On Saturday, in a packed church in Catacaos, northern Peru, Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu addressed the Tallán Indigenous community.

“We are here to ask for your forgiveness in the name of the Church,” he said. “We are late. We should have come 20 years ago, and we are truly sorry.”

The Sodalitium Christianae Vitae was founded in Lima in 1971 by Luis Fernando Figari. A conservative Catholic society, it emerged as a direct counterweight to liberation theology — the movement within the Latin American church that advocated for the poor, the marginalized, the Indigenous. At its peak the Sodalitium had approximately 20,000 members across South America and the United States.

What the Vatican investigation found: “sadistic” sect-like abuses of power and spirituality, sexual abuse by its founder, financial mismanagement of church funds, harassment of critics. In August 2024, Pope Francis expelled Figari. In January 2025, Francis signed the decree of dissolution. In April 2025, the dissolution was implemented.

What happened in Catacaos: Sodalitium-linked companies initiated legal actions to evict Tallán farmers from thousands of hectares, citing property transfers the community did not recognize. Dozens of farmers were prosecuted for “usurpation” — for occupying their own land. Two community leaders were shot and killed during eviction clashes.

The reparations for sexual abuse, physical abuse, and spiritual abuse came to $5.35 million, distributed to 83 identified victims. That is $64,457 per person.

The reparation for the land — thousands of hectares, dozens of prosecutions, two dead — was Saturday’s ceremony.

One form of reparation has a dollar figure. The other has a homily.

In March 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery — the 15th-century papal bulls that European colonial powers cited as divine permission to claim any land not inhabited by Christians. The Vatican said these documents “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples.”

Indigenous leaders called it “a humongous symbolic victory.” They also pointed out that it doesn’t change the law in any country. The bulls that authorized the taking were words on parchment. The repudiation was also words on parchment. The land didn’t move.

In 2024, Pope Francis addressed the Catacaos community directly: “Fight for your lands. I am with you.”

In 2025, he dissolved the organization stealing their lands.

In 2026, his commissioner held a ceremony asking forgiveness for the theft.

Three actions in three years. Each praised as historic. Each symbolic. The hectares did not change hands.

Liberation theology taught that the Church should stand with the poor against the systems that impoverished them. The Sodalitium was founded to counter that teaching. And then its linked companies evicted Indigenous farmers from their ancestral land, prosecuted them for living on it, and were present when two of their leaders were killed.

The organization designed to oppose advocacy for the vulnerable became the thing advocacy warned about. That is not irony. That is the architecture working as intended.

Bertomeu described the community he addressed as “fearful and broken.” Those are his words. The apostolic commissioner’s own assessment of what the institution left behind.

Tania Pariona, secretary of Peru’s National Human Rights Commission, called the ceremony “a historic gesture.” She said the church was “taking the lead over the state, which has failed to protect rural communities.”

The state failed to protect them. The church asks for their forgiveness. Neither returned the land.

There is a word that keeps appearing in these stories. Symbolic. A symbolic victory. A symbolic repudiation. A symbolic ceremony. A symbolic reparation.

Symbolic means the gesture was made and the condition didn’t change. Symbolic means the institution performed accountability without bearing its cost. Symbolic means the word “reparation” can describe $5.35 million to 83 people or a Mass in a packed church, and the institution counts both as complete.

“We should have come 20 years ago,” Bertomeu said.

Twenty years the Church knew. Twenty years in which the evictions proceeded, the prosecutions were filed, the leaders were buried. The institution that created the Doctrine of Discovery in 1493 needed until 2023 to revoke it and until 2026 to apologize for one specific instance of its application.

Five hundred and thirty-three years from the bull to the ceremony. Twenty years from the knowledge to the apology. And in the packed church in Catacaos, a community the commissioner himself described as “fearful and broken” is asked to forgive the institution that broke them.

The land was theirs before the bulls. It was theirs before the Sodalitium. It was theirs before the property transfers no one recognized and the prosecutions no one asked for and the evictions no one stopped.

It still isn’t.

// NEON BLOOD

Sources: ICT News / Associated Press, National Catholic Reporter, Wikipedia: Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, NPR, CBC News