Takeaways from AP report on abuse case handled by Pope Leo. Victims say he helped when others didn't

VATICAN CITY — As Pope Leo XIV's past record of handling clergy sexual abuse cases comes under scrutiny, his biggest defenders are the victims of a powerful Catholic movement he helped dismantle.

The group, known as the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, was formally dissolved by Pope Francis this year after a Vatican investigation uncovered sect-like spiritual, physical and sexual abuses by its leaders against its members.

Victims of the group say that starting in 2018, when the pope was a bishop in Peru, Robert Prevost met with them. He took their claims seriously when few others did, got the Vatican involved and worked concretely to provide financial reparations for the harm victims had endured. They credit him with helping arrange the key 2022 meeting with Pope Francis that triggered the Vatican investigation that resulted in the suppression.

''What can I say about him? That he listened to me,'' said José Rey de Castro, who spent 18 years in the Sodalitium as the personal cook for its leader, Luis Fernando Figari. ''It seems obvious for a priest. But that's not the case, because the Sodalitium was very powerful.''

A conservative army for God

Figari, a Peruvian layman, founded the Sodalitium in Peru in 1971 as a lay community to recruit ''soldiers for God.'' It was one of several Catholic societies born as a conservative reaction to the left-leaning liberation theology movement that swept through Latin America starting in the 1960s. At its height, the group counted about 1,000 core members and several times that in three other branches across South America and the United States. It was enormously influential in Peru and has its U.S. base in Denver.

Starting in 2000, stories about Figari's twisted practices began to filter out in Peru when a former member wrote a series of articles in the magazine Gente. A formal accusation was lodged with the Lima archdiocese in 2011 but neither the local church nor the Holy See took concrete action until former member Pedro Salinas and journalist Paola Ugaz exposed the practices of Sodalitium in their 2015 book ''Half Monks, Half Soldiers.''

In 2017, a report commissioned by the group' s new leadership found that Figari sodomized his recruits and forced them to fondle him and one another, that he liked to watch them ''experience pain, discomfort and fear,'' and humiliated them in front of others to enhance his control over them.

Yet when members found the courage to escape and denounce the abuses they suffered, they say they often met a wall of silence and inaction from the Peruvian Catholic hierarchy and the Holy See.

Prevost stands out

But not from Prevost, whom Francis made bishop of Chiclayo, Peru in 2014 and later was elected vice president of the Peruvian bishops conference. He headed the bishops' commission created to listen to victims of abuse, and became a critical ''bridge'' between victims and Sodalitium, the victims say.

Rey de Castro, the former Figari cook who got out in 2014, turned to Prevost in 2021. He had been critical of a 2016 Sodalitium reparations program that, according to the group, provided some $6.5 million in academic, therapeutic and financial support to nearly 100 Sodalitium victims over the years.

After their 2021 meeting, Prevost helped arrange a confidential settlement with Sodalitium, he said.

Salinas and Ugaz, for their part, say Prevost also stepped in when the Sodalitium started retaliating against them with legal action for their continued investigative reporting on the group. After the Sodalitium's archbishop of Piura, José Eguren, sued Salinas in 2018 for defamation, Prevost and the Vatican's ambassador to Peru helped craft a statement from the Peruvian bishops conference backing the journalists.

''It was the first time that anyone had done anything against the Sodalitium publicly,'' Ugaz said.

After the Sodalitium criticism accelerated against Ugaz and Salinas, Prevost helped arrange for Ugaz to meet with Francis at the Vatican on Nov. 10, 2022, during which she laid out her findings and convinced Francis to send his top sex crimes investigators to Peru.

Their 2023 investigation resulted in Francis taking a series of initiatives, starting with the April 2024 resignation of Eguren which Prevost handled. It continued with the expulsion of Figari, Eguren and nine others, and finally the formal dissolution of the Sodalitium in April this year, just before Francis died.

The Sodalitium has accepted its dissolution, asked forgiveness for ''the mistreatment and abuse committed within our community'' and for the pain caused the entire church.

''With sorrow and obedience, we accept this decision, specifically approved by Pope Francis, which brings our society to an end,'' the group said in an April statement after the decree of dissolution was signed.

There was no reply to an email sent to the group with specific questions about Prevost's role.

Prevost now a target

The idea Prevost might have enemies was crystalized in a recent podcast hosted by Salinas on Peru's La Mula streaming platform. While Salinas dedicated most of the hourlong episode to reading aloud seven years of glowing correspondence between Sodalitium victims and Prevost, he also said Prevost had become the target of a defamation campaign questioning his handling of past abuse cases. Salinas blamed the campaign on Sodalitium's supporters trying to discredit him.

One of the cases in question is Prevost's handling of abuse allegations made in 2022 by three sisters against one of his priests in Chiclayo. The diocese and Vatican say Prevost did everything he was supposed to do, including removing the priest from ministry, sending a preliminary investigation to the Vatican's sex crimes office, offering psychological help to the victims and suggesting they go to Peruvian authorities, who archived the case because it happened too long ago.

The Vatican archived the case for lack of evidence, but it was reopened in 2023 after it gained traction in the media. Victims' groups are demanding an accounting from Leo.

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Briceño reported from Lima, Peru.

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