“I felt doubly betrayed, doubly victimized and violated, because I tried to be a good person (but) they don’t care. They care more about their vanity and their name,” Aharon Felipe Cardona, formerly Andrés prior to his conversion to Judaism around two years ago, told Crux.
Cardona is a former member of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), a men’s lay group founded in Lima in 1971 by Peruvian layman Luis Fernando Figari, who last month was expelled amid an ongoing Vatican inquiry after previously being sanctioned in 2017 for the physical, psychological, spiritual and sexual abuse of members, including the sexual abuse of minors.
He spoke following a Sept. 25 announcement from the Peruvian Bishops Conference that 10 prominent members of the group had been expelled as part of an ongoing inquiry by the Vatican’s top investigating team, Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, an adjunct secretary to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Spanish Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, an official in the same department.
Among those expelled was Father Daniel Cardó, pastor of the Denver-based Holy Name parish, which was entrusted to the SCV in 2010 and contains a community house on parish grounds.
Cardona, who is Colombian and has previously accused Cardó of physical assault as part of his testimony before two investigatory commissions, said that after last week’s announcement of Cardó’s expulsion, he heard rumors that SCV members were telling parishioners he had retracted his complaints.
“It hurts me a lot what is happening to Daniel, because I don’t hate him. It hurts me a lot. I put myself in his shoes and say he must be having a really hard time,” he said, but insisted that “I have not retracted any complaint.”
Cardona said the rumor is a “manipulated response that at no point considers my how it affected me, my pain, my feeling of what happened to me in the community.”
Though Cardona assured that he harbors no ill will toward the SCV, the word that came to mind when he heard the rumors was, “bastards!”
Cardona, who grew up in a poor, single-parent household, met the SCV when he was 13, as they had a community house near his school, and eventually joined a band they were forming.
In 1998, he made his aspirant promise with the group committing to a year of discernment, later that year moving in with other ‘aspirants’ before eventually moving into the SCV’s community house in Carmen de Viboral.
He spent around five years in total with the SCV, with Cardó serving as his spiritual director from 1998-2000, while former SCV member Miguel Salazar was the house superior.
Salazar, former superior of the SCV house in Arequipa and vice-rector of the prestigious San Pablo University in Arequipa, was also among those expelled from the SCV last week.
During his time as an aspirant, Cardona said, “Daniel mistreated me, Daniel was very harsh with me. I was humiliated, there are thousands of stories. I was with him for two, three years as a spiritual advisor.”
Cardona was among the anonymous contributors to the 2015 book Half Monks, Half Soldiers by journalists Pedro Salinas, also a former member of the SCV, and Paola Ugaz, which exposed abuses within the SCV and prompted a series of investigations and reform efforts.
In the book, Cardona describes being routinely abused by Cardó, Salazar, and another SCV member, José Alfredo Cabrera.
Among other things, Cardona said that Cardó one night came up to him and said he would punch him in the stomach 11 times and that if he fell down, Cardó would start again from the beginning.
Despite falling repeatedly and crying due to the pain, Cardona said he endured and that Cardó indicated that he was doing it for his own good, to make him stronger and a better man. He said this happened on repeated occasions, and that he was also often slapped by Cardó in the face.
Cardona said he was also forced to eat rotten pizza, and at one point was forbidden by Salazar from smiling for three months, because his face was too “sensual” when he smiled. He was also forbidden from eating for three days after he failed to elicit laughs from a joke he told.
He said he was also made to cross through paramilitary zones to go swimming in lake at midnight in frigid temperatures for drifting off during prayer, and he was also made to walk without shoes in the winter, and was forced to do extreme exercises, including 1,000 sit-ups in one night.
Cardona presented these incidents and more in his testimonies before an ethics commission established in November 2015, following the publication of Salinas and Ugaz’s book to investigate and offer proposals, and before a separate internal investigation conducted by the SCV a year later.
On the acts he described, “all of them are real, they are all real,” he said, saying, “the Daniel I know was a Daniel who thought he was a prince, who thought he was untouchable. With an aura of purity, an aura of ‘I am perfect.’”
Cardona said that not long after Salinas’s book was published in 2015, Cardó reached out and asked to talk, saying his family was struggling with the revelations and had stopped supporting him financially, and that he was “surprised” by Cardona’s testimony.
The two met in Medellín, and Cardona said he listened to Cardó and offered to speak with his family to help them understand that he had made complaints about other SCV members, too.
“I don’t know if he took it as me retracting my complaint,” he said, but insisted that “I never wrote a document saying that it was false. No. I never retracted.”
Cardona said he also ran into Salazar on an airplane not long ago, and, wanting to leave past sufferings behind, decided to approach him, and even offered him a ride into the city and spoke about potential collaboration between San Pablo University and his foundation, ANCLA, dedicated to human rights.
Upon seeing Salazar, Cardona said he told himself, “We have to lower the war. They have also suffered. In the end, he’s also a victim of an international structure,” and he thought the encounter went well.
However, a week later, he said, he got a call saying that Salazar had been telling people that “what Cardona says is false,” and that his testimony was a lie.
Cardona said he tried to have “a nice attitude, to forgive a little, to get over the pain, but these people have not done it themselves. What they say seems very unfair to me. It seems unfair that in the face of a complaint that has cost so much, they say that it is false.”
However, the rumor that he had retracted his testimony, he said, “hits me much harder…these people have not learned. I mean, there is really no feeling of recognizing the error and saying let’s change, because they are wanting to save themselves at my expense.”
“The issue of repentance is false. The issue of asking for forgiveness is false. I have not retracted any complaint,” he said, saying, “I did want to be in solidarity with Daniel and I told him if you want, I can talk to your family (but) I never told him that what I said is false, at no point.”
Cardona said the apparent attitude of denial on the part of the SCV and their failure to acknowledge the experience of their victims brings back difficult memories.
“Who cares how we felt when they threw us out like dogs?” he said, saying he feels compelled to set the record straight because “It’s not just my suffering that’s on my back, but it’s the suffering of the rest of the victims, who may not be Daniel’s, but they are from the institution.”
“I wouldn’t forgive myself for the rest of my life, because it would be betraying the pain of my friends,” he said.
Cardona said that in their conversation in 2015, Cardó never apologized for his actions, but was rather worried about his family and the fact that they had stopped supporting him financially.
“He didn’t apologize. No, not at all…He wasn’t worried about the pain, he wasn’t worried about the institutionality of what was happening. He was very worried about what his family was saying,” Cardona said, saying, “I was worried that he might suffer from Stockholm syndrome.”
Cardona said that after giving his testimony, the SCV offered him a sum of around $50,000 in compensation, but on the condition that he sign a letter stating that he would never again make a formal complaint of a similar nature.
“They thought they were buying silence, but you can’t really do this in terms of human rights,” he said.