On Distinguishing Justice and Vengeance

For Peru, the 1980s were an ugly time. Shining Path, a Maoist terror group, was in full swing, ultimately murdering nearly 25,000 victims, many of them poor. The economy was stagnant. Social divisions ran deep. Poverty was widespread. And in the Church, liberation theology, flavored with Marxist thought and challenged by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s then-Cardinal Prefect Joseph Ratzinger, was on the rise.  

But Peru also harbored a dynamic new movement, mainly of consecrated laymen. It was devoted to the poor, intent on reviving the nation’s Catholic culture, faithful to the Holy See, and happy to push back on the leftward drift in much of the Latin American Church. That movement was, and is, the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV; “Community of Christian Life”), a society of apostolic life of pontifical right under canon law.

I’ve known the SCV for forty years, first as editor of the National Catholic Register newsweekly when it was based in Los Angeles, then in senior diocesan service with the Archdioceses of Denver and Philadelphia. In both dioceses, the SCV has done excellent work, reviving parishes that were well into decline and reigniting a spirit of evangelical witness. I’ve met many SCV members over the years. Several have been close family friends for decades. They remain so. Each of those friends is a man of admirable Christian character. 

I mention the above because Luis Fernando Figari, the SCV’s founder, was removed from leadership by the Vatican in 2017 for the emotional and sexual abuse of various SCV members. On August 24 this year, he was formally expelled from the SCV’s ranks.

I dealt with sex abuse issues, in one capacity or another, for nearly all of my twenty-seven years in diocesan service. It’s ugly work. The damage done to abuse victims is persistent and vile. So is the collateral impact on innocent priests and laypeople affiliated with the perpetrator. Most of what happened next for the SCV was thus both unsurprising and just: public humiliation, bitter lawsuits, heavy compensatory payouts, a leadership team purge, and crippling defections. Rome-appointed oversight, mainly in the person of Newark’s Cardinal Joseph Tobin, has been part of the SCV’s life ever since.

None of which changes my esteem for the SCV men I know. Nor does it excuse the vindictive spirit that drives some of the SCV’s harshest critics.  

The SCV has cooperated fully with years of exhaustive civil and ecclesial investigations. It has complied willingly with all mandated reforms. In 2016–17, an independent team led by Kathleen McChesney, a former ranking FBI official and past executive director of the U.S. bishops’ Office of Child Protection, conducted an extensive investigation into SCV personnel and actions—including its leadership. McChesney was joined by Ian Elliott, former CEO of Ireland’s National Board for Safeguarding Children, and Monica Applewhite, an expert in developing child protection programs for secular and religious organizations.  

The team had complete freedom of access to SCV members past and present, SCV critics, and all SCV records. They did not whitewash the SCV’s problems. Nor did they issue unqualified support for the SCV. Instead they highlighted active and inactive SCV members whose conduct had been destructive, directly or by complicity, in incidents of emotional and sexual abuse. The team’s findings and recommendations were accepted and adapted by the SCV without delay or resistance. And an important detail in their report was this: They found no evidence of abuse or coverup on the part of one Jose Ambrozic, the SCV’s former vicar general and a longtime SCV member. More on this in a moment.

After a decade of media outrage, litigation, purgation, Vatican oversight, victim reparations, and reform, one might expect that the SCV would be allowed a breather to rebuild. Not so. In 2023, Pope Francis appointed yet another Vatican investigative team, this time with the added focus of finances. The investigation is currently ongoing, again with the cooperation of SCV leadership.

Any irregular financial dealings, should they be proven, certainly deserve to be punished. Yet it’s hard not to see a generous helping of malice in all this. Jose Ambrozic—a man I’ve known well for more than two decades and whom I greatly admire—has been the target of especially bitter treatment. Investigations have repeatedly ended with a complete dismissal of all charges against him. Multiple Peruvian prosecutors, none of them friendly to the SCV, have reviewed charges against Ambrozic. In every case, the charges have been dismissed.  

As one observer familiar with the SCV drama says, “The spiteful treatment of Mr. Ambrozic in the face of the truth is among the ugliest injustices I’ve ever seen. He’s one of the finest servants of the Church I’ve ever met.” Again: Ambrozic has fully supported the SCV reform process. He’s been fully cooperative in multiple investigations of his own record by multiple authorities, multiple times. And he’s consistently been cleared—only to have the same charges investigated yet again. 

Pressure is now building for the expulsion of Jose Ambrozic and other longtime members from the SCV: men like Alejandro Bermudez, Eduardo Regal, and others. At this stage, such efforts seem grounded less in the execution of justice than in an appetite for vengeance by the ecclesial left for perceived “culture war” grievances of the Latin American past. Bermudez in particular—whom I count as a close friend—is guilty of a hot temper and an abrasive leadership style. But that warrants correction, not expulsion. His real “sin” may lie elsewhere. He was the longtime director of the ACI Prensa news organization and founder and director of the English-language Catholic News Agency—both now owned by (the ill-favored, in some quarters) EWTN. Bermudez’s entire life, like Jose Ambrozic and various other men on the hit list, has been devoted to serving the Church and advancing her mission.  

They deserve better. So does the SCV.

Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, D.C.

First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Click here to make a donation.

Click here to subscribe to First Things.

Photo by Edward Josué Quevedo Macalupú, provided by Wikimedia Commons, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.