PIURA (PERU)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
September 26, 2024
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
One of the expelled members of the Sodalitium is emeritus archbishop Jose Antonio Eguren Anselmi, three are priests, and the other six are non-ordained males.
With them, the number of expelled members is eleven, after the decision to expel Luis Fernando Figari, the founder of the Sodalitium.
The Sodalitium is an organization with several branches, a religious holding of sorts, active in Pennsylvania and Colorado in the United States, and in several countries in Latin America.
On Wednesday, around midday, the Apostolic Nunciature in Lima, Peru, issued a statement regarding the ongoing crises in the Sodalitium of Christian Life, a religious organization resembling in some respects a religious “order” in the Roman Catholic Church, integrated by several organizations resembling a religious holding.
The statement informs about the decision of Pope Francis to definitely expel ten members of that organization. It is relevant, because all of them had denied any knowledge about the many instances of clergy religious abuse happening in that organization, which operates as a religious holding of sorts.
The charges leading to that decision appear in the ninth paragraph of the press release at Lima. The document summarizes six different forms of abuse:
- Physical abuse, including sadism and violence.
- Abuse of conscience, with sect-like methods to break the will of subordinates.
- Spiritual abuse, with instrumentalization in the external forum of the information obtained in the non-sacramental internal forum or spiritual direction.
- Abuse of position and authority, with episodes of hacking of communications and harassment in the workplace as well as cover-up of crimes committed within this institution.
- Abuse in the administration of ecclesiastical property.
- Abuse in the exercise of the apostolate of journalism.
And yes, there is no specific reference to clergy sexual abuse as such, but the allegations about that kind of abuse abound.
The Nunciature’s press release itself references crimes in the number 4, so it is impossible at this point to know why the Pope and the nuncio in Peru, archbishop Paolo Rocco Gualtieri, are not addressing the accusations of clergy sexual abuse, but it is clear that there is some awareness about the existence of “crimes”, which is the way the Roman Catholic church addresses the clergy sexual abuse.
The press release issued by the Nunciature to Peru at Lima, September 25th, 2024.
It is more relevant because among the expelled members the document includes the archbishop emeritus of Piura, the largest metropolitan area in Northern Peru, José Antonio Eguren Anselmi, who “voluntarily” tendered his advanced resignation to his position back in April of this year, when he was “only” 67 years-old, and had eight more years of potential service there. Besides Eguren Anselmi, the document mentions Eduardo Antonio Regal Villa, a Peruvian national and non-ordained male.
Regal Villa is the former superior general of the order that appointed him, back in 2011 to succeed Luis Fernando Figari. Figari was one of two founders and Pope Francis expelled him from the Sodalitium a few weeks ago as the story linked after describes.
Other leading members expelled by Pope Francis are a couple of former regional superiors, who unlike Regal Villa are both priests: Rafael Alberto Ismodes Cascón, and Erwin Augusto Scheuch Pool.
Other members expelled are two non-ordained members with some role as teachers or “formators” Humberto Carlos del Castillo Drago and Óscar Adolfo Tokumura Tokomura and another priest with similar duties, Daniel Alfonso Cardó Soria.
The Pope also expelled non-ordained members Ricardo Adolfo Trenemann Young and Miguel Arturo Salazar Steiger. Finally, Jorge Mario Bergoglio expels a key figure in the Sodalitium, not only in Peru, but in the United States and Latin America at large, Alejandro Bermúdez Rosell.
Of all these now former members of the Sodalitium it is worth to consider three cases. The now emeritus archbishop of Piura Eguren Anselmi; Father Scheuch Pool, and Alejandro Bermúdez Rosell.
Crooked Lines
Scheuch Pool is a special case because he is the brother of Martin Scheuch Pool, a former member of the order who is a leading voice in the criticism of the many abuses perpetrated at different points in the history of the “order” by the leaders of the Sodalitium. Martin Scheuch Pool publishes regularly at his blog, Las líneas torcidas.
The underlying meaning of that title is an old saying in Spanish, frequently used by leaders of predatory religious orders that goes like “Dios escribe derecho en líneas torcidas” (God writes straight in crooked lines).
That old Spanish saying was frequently used by members of the Legion of Christ in Mexico, using the Mexican variation of “Dios escribe derecho en renglones torcidos,” the Pious Priestly Union in Santiago de Chile, the predatory organization led by Fernando Karadima, and the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word, led by Carlos Miguel Buela, the Argentine accomplice of former U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
Martin Scheuch’s testimony and criticism of the practices in the Sodalitium are the most valuable testimony to understand the intricacies, the detail of the abuse perpetrated there.
He has had the care to provide detailed accounts of the readings the students at the Sodalitium read. It is through his detailed account of those reading that it is possible to understand how the six types of abuse described by the statement issued by the Apostolic Nunciature to Peru happened at the Sodalitium.
In one entry at his blog, aptly titled “The violence of priestly celibacy” (available only in Spanish here), he describes the use of a book written by a priest in Spain in the 16th century to instill the dismissive attitude of the members of the order towards females.
In that entry one finds the kind of talk about how it would be better to kill a female than to have sex with her that was common currency in the “formation” of the members of the Sodalitium.
Putting that and other examples of how useful Martin Scheuch’s blog is to understand the role of his brother Erwin and to try to figure out why Pope Francis singles out Erwin as one of the eleven members of that order (including the founder Luis Fernando Figari) that the Pontiff is expelling.
Martin addresses the issue of his relationship with Erwin, his brother in at least two entries. The most useful is one from 2016, where he goes over what he has called the “Sodalite system”. It is impossible for me at this point to summarize his account of what that system entails, but if you read Spanish I encourage you to read his entry, available here.
The Sodalitium and the Opus Dei
As far as Eguren Anselmi, he was, up until April of this year the archbishop of Piura, a city located 570 miles or 910 kilometers North of Lima, close to the border with Ecuador.
Eguren Anselmi’s early resignation there was a sign of what happened today. As Los Ángeles Press has proved in other installments of this series, the early resignation of a bishop is an almost certain sign that something , but still there is no clear indication that there would be something more meaningful to indicate that he, as the rest of the expelled members of that organization, were somehow aware of the abuse happening in that organization since their origins in the 1970s in Lima.
Eguren Anselmi turned Piura into a stronghold of the Sodalitium for the last two decades. Pope Benedict XVI appointed him as archbishop back in 2006, after a four-year stint as auxiliary bishop of Lima, under the guise of now emeritus archbishop of Lima and Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne.
Cipriani Thorne did his best to dismiss any and all criticism of the Sodalitium or, for that matter, any accusation of clergy sexual abuse in Peru. He also drowned the Pontifical University in Peru into a bitter fight that forced the intervention of Rome to save the role and influence of the Roman Catholic Church in that University.
Cipriani is a member of the Opus Dei, an order founded in Spain in the midst of the Civil War that ravaged the European country from 1936 through 1939, with plenty of accusations of abuse on its own in both Spain, the United Kingdom, and Argentina, among other countries.
It was Cipriani who put a good word in Rome when Piura became available in 2006. Pope Benedict XVI appointed Eguren Anselmi’s tenure as archbishop in Piura, sometimes called Piura Tumbes, and there he replicated Cipriani Thorne’s model of staunch negation of any accusation against the Sodalitium and their members.
Any critique of the Sodalitium would be met by the archbishop, the media willing to amplify his takes on any issue and, above all, a small platoon of lawyers, very willing to use their influence in a country where the Roman Catholic Church is fully established, as the Church of England is in the United Kingdon.
Because of that, he was frequently involved in bitter arguments with survivors of clergy sexual abuse willing to come out and, despite the punitive legislation in Peru, publicly talk about their experiences in the complex of organizations shaping the Sodalitium.
Back in 2018, after Pope Francis’s visit to Chile and Peru earlier that year, Eguren Anselmi filed a criminal report against journalist Paola Ugaz. As part of the report, Eguren Anselmi was asking for a penalty of three years of imprisonment and a payment of at least 60 thousand U.S. dollars, as compensation for having damaged his “honor and reputation” in some messages published at what was Twitter back on January 20th, 2018.
One of those messages appears after this paragraph. What Ugaz was saying there was not something new and it was not a defamation. At that point, she and other journalists, and former members of that organization in Peru had been publishing reports about the state of affairs at the Sodalitium.
It was what journalists do in social media. Emphasizing something relevant for the discussion of public issues, as the message posted after this paragraph in Spanish and translated to English further down on this page proves.
The tweet says:
LOOK. STOP. BOMB!!!
Pope Francis presides a ceremony in Trujillo alongside Archbishop José Eguren, a member of the Sodalitium leadership, accused of land trafficking in Piura and covering up sexual and physical abuse in the Catholic organization.
Ugaz was talking about the accusations raised against Eguren Anselmi and other leaders of the Sodalitium by communities of Peruvian First Nations who accuse the religious “order” of dispossessing them from their land and other resources under false assumptions.
That is, at least partially, what Wednesday’s press release encompasses under the idea of “abuse in the administration of ecclesiastical property.”
It should not surprise that the Latin American Journalism Review of the Knight Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has been following ever since the case. More details of the emeritus archbishop allegations against Ugaz are available in this English-speaking piece.
What Ugaz was talking about back in 2018 is relevant for the fifth type of abuse in the Nunciature’s press release, that of Abuse in the administration of ecclesiastical property.
Death business
The Sodalitium as many other religious “orders” in Latin America and other regions in the Roman Catholic world have operations similar to those of investment funds, it has schools, from pre-K through colleges and, in some cases, where they see a chance for profit, they enter other types of business.
In Peru, the Sodalitium entered the death business, becoming a major player in the cemetery business, on top of other types of Real Estate in Peru and other South American countries.
Also, even if they formally sold their holdings in the Spanish-speaking ACI Prensa and its English-speaking counterpart, Catholic News Agency (CNA), now integrated in the media octopus that is EWTN, some leaders of the Sodalitium, at least up until today had ties with extremely radical conservative media.
That is the case of Alejandro Bermúdez Rosell, originally a Peruvian national who nowadays spends most of its time in the United States as a key figure of both ACI Prensa and CNA.
It is worth to pay more attention to Bermúdez Rosell’s case as the Press Note released today in Lima stresses the role of the Sodalitium in media.
The relevant paragraph, ninth in the original Spanish-speaking “Nota de Prensa” displayed before this paragraph is a denunciation of the abusive practices many in Peru have been talking about for more than 20 years now that earned ACI Prensa the mock name of “Casi Prensa”, as to say in Spanish, “almost press”.
That mock name was used by Pedro Salinas as the title of a piece he wrote about Bermúdez back in 2018 (available only in Spanish here). A screenshot of that piece appears before this paragraph.
Salinas is a former member of the Sodalitium who wrote with Paola Ugaz a book offering one of the most detailed descriptions of the abuses at that “order”. published in Peru, in Spanish, as Mitad monjes y mitad soldados (Half monks and half soldiers) it is a mind-blowing trip into the some of the darkest corners of Roman Catholicism as practiced by the Latin American upper classes.
Martin Scheuch is one of the former members of the order whose testimony appears at Ugaz’s and Salinas’s book.
That brand of Roman Catholicism is a mash up of racist, sexist, and nationalist ideologies that, in their most radical versions, lead their practitioners to reject any change in their Church, so they are close to the camp usually identified in the English-speaking Roman Catholic world as Rad-Trad.
A good fit
It should not surprise, in that regard, that Bermúdez Rosell is a good fit for CNA and their parent company EWTN, where attacks on Pope Francis are dime a dozen. No wonder Jorge Mario Bergoglio himself described those attacks at the “most Catholic” medium in the United States as the work of the devil during his 2021 trip to Slovakia.
That the Nunciature’s press release singles out Bermúdez Rossel and the Pope’s decision to expel him with specific references to abuse of the apostolate of journalism is an accusation on the ways of ACI Prensa and CNA.
Sadly, given the current polarization in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and Latin America, chances are Bermúdez Rossel will use the Pope’s ruling to render himself a victim of Bergoglio.
Allies of Bermúdez Rossel in the Latin American Catholic far-right frequently dismiss Pope Francis as “Peronista Pope.”
EWTN and its subsidiaries cheered, among many other forms of violence aimed against Pope Francis and his attempts at reform of his Church, the stealing and destruction of images of the so-called Pacha Mama, a cultural product of the South American Amazonia, during the Synod called by Francis back in 2019, and that led to one of the most extreme attacks to a Pope’s authority in recent centuries.
One proposition for that Synod final document was to bring back the old institution of the so-called viri probati, that is to say the “tested males,” for the Amazonia. The proposition had some support in the countries of the region who are most affected by the lack of priests.
As a piece published recently by Los Ángeles Press proved, it was precisely in that region where one of the most recent scandals about the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church happened with the relatively young Paulo Araújo, a priest from the Brazilian diocese of Coari who reenacted almost to the dot, the Portuguese 19th century novel The crime of Father Amaro.
The story, linked above, is about a young priest, ordained back in 2018, who is a serial sexual predator and who got one of his victims, an underage girl, pregnant and forced her to have an abortion.
If the Peruvian authorities were expecting some sign from Rome about the Pope’s perception of the now expelled leaders of the Sodalitium, the press release issued on Wednesday should be an indication that there is no objection from Rome if the Peruvian authorities wanted to offer a measure of justice to the many victims of the Sodalitium, including the First Nations in the vicinity of Piura who were dispossessed of their land by the leaders of what, in any other context, should be seen as a sectarian and dangerous organization.
Sadly, the Sodalitium has powerful friends, as in the case of the mayor of Lima, another Peruvian member of the Opus Dei, Rafael López Aliaga, and those friendships are more relevant in a country affected by a deep political crisis that most recently issued an almost total amnesty on many severe violations of Human Rights and deeply polarized for the last ten years or so.
The Sodalitium is active in Peru, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and the United States, among other countries, as a previous installment of this series details. That story, was already linked above, but available here too, details.
Sadly, the Peruvian legislation is extremely restrictive when dealing with accusarions of sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise, as the story dealing with a recent case in the Peruvian diocese of Chiclayo details. That story is linked after this paragraph.
It is clear that the Pope’s decision it is not enough, since there is only a timid call to address the needs of the victims of abuse at the Sodalitium. It is not clear what will happen with the four clerics (one bishop and three priests) expelled. Will there be other disciplinary measures? Will they be suspended from ministry? Are they about to miss their priesthood?
However, if the Peruvian political elites are willing to read the message it is clear that the Holy See acknowledges the reach of the abuse perpetrated at that “order” and opens the door so those who can fine and send to jail do their job.
Pope Francis will spend the next three days in Luxembourg and Belgium, as the programme issued by the Holy See, available here, details.