Peru’s Catholic Church holds a symbolic ceremony in apology for Indigenous land dispossession

LIMA, Peru — After years of allegations of land dispossession by a now-dissolved Catholic group, the highest ecclesiastical authorities in the Andean country on Saturday held a symbolic reparation ceremony for the Indigenous people whose land was taken away.

The Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae was dissolved din 2025 by the late Pope Francis, after years of attempts at reform and a Vatican investigation that uncovered sexual abuses by its founder, financial mismanagement by its leaders and spiritual abuses by its top members.

The ceremony in Peru took place before the Indigenous people of Tallán, in the northern community of Catacaos.

“We are here to ask for your forgiveness in the name of the Church,” Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, apostolic commissioner who was in charge of the dissolution process of the Sodalitium, said before a packed church. “We are late. We should have come 20 years ago, and we are truly sorry.”

The Sodalitium was founded in 1971 as one of several Catholic societies born as a conservative reaction to the left-leaning liberation theology movement that swept through Latin America in the 1960s. At its height, the group counted about 20,000 members across South America and the United States, and was