Published September 11, 2024
My parents grew up in the Depression Era. College was financially out of reach. The focus of their everyday lives was survival. As a result, they made education a priority for their children, and I got plenty of it: seven years of undergrad, graduate, and post-grad studies. But the best education I ever received was in a Jesuit high school, and the men who conducted it were uniformly admirable. Nearly 60 years later, I remember those Jesuits by name. They gave me a lifelong love for learning, and it’s a debt I can never repay. I’ve had Jesuit friends, outstanding men dedicated to the Gospel, throughout my adulthood.
And yet the Society of Jesus, like most things that involve humans, has a mixed record. In 2011, the Society agreed to pay $166 million to settle sex abuse claims in the Pacific Northwest. The Society’s Central and Southern Province maintains a list of more than 50 Jesuits with credible allegations of abuse. In 2021, the Society announced an effort to raise $100 million in reparations for its past role in the slave trade.
Father Marko Rupnik, accused of serial sexual and spiritual abuse and a former Jesuit, remains a source of scandal both for the Society and the current pontificate.
I mention all this because no one, to my knowledge, has called for the suppression of the Society based on past cases of abuse and slavery, or the appointment of special Vatican investigators into its structure and practices regarding such cases, or the designation of a special Vatican overseer to ensure reform. Yet all of the items above have been applied to the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV; or Community of Christian Life), a Peruvian-born “society of apostolic life of pontifical right” under canon law, comprised mainly of consecrated laymen.
Founded in the 1970s, the SCV had rapid, dynamic growth and played a vigorous role in countering Marxist influences on Latin American theology. The SCV developed thriving local communities throughout Latin America, in the United States, Rome, and elsewhere. But German Doig, the SCV’s original vicar general, was posthumously accused of sex abuse. And Luis Fernando Figari, the SCV’s founder, was later accused of similar sexual and mental abuse. He was removed from authority and later expelled from the SCV in August of this year.
I’ve written about the SCV and its troubles elsewhere, but its story bears further attention. I’ve known the SCV and its work since the mid-1980s. I’ve met many of its members. Several are longtime and close family friends. Every one of those friends is a good and faithful man committed to the Church. Each of them deserves respect, not humiliation.
But again, anything that involves humans has its measure of sin. Sexual abuse is a uniquely vile, uniquely intimate form of violence. I’m the father of four adult children. I worried for the safety of all of them as they grew. In my decades of diocesan service, I saw the long-term, bitter wreckage wrought by sexual abuse on victim families.
The justice that sexual abuse demands is – rightly – harsh. As a result, the SCV has gone through a decade of allegations, lawsuits, reparations to victims, civil and ecclesial investigations, a leadership purge, revisions to its constitution, and direct Vatican oversight. And Rome has now assigned yet another team to investigate SCV financial dealings. There are calls for the unwarranted expulsion of some SCV members, and even the dissolution of the entire community.
Exodus 34:7 famously suggests that God visits the sins of a father on his children. But in New Testament thought, that verse is descriptive, not prescriptive. The ugly burden of another’s past sins, borne by the innocent, is a common fact of life. But it is not justice. Each of us bears responsibility for our own actions and inactions. Collective punishment for alleged or perceived collective guilt is its own form of injustice.
In the case of the SCV, abuse victims have the Church’s priority for concern and assistance, and they deserve just compensation. Those who did the abusing and those who intentionally covered it up deserve punishment. But the innocent – those SCV members who seek to remain in the community, renewing and rebuilding it from within – deserve the opportunity and support to do so as well.
At this point, one might reasonably question the ambiguous flavor of the investigative proceedings. In the conflicts over liberation theology and Marxist-influenced pastoral work in Latin America during the John Paul II pontificate, the SCV made enemies. . .enemies with long memories. At least some of the extraordinary bitterness directed today toward the SCV might be traced to that. It’s also worth asking the awkward question of whether some Latin American Church leaders hostile to the SCV – should the community be dissolved – might find the SCV’s assets useful in their own dioceses and missions.
The SCV has impacted tens of thousands of lives positively over the last five decades, leading many people to Jesus Christ. SCV members founded or helped build the CNA and ACI Prensa Catholic news organizations, and the “Christ in the City” urban volunteer service effort. Here in the United States, the SCV does important and successful pastoral work in the dioceses of Denver and Philadelphia. The SCV men I know are a blessing and a model of Christian discipleship to my own family and many others at a time when examples of virtue are urgently needed. This excuses no past sins of the SCV’s founder and individual members. But as with the Society of Jesus and other religious communities, those past sins cannot cancel out the great good the SCV has done and continues to do. The community deserves the freedom to revive the best strengths of its founding and renew its service to the Gospel.
The appearance of double standards in dealing with the sins of religious communities can only hurt the credibility of the Church. We should pray that the Holy Father, himself a Jesuit, will in his wisdom understand. . .and proceed accordingly.
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
