations of abuse coverup are “despicable.”

The MCR is one of four entities founded by Peruvian layman Luis Fernando Figari, including the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), the Servants of the Plan of God (SPG), and the Christian Life Movement (CLM).

Figari in August was expelled from the SCV amid an ongoing inquiry by the Vatican’s top investigating duo, Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, adjunct secretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), and Spanish Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, an official of the dicastery.

Last month an additional 10 members of the SCV were expelled as part of the inquiry, which so far has focused primarily on allegations of abuse and financial corruption within the SCV.

However, Figueroa, a founding member and former superior general of the MCR who was also a whistleblower on abuses committed by Figari and his longtime vicar, German Doig, in her letter said all of the entities established by Figari “more or less orbited around the Sodalitium.”

All of the communities, she said, shared “the same lifestyle.”

She referred in her letter to an Oct. 3 statement from the MCR in response to an online comment from a former member of the group saying she had been sexually abused by a member of the SCV, and that authorities inside of the MCR covered it up.

In a post responding to an online petition in support of the Vatican’s “Special Mission” investigating the SCV, the former member of the MCR said, “I was sexually abused by a Sodalit! I support the Vatican Mission!”

“Further, I was obliged by the authorities of the MCR to remain silent for decades. We want justice and reparation,” she said.

In their Oct. 3 statement responding to the woman’s claim that was signed by the Superior General, Luciane Urban, the MCR apologized for the pain “of al the victims who have suffered abuses of authority, manipulation of conscience, or any other type of abuse within our communities.”

They noted that they formally severed institutional ties from the SCV in 2022, and said that the current leadership of the MCR had been unaware of the abuse, which they said was brought to the attention of internal leadership and the Archbishop of Lima in 2011.

The alleged abuse, then, happened prior to 2011, they said, and pledged that the allegations made by the former member would be “duly investigated,” and, pending the results, they would take necessary measures for “reparation and sanction.”

The MCR also informed about institutional measures they said they had taken in recent years amid ongoing scandals surrounding the SCV, but which they had not made public.

After a canonical visitation supported by the Archdiocese of Lima, the MCR, the statement said, severed institutional ties with the SCV, and in February of this year established a formal channel for processing current and historical complaints of abuse and coverup.

Figueroa, currently a professor of Systematic Theology at Catholic Theological College in Auckland, in her open letter lamented that the MCR’s Oct. 3 statement was the first it had issued since scandals surrounding the SCV exploded in 2015.

Scandals erupted after the publication in 2015 by Peruvian journalists Pedro Salinas, a former member of the SCV, and Paola Ugaz of their book Half Monks, Half Soldiers, documenting decades of physical, psychological and sexual abuse, as well as abuses of power and authority within the SCV.

“This silence, which in the end is a type of word – since silence gives consent – did nothing but re-victimize all those who were hurt within that institution,” she said, saying the MCR’s statement was also revictimizing.

She accused the MCR of “looking for a scapegoat,” and said that by denying any knowledge among the current leadership about the alleged abuse of the woman who posted about it online, they essentially threw that former member “under the bus.”

“The Fraternas,” as members of the MCR are called, “have no hope,” Figueroa said, saying their statement indicates that “they carry the DNA of the Sodalitium down to their very core” and are employing the same tactics of the SCV, “only 15 years later.”

These tactics, she said, are to “burn a person in order to save the institution; prioritize damage control over the truth,” and to “manipulate with half-truths without telling the whole story.”

Figueroa also decried what she said have been “perverse” attacks on Scicluna and Bertomeu since they began their work, including a civil criminal complaint filed against Bertomeu by two individuals with close ties to the SCV.

She defended a sister who is the subject of the MCR’s inquiry into the alleged coverup of the abuse mentioned by the former member online, saying the SCV’s leadership repeatedly failed to act when she and the former Fraterna under investigation tried to sound the alarm about Figari’s and Doig’s abuses years ago.

Despite resistance from the SCV, she said they complained to the former archbishop of Lima, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, and later, to Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Religious, along with the department’s former secretary, Archbishop Jose Rodriguez Carballo, but nothing happened.

No one in the MCR is without fault, she said, saying, “we were and are all victims and perpetrators of greater or lesser caliber in an abusive system.”

“We became police and accomplices of the machismo and sexual control of Figari and his gang,” she said, saying that through strict surveillance of matters such as members’ clothing, “we were all members or informants of a kind of Iranian ‘anti-vice squad.’”

Figueroa said spiritual abuse within the MCR is not a thing of the past, but is ongoing, and that, “it is  well-known” that some Fraternas have made complaints to the current archbishop of Lima, Cardinal-designate Carlos Castillo.

Referring to the revision of their constitutions after having disassociated from the SCV, Figueroa said, “I was naïve to think that you could change by separating from the Sodalitium.”

“Although I left the Fraternas broken and without direction, I still had the dream of those five girls who started (it) with a spirit of authentic love and service to God…That is the dream that Figari and the Sodalits destroyed,” she said, adding, “nothing remains of it.”

She voiced her belief that “there is no spirit” in the Fraternas, “because there was never an original charism.”

Figueroa referred to a division within the MCR among members who are positively inclined toward the SCV, and others who are not, saying this split among members, “all lost and without a direction,” is because “there is no charism.”

Comparing the MCR to the Jansenist nuns of Port-Royal in the 17th century, known as radical adherents of a strict asceticism who were “pure as angels and proud as demons,” Figueroa cautioned that if there is no charism and adherence to a common spirit, nothing will unite the community apart from “a diabolical fanaticism that only generates violence.”

“You cannot force a charism. It is there or it is not. You receive it or you don’t,” she said, saying, “you could not receive anything good from Figari.”

 

Figueroa closed her letter voicing her belief that “the future of the Fraternas is unviable, as is that of all of Figari’s foundations. The statement makes it clear: it is simply the chronicle of a death foretold.”

The MCR declined a Crux request for comment.

Editor’s Note: Elise Ann Allen is a former member of the Marian Community of Reconciliation.

Follow Elise Ann Allen on X: @eliseannallen