Bishop says even his efforts to denounce abuse, cover-up fell on deaf ears

ROME – In most narratives concerning Catholicism’s sexual abuse scandals, bishops generally are cast as the bad guys – insensitive bureaucrats who ignored suffering and prioritized the interests of the church over the pain of victims.

However, the nearly surreal case of Bishop Kay Schmalhausen, a former member of the Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), illustrates that such narratives often miss the point. To hear him tell it, institutional dynamics of denial and deflection are actually so deeply ingrained that even a bishop’s efforts to report his own abuse, and to call out cover-up, can fall on deaf ears.

The retired bishop of Ayaviri in Peru, Schmalhausen, 60, claims to have been a victim of sexual abuse by various members of the SCV during his early years in the group, and he also asserts that his later attempts to alert church authorities about problems in the SCV weren’t taken seriously.

Founded in Peru in 1971 by layman Luis Fernando Figari, the SCV consists of four different branches. Over the past decade, it’s been embroiled in scandals involving allegations of sexual and other forms of abuse, as well as financial corruption.

In July 2023 Pope Francis sent his top investigating team to Lima to investigate the accusations against SCV, an inquiry which has so far led to the expulsion of 15 top-ranking members, including Figari himself.

Schmalhausen’s story differs vastly from that of the SCV’s other prelate in Peru, Archbishop Jose Antonio Eguren, who was ousted from leadership of the Piura archdiocese earlier this year amid the Vatican probe.

In an interview with Crux, Schmalhausen, 60, described his troubled history within the SCV and criticized what he said were failures by church leaders to properly handle the case.

Trouble in the SCV

Schmalhausen said he first met the SCV when he was 14, and formally joined when he was 18. He was ordained a priest for the group when he was 25, and was named Bishop of Ayaviri at 41. He eventually left the SCV and subsequently resigned his episcopal post.

During his early years in the institution, Schmalhausen said he was sexually abused four times by four different members of the SCV at the ages of 14, 17, 18, and 19.

His abusers, he said, included Figari himself and the then-Vicar General of the SCV, German Doig, who has since died and has been accused of other instances of sexual abuse of minors, as well as Alfredo Garland, who still belongs to the SCV, and Alberto Gazzo, a former priest who has since left the group.

“I suffered diverse abuses, mistreatments, humiliations, mockery and insults, which for most people would be unimaginable, and all this began a few months after my entrance as a minor,” Schmalhausen said.

Schmalhausen described his first year inside of the SCV, with Doig as his superior, as “my year of hell and horror.”

“For me, the episcopate was both an unexpected way out of a pernicious system of manipulation and control, and an awakening to a real and much healthier world, outside of that bubble and its parallel world of ideological and sectarian manufacture,” he said.

After his appointment as bishop of Ayaviri in 2006, he said things became especially difficult when Erwin Scheuch, who is among 15 members of the SCV recently expelled as part of the Vatican’s ongoing inquiry, was named the group’s regional superior in 2010.

In theory, he said, projects and funds of the Prelature of Ayaviri should have been under his jurisdiction as the local bishop. In fact, he said, the SCV began asserting authority, arguing that since Ayaviri was governed by an SCV bishop, the group had the right to exercise control.

Schmalhausen accused the SCV of mismanaging the funds of social programs in Ayaviri, hacking his secretary’s computer and badmouthing him to community authorities when he resisted.

In a social media post following the publication of his testimony on Spanish-language outlet Religion Digital, Schmalhausen’s former secretary, Carlos Huamanchumo Sanchez, confirmed that his computer had indeed been hacked.

“I was a witness to how they wanted to take control of the prelature from him in financial matters, management and pastoral decisions, etc.,” he said, adding, “defending him earned me warnings and mistreatments. I saw his suffering and could accompany him.”

Schmalhausen said he was accused by Scheuch of a lack of fidelity and obedience, and that Scheuch’s complaints about him to SCV authorities and other members sparked tensions that ultimately led to his departure from the SCV in 2018.

“I experienced firsthand the malice of the authorities of my former community, coordinating and organizing, secretly and with impunity, criminal decisions and actions,” he said, saying a top-ranking member would call him “with loud shouts and insults,” criticizing decisions he had made.

The decision to leave, he said, was a long process that included coming to terms with his abuse and mistreatment by the SCV, as well as the failure of internal authorities and those in Rome to investigate Figari and the SCV until scandals became public.

Sounding an alarm

When allegations of sexual abuse against Doig began to surface in Peru in 2010, it was the first time Schmalhausen ever acknowledged out loud that he, too, had been a victim.  The first time he spoke about being sexually abused by Doig, he said, was with a Peruvian priest named Father Jaime Baertl, also among those later expelled from the SCV.

In that conversation, Schmalhausen said Baertl confided that a beatification cause the group had opened for Doig would have to be closed due to the accusations. Upon hearing this, Schmalhausen said that almost uncontrollably, he blurted out that “the same thing happened to me.”

Baertl, he said, looked at him and left the room without saying another word, and that after that moment, he became increasingly isolated within the SCV.

It took another three years for Schmalhausen to discuss his abuse by Figari, bringing it to the attention of SCV authorities in 2013. An internal investigation was conducted over the next 5-6 months, which ended he said, with a finding that Figari was innocent.

“That’s when I said, ‘They are covering up,’” Schmalhausen said.

Schmalhausen said he went to Rome on multiple occasions to discuss problems inside the SCV, including once in 2015 prior to the publication of the book Half Monks, Half Soldiers by journalists Paola Ugaz and Pedro Salinas, himself a former member of the SCV, which chronicled scandals and eventually prompted a series of investigatory commissions and attempted reforms.

During his visits to Rome, Schmalhausen said he met with the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and the secretary of the Vatican’s so-called Dicastery for Religious, Spanish Archbishop José Rodríguez Carballo, to discuss the allegations of abuse in the SCV and problems with its internal culture.

He said both prelates were provided with a lengthy report on problems within the SCV, adding that Carballo was the only one to whom he confided his own experience of sexual abuse. Nothing was done, he said, describing the result as “Roman silence.”

It was only later, he said, in the wake of public pressure, that Carballo asked him to deliver his testimony by email.

In 2017, after a commissioner had been named to oversee SCV reform efforts, Schmalhausen said he sent a lengthy report to American Cardinal Sean O’Malley, President of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.

That report, he said, detailed ongoing abuse and problems in the SCV’s internal culture, despite their apparent attempts at reform, and allegations against specific individuals, including Baertl, whom he accused being part of a systematic invasion of privacy and phone tapping.

Schmalhausen said he got no response to the report, and that “every door I knocked on became, even though I’m a bishop of the Church, closed and sealed.”

In comments to Crux, O’Malley said that while he sympathizes with Schmalhausen and is sorry for the suffering he has endured, his account of events is “very unfair,” and said he had, in fact, discussed Schmalhausen’s concerns.

O’Malley said the two had had an initial conversation over the phone about the SCV in June 2017, and that Schmalhausen sent his report after that. Once he received the report, O’Malley said he attempted to contact Schmalhausen again by phone but was unable to reach him.

Schmalhausen said that amid his efforts to sound the alarm in Rome, SCV members began spreading rumors about him among the curia, saying he was “not right in the head.”

“As time went by, I learned of the defamations and calumnies that were sown against me inside and outside of Rome,” he said. “The strategy was to lie, lie, and something will stick.”

Schmalhausen said Parolin had initially been welcoming and receptive to his complaints about the SCV, but that he was essentially brushed off by both Parolin and O’Malley during Pope Francis’s 2018 visit to Peru and Chile when he tried to approach them to discuss the SCV, calling them “absolutely cold and distant.”

O’Malley told Crux that Schmalhausen’s recollection of their interaction is a “complete misinterpretation” of his attitude and intentions.

He said he had no recollection of meeting Schmalhausen during the pope’s visit, which he described as “a particularly difficult moment for me,” as a devastating clerical abuse crisis in Chile was exploding internationally, and O’Malley himself was being criticized for his critique of papal remarks that had caused hurt among victims.

At the time, O’Malley said, the belief was the SCV scandals were under control, since a commissioner had been appointed and investigatory commissions had been established.

“I wish [Schmalhausen] would have approached me and asked to speak, I would have been happy to,” he said, saying, “I’m sure I would never have brushed him off…I’m not that kind of person.”

Parolin did not respond to a Crux request for comment.

Schmalhausen eventually left the SCV in 2018, concluding that relations with his community had “completely deteriorated,” blaming attempts to discredit him in Rome for the increased isolation he said he experienced in the Peruvian bishops’ conference and in the SCV.

He said repeated requests over a period of nearly four years to be transferred to a new diocese, so he could have a fresh start, were repeatedly denied. Eventually, he said, in the spring of 2021 he received a call from the Vatican’s envoy to Peru at the time, Italian Archbishop Nicola Girasoli, who he said “shouted” at him and demanded his resignation.

“Why resist a machine whose gears would not stop?” he said, saying he complied and stepped down at age 57, with no other assignment and with the excuse, suggested by Girasoli, that he had to care for his elderly mother.

However, Schmalhausen said he continues to celebrate Mass and to hear confessions.

“Even though my life was broken into a thousand pieces, and I spent years in a valley of pain and despair as a result of the abuses and ecclesiastical re-victimizations I suffered, my faith was not shattered,” he said.

Flaws in the system

As a victim, Schmalhausen said he has experienced firsthand “the painful path of trauma: Phobias, panic attacks, nightmares, fear, delusions of persecution, anxiety, and so many other symptoms that accompany this prolonged ordeal.”

“I know firsthand the dynamics of manipulation, submission and breaking of the will,” as well as what he said was a “total lack of empathy, compassion, listening, recognition, and affirmation on the part of other members of the Sodalitium, not to mention ecclesial authorities.”

He apologized for times when he, too, failed to listen to victims who confided in him, and said that in light of his experience, he has sought to help other victims of the SCV and other institutions to navigate their own paths of healing and leaving their communities.

Schmalhausen voiced support for the Vatican team investigating the SCV, condemning what he said have been widespread efforts by the SCV and its network to discredit the investigation, and also criticized the way the Peruvian bishops’ conference has handled the SCV crisis.

“As a bishop and former member of the Sodalitium, throughout my active presence in the CEP, I was never asked for my opinion or view on the subject,” he said. “No one ever approached me to engage in an honest and direct dialogue, with the aim of really understanding what was happening and thus being able to act.”

He charged his fellow bishops with donning a “cloak of silence.”

“Transparency, integrity, and accountability are unavoidable demands for the Church and its pastors of today and tomorrow if we want to avoid the tsunamis of indignation, anger and impotence which break the dikes of silence and coverup,” he said.

In recent weeks Baertl, the priest to whom Schmalhausen first revealed his abuse, has sought meetings with several officials in Rome despite being expelled from the SCV. O’Malley said he met Baertl, urging the SCV to “put the victims first” and to prioritize reparation.

“My message to him, as it is to everyone, was to put the victims first, in dialogue with the Holy See, and to set up a fund to compensate those who have been harmed, because you know it’s not just people harmed by the sexual abuse, but also the economic injustices of some of the members,” he said.

Daniel Calderon, a spokesman for the SCV, confirmed to Crux that the SCV had received “confidential testimonies of various kinds of abuse” against Figari between 2013-2014, including that of Schmalhausen, but said that Figari “was never declared innocent.”

Each of the allegations were brought to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Religious, he said, saying the SCV, with the guidance of that department, began an internal administrative process which culminated with “the imposition of disciplinary measures” against Figari in 2014.

After an investigatory commission vetted these and other testimonies in 2016, after scandals involving Figari and other top SCV members went public a year prior, a report was published in 2017 and the Vatican imposed new sanctions against Figari that year, he said.

Calderon also denied the allegation that SCV members had hacked the computer of Schmalhausen’s secretary, saying the individual accused of downloading the spyware has denied the allegation, and that investigations in 2016 and June 2024 found the individual to be innocent.

What was installed by the person in question, Calderon said, was “a browsing filter” that was imposed on all members of the SCV, but “it was not a program that accessed personal information.”

The results of the 2024 investigation, which took place amid the Vatican’s ongoing inquiry into the SCV, were submitted to the Vatican’s investigatory team earlier this year, he said.

Calderon said members have not “spread lies” about Schmalhausen in Rome, and he said the SCV has received no sexual abuse allegations against Garland, one of the four figures Schmalhausen said had abused him during his early years in the group.

“Any complaint that is made and involves sexual abuse committed by a member of the Sodalitium will be investigated appropriately, even if the alleged act is prescribed, and the appropriate measures will be taken to repair the damage caused, complying at all times with civil and canonical norms,” Calderon said.

Follow Elise Ann Allen on X: @eliseannallen