(PERU)
Where Peter Is [Beltsville MD]
October 1, 2024
By Austen Ivereigh
The ten leading members whom the Pope last week expelled from the scandal-plagued Peruvian movement Sodalicio were responsible for abuse of different kinds: physical, including sadism and violence; of conscience; and spiritual abuse, such as using information obtained in spiritual direction. The sanctions for these are established in canon law and have been used before. But Alejandro Bermúdez, the last in the list, has been expelled for abuse in the exercise of the apostolate of journalism. Canon law in his case has been applied in a new, creative, but entirely legitimate way, one that has implications for those who profess to be Catholic journalists but who act in ways that disgrace their profession and undermine their claim to be witnesses to the Gospel. I know something about his case, because I was one of those who gave evidence to the Vatican.
But first: It will surprise no one who has followed the revelations about the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), to give it its full Latin name (Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana in Spanish), that the expelled ten — a bishop, two priests, three formators, and two consecrated lay people — were part of or close to the inner circle around its founder, the layman Luis Figari, whom the Vatican also removed a month ago after years of imposing different sanctions on him. The abuses (sexual, physical, and so on) meted out by Figari and his immediate followers, as well as the eye-watering corruption inside the SCV, were first publicly exposed by Pedro Salinas, a former sodálite, in a book he co-wrote with the journalist Paola Ugaz nearly ten years ago. Their claims, and those of at least 30 victims, have driven a years-long investigation by the Vatican that is ongoing, fueled by a seemingly endless series of revelations in further books, articles, and victim testimonies.
I’ve followed the story with interest after reporting on the scandals from Lima, Peru in 2016 for the news site Crux. The abusive culture in the SCV was by then coming to light, triggered by the Salinas/Ugaz book: details had emerged of the ways Figari and his circle would separate young men from their families, and degrade them physically and sexually while instilling in them a gnostic mysticism that divided the world into friends or enemies, people of light and people of dark. In Lima I met some of the brave consecrated woman members of the SCV (known as las fraternas) who had chosen to speak up against this culture, hoping to root it out. One of them told me how Figari spurned less well-off, dark-skinned people, as well as women. “We never saw him work with poor people, nor visit the sick, nor making acts of kindness,” Rocío Figueroa told me. “He didn’t know how to ask forgiveness.” I remember also a conversation with Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, Lima’s archbishop at the time. He told me that the formation of SCV’s leaders had been warped by Figari, that it was based on “a constant psychological abuse of dominating people through violence and threats” and that the SCV could only be changed with outside intervention, because the leaders were all products of that same formation.
I did a story for Crux that the Lima ecclesiastical tribunal had tried since 2011 without success to get the Vatican to act on the sex and other abuse allegations. There were reasons for inaction: the statute of limitations that the Church had lifted in abuse cases did not apply to abuse by lay people. But the other reason was fear. When people in Lima spoke about the SCV, they might have been referring to a mafia or aggressive corporation; it didn’t sound like a Catholic community. Clearly there were good and holy people in the SCV. But its leadership — white, wealthy, upper-class, reactionary — had been distorted by money, power and false mysticism. The movement had meanwhile grown to be one of the richest and most powerful non-state entities in Peru. In order to mask their astonishing financial and other kinds of corruption — at the heart of which is a well-documented money-laundering scheme using Peruvian cemeteries, made possible by legal tax exemptions — SCV leaders would famously counter-attack, throwing every piece of dirt they could dig up. The message was always: question or criticize us and you’ll pay a heavy price. It has often proved effective: Many people, not least within the SCV, have been silenced over the years.
So it won’t be hard to imagine what Salinas and Ugaz, who doggedly exposed all this, have been through this past decade, as they have continued to write articles and books on the SCV. They have appealed regularly to the Vatican, and the Pope in particular, for protection and support. In November 2022 Ugaz was publicly and warmly received by Pope Francis, just as she was being hounded through the Peruvian courts: the SCV was seeking to overturn her journalist’s right to protect her sources, and demanding she turn over even communications she and Salinas had had with the Holy See. Giving Ugaz his backing in this very public way was Francis’s way of sending a clear message: he was standing with victims, for truth, and against corruption, and the Vatican would not be intimidated. The Vatican also intervened to prevent the then Archbishop of Piura, José Eguren, from suing the journalists, after they revealed he was at the heart of abuse and corruption. Eguren was forced to stand down earlier this year, and is one of those expelled last week.
Francis’s meeting with Ugaz — which had originally been scheduled two years earlier, but was delayed by the pandemic — persuaded him to send a “special mission” to Peru, much as he had done in 2018 with the abuse cover-up in Chile. He sent the same crack team of investigators: Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu of the anti-abuse section of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Their brief? To conduct a rigorous, systematic and impartial review of the SCV’s enormous conglomeration of institutions and associations, extending from Lima, Peru to Denver, Colorado, that includes businesses of various kinds, a network of upper-class universities and colleges, as well as a web of institutions and front organizations in the world of right-wing politics, the media and the law. The expulsions of Figari and now his ten close associates are the result. It is a huge achievement. Many in Peru and elsewhere have long seen the SCV as too powerful to be held to account by the Holy See, let alone by the local Church. But with the support of Lima’s archbishop, Carlos Castillo, Francis’s team has made remarkable headway, showing that, however apparently untouchable, corrupt networks can be challenged with the weapons of law and truth.
The SCV attack machine has been going into overdrive, launching counteraccusations and even trying to sue Monsignor Bertomeu. It’s what they do: go after us, and we’ll make you pay. Which brings us to Alejandro Bermúdez. As a Latin-American Vatican official who has had many dealings with them told me when I said I was writing this piece: “Be careful. Bermúdez & Co. fight hard and low. They threaten, and sometimes they carry out their threats.”
Bermúdez is a consecrated lay sodálite in his 60s whose mindset is a typical product of Figari’s (de)formation. He has had a long career in the conservative fringes of Catholic journalism, running SCV’s ACI Prensa news agency, which was later sold to EWTN, and latterly serving as head of EWTN’s Catholic News Agency. He has also been a prominent activist in various Church-adjacent, right-wing culture-war groups both in Spain, where he is close to the head of CitizenGo/HazTeOir, and in the USA, where for example he has served on the board of Catholic Voices USA, one of the dark-money front organizations used by Ann and Neil Corkery to fund Leonard Leo’s conservative Catholic takeover of the US Supreme Court. Bermúdez has over the years been notorious for his threatening, intimidating, harassing, belittling and insulting those whom he considers enemies or rivals, not least on social media. Two of those who gave evidence to the DDF against him describe his verbal, emotional and psychological abuse of them in the workplace, and how he would ask them to make up quotes in stories in order to discredit those he considered enemies.
The sanction of “abuse of the exercise of the apostolate of journalism” applies because as a consecrated member of a Catholic community, journalism was his particular apostolate, the way he fulfilled his vocation. And yet in that apostolate, he gave a counter-witness to the Gospel, damaging without right cause the good name of others (c. 1390 §2), perverting information for ideological purposes, and abusing his authority. The Church has the right under c. 1399 to sanction such publicly scandalous behavior, especially when it is by a person in vows, who is directly accountable to Church authority.
For example: After my stories about the SCV in 2016, when I was seen by them as an enemy, Bermúdez regularly attacked me, seeking to discredit me (so far, so normal). When in 2018 I challenged the accuracy of an unsigned hit-piece written by him and put out by EWTN’s Denver-based Catholic News Agency (CNA), which he then oversaw, Bermúdez warned me in an email that if I “attacked” CNA he would “make me pay.” On Twitter, I made light of the threat by screen-shotting it, and adding a joke about waking up to find a horse’s head in my bed. But I also wrote to Michael Warsaw, EWTN’s chairman, to complain. I had no reply.
I had not planned to make this brief testimony public, but Bermúdez has now invaded his own privacy by naming those who gave evidence against him. In this I am following the lead of Dawn Eden Goldstein, who in posts on ‘X’, has shared some of her own testimony. Back in 2022, Dawn earned Bermúdez’s ire (and violent insults) by highlighting links between him and the EWTN-backed attempt to unseat Pope Francis in 2018, while also suggesting links with the Putin-funded fringe of the pro-life movement. In her latest posts, she links to a bizarre defense of Bermúdez in First Things by one of his allies, Fran Maier, the ghostwriter and attack dog for Charles Chaput, former archbishop of Denver, where Bermúdez lives. Dawn observes rightly that “Bermúdez and supporters such as Fran Maier criticize abusers when it suits their anti-Francis narrative. But when an accusation threatens their power base, they claim the persecution is over ‘orthodoxy.’ It’s the same tactic used by Maciel’s backers.” (This last reference is to the notorious abuser Marcial Maciel, founder of the Mexico-based Legionaries of Christ, whose reactionary Catholicism and right-wing politics are pretty much identical with the SCV’s).
Recording on the day of his expulsion a self-exculpatory rant that perfectly illustrates Dawn’s observation, Bermúdez paints the Scicluna-Bartomeu investigation as “revenge on behalf of friends of the Pope.” He claims that those of us who gave evidence against him — including Elise Ann Allen, Dawn Eden Goldstein, and I — did so because of his criticisms of the Pope. And of course, using the same old playbook, he tries to discredit us.
Against me he makes use of an old defamatory allegation while omitting to mention that it was the subject of a libel case that I won in 2009 against the newspaper that had published it. Bermúdez feigns not to know if the story is true or not (it is not), but having used it to sow doubt about me, claims I am “a somewhat controversial figure.” Then he seeks to discredit two people who once worked for Bermúdez and testified to the Vatican about his patterns of verbal, emotional and psychological abuse. The name of the first, he says, he will not reveal, “because her parents are good friends of mine and would have a heart attack if they knew she had anything to do with my expulsion.” (They would be strange parents not to be more shocked by their good friend’s abusive treatment of their daughter.) The second is Elise Ann Allen, the Crux journalist who was once a fraterna in the SCV but left in 2013, before going on to work as CNA’s Rome correspondent under Bermúdez. She tells me she was one of a group that made a formal complaint to EWTN about his violent language and abuse, that EWTN took no action in response, but that after she left the complaints continued, and were part of the reason for his “early retirement” from CNA. Since 2018 Elise’s journalism on the SCV in particular has been rigorous and outstanding, and has of course provoked a number of threats from Bermúdez, including indirectly to members of her family by telling her that he knows who they are and how to get to them. In his video rant, Bermúdez claims bizarrely that she is violating journalistic ethics by giving evidence against him, having once belonged to the SCV.
The Catholic journalist and writer Dawn Eden Goldstein is referred to more than once as a “Jewish convert,” presumably to sow doubts about her bona fides. In his video Bermúdez laments that, after writing good books, “she joined the band of Austen Ivereigh and his friends who are blind defenders of the Pope in all circumstances.” As proof of this blindness, he says “they tried to defend Amoris Laetitia,” the papal teaching of 2016 which followed the two-year synod on the family. In Bermúdez’s mind, the reason we have given evidence against him was that, unlike us, he was willing to “criticize [the Pope’s] ambiguities and vanities.”
One of the tell-tale signs of moral and spiritual corruption is dismissing one’s peccadilloes (“of course, I’m no saint,” he says at one point in the video) while refusing to admit to any serious sin. Despite the years of evidence of his aggressive, abusive behavior — catalogued by the Salinas/Ugaz books, recorded even in the SCV’s own internal investigations, set out in detail in a painstaking Vatican investigation — he dismisses as “indefensible” the notion that he is a source of public scandal. As so often in cases of clerical abusers, Bermúdez sees himself as special, as chosen. He has the “moral certainty” that God has called him to be a sodálite, and says he is unable to understand of his accusers “how people who declare themselves Catholic can rejoice in destroying my vocation.” He is the faithful, innocent victim of plots and intrigues by “very bad people who hate my community.” Because of these “friends of the Pope” out to get him, he must find a new place to live and wait for a new pope to overturn this “abuse of papal power.” In the meantime, “Christ is with me, suffering with me.” There is no question of sackcloth and ashes, no remorse or repentance, only self-justification and self-pity.
For the avoidance of doubt (and here I speak also for the others who gave evidence): revenge was no part of my motive for giving evidence against Bermúdez. Nor was it in any way related to his critiques of the Pope and papal teaching; they are no more obnoxious or un-Catholic than others in the right-wing fringe of the US Church. I/we gave evidence simply to help the Vatican stamp out abuse in the Church, especially when it is armor-plated by money and power and justified as journalism. In face of the astonishing aggression meted out by SCV leaders to all who dare question and critique their modus procedendi, it was a privilege to contribute in a small way to the Scicluna-Bertomeu mission to expose the truth and apply the law. Bermúdez’s expulsion is just. It is not an excommunication. He remains in the Church. And if it leads to his waking up to what his formation did to him, it will be not only for the Church’s good but for the vocation to which he still feels a call.