Pope Helped Sex Abuse Victims

Pope Leo XIV made plenty of enemies helping dismantle a powerful Catholic movement whose leaders physically, sexually, spiritually and psychologically abused members.

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VATICAN CITY - Pope Leo XIV made plenty of enemies helping dismantle a powerful Catholic movement whose leaders physically, sexually, spiritually and psychologically abused members.

As Leo's past record of handling clergy sexual abuse cases comes under scrutiny, victims of the now-disgraced group are stepping up to defend him.

These survivors say that starting in 2018, when Robert Prevost was a bishop in Peru, he met with them. He took their claims seriously when others did not. He got the Vatican involved and worked concretely to provide financial reparations for the harm they had endured.

They credit him with helping arrange the key 2022 meeting with Pope Francis that triggered a Vatican investigation into the group, known as the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, that resulted in its suppression earlier this year.

"What can I say about him? That he listened to me," said José Rey de Castro, a teacher 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."

Conservative army Figari 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.