Peruvian priest ousted from order accused of sex abuse, coverup

28.10.2024 12:06

Crux

ROME – After a priest recently expelled from a Peru-based society has denied allegations of sexual abuse, two former members of the group have said he not only committed the abuse, but obstructed justice in the coverup of child pornography.

Father Jaime Baertl is one of 15 members expelled from the Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV) in the past two months, including its founder, Peruvian layman Luis Fernando Figari.

For over a year the Vatican has been conducting an in-depth investigation into the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), which for the past decade has undergone various reform efforts amid sweeping allegations of various forms of abuse, including the sexual abuse of minors, as well as financial corruption.

Baertl and fellow SCV member Juan Carlos Len were jointly expelled from the SCV Thursday, with a communique from the nunciature referring to “irregular and illicit” financial activities within SCV companies and organizations, as well as one allegation of sexual abuse.

In response, the men sent a notarized letter to the Vatican’s nunciature in Lima saying the allegations of sexual abuse were “absolutely false,” and asking them to rectify the communique, which they said contained “false and defamatory” information.

However, the alleged victim of the act of the abuse mentioned has told Crux that not only is it true, but the abuse itself was committed by Baertl in his capacity as a spiritual director, and has never been acknowledged by the SCV, with an investigatory commission ultimately determining that it was “implausible.”

Speaking to Crux, Martin Scheuch, who was a member of the SCV to varying degrees from 1978-2008 and whose brother Erwin Scheuch was among 10 members expelled last month, said that when he was 16, he was ordered by Baertl in spiritual direction to undress and fornicate with a chair.

He had gotten involved with the SCV roughly a year prior and had begun receiving spiritual direction from Baertl as part of his desire to grow in holiness and, eventually, become a member of the group.

It was in one spiritual direction session in 1979, he said, that “Baertl gave me the order to strip, twice, because the first time I doubted that I had heard what I heard, and I was reluctant to do so.”

Scheuch said he finally complied with the order and undressed, “because I trusted Baertl as my spiritual guide, who supposedly knew that what he was doing was for my greater good.”

“Even so, he had to order me afterwards to take off my underwear too, because I assumed that I was complying with what was ordered by keeping them on,” he said, saying after he was completely naked, Baertl asked him to “f*ck” a large chair on the other side of the room.

Again, Scheuch said, Baertl had to give the command twice, “because the first time I couldn’t believe what I was being ordered to do, and it seemed absurd to me.”

The second time Baertl ordered, Scheuch said, “I obeyed, placing myself behind the backrest, which reached up to my chin, and passing my [penis] through the space that separated the backrest from the seat itself.”

“I made a couple of clumsy movements trying to imitate what intercourse is like – an experience I had never had in my life – but I simply couldn’t do what Baertl ordered me to do, because the discomfort I felt made my movements unnatural and cause a certain bodily rigidity.”

Scheuch said the episode, which he described as not erotic but rather “an inhibitor of all sexual libido,” lasted less than a minute, after which he was told to get dressed again.

Baertl, he said, “never tried to take sexual advantage of the situation,” but seemed to be uncomfortable himself, sitting across the room while the episode unfolded with his hand over his face, while looking out of the corner of his eye.

Scheuch said that prior to issuing that command, there had been a lull in their conversation and Baertl told him to wait while he spoke to the house superior, at the time Germán Doig, who is now deceased but who has also been accused of sexually abusing minors.

After returning to the room, he said, Baertl told him that the reason the conversation had reached a dead end was because he had too many “inner barriers,” likely related to past trauma, and that he needed to break those barriers.

Once he put his clothes back on, Scheuch said he felt as if “I had been subjected to internal violence.”

“At the time I did not categorize this as something bad and reprehensible, because in the Sodalitium one was mentally trained to accept acts of psychological violence against oneself or against others as normal,” he said.

It was only after several years had passed that he realized that what happened was wrong, he said, saying, “Only with the passing of the years, when one learns to know the world better and is confronted with reality does one come to categorize certain past experiences as abuse, while at the same time becoming aware of the damage they have left on one’s own psyche.”

“That is what happened to me with this and other experiences,” he said, saying no one technically forced him to commit the act, but he did it because “I was at the mercy of my spiritual advisor.”

It was done, he said, “based on the trust I had in him and the authority that he exercised over me as a spiritual guide” over an adolescent.

Scheuch said an initial Ethics Commission for Justice and Reconciliation tasked with investigating the SCV’s abuses found his accusation regarding the incident to be credible, whereas a second determined it was “implausible.”

He said that the previous two superiors general of the SCV also determined the incident to be implausible, including the current superior general, José David Correa, who despite doubting the credibility of the allegation offered him compensation in dollars that was higher than what other victims had received in the past.

“Jaime Baertl must be happy that my story has been considered implausible by his hired experts, but his joy is probably fragile and fleeting, because if he still does not have Alzheimer’s, I am sure that the memory of what happened will accompany him to the grave,” he said.

In addition to the episode with Scheuch, Baertl has also been accused of covering up the abuse of former SCV member Daniel Murguía Ward, who on Oct. 27, 2007, was arrested after being discovered by police in a hotel with a child half naked with their pants down while he was holding a digital camera.

That camera, confiscated by police, contained explicit photos of that minor and two others.

Murguía, though arrested in Lima, at the time was living in the SCV’s community house in Santiago de Chile.

Speaking to Crux, former SCV member Renzo Orbegozo Benvenuto, who at the time was living in the same community house in Chile as Murguía, said he was contemplating leaving the community, but was advised by Baertl to wait until after the scandals involving Murguía blew over.

“It was the last months of 2007, and I asked Father Jaime Baertl to talk about my departure from the community, which I had sought for nine years,” Orbegozo said.

He said he and Baertl met at a café called La Baguette in the neighborhood of San Isidro and that “after a trivial conversation we got to the point: Jaime I want to go out at the end of the year.”

Baertl in response, he said, told him, “What do you think if instead of leaving at the end of the year you wait until February or March 2008?”

“At that stage of my life within the association I was counting the seconds to leave, so I asked why the delay,” Orbegozo said, saying Baertl’s response was that “I don’t want you to be linked to the case of Daniel Murguía, who had just been caught in a small hotel taking photos of a minor.”

Given that he was anxious to leave the community, Orbegozo said that if he was going to comply with Baertl’s request to wait, he wanted to know how true the allegations against Murguía were, so he asked Baertl about it directly.

“Jaime took a breath and told me, Eduardo (Regal), Gonzalo (Len) and I have reviewed this guy’s computer,” referring to a laptop that Murguía had brought with him from Chile to Lima, “and we found enough material so that Daniel may never see the light of day again in his life.”

“Faced with such a revealing answer, I remained silent, drank my coffee and stayed inside [the community] without questioning anything,” Orbegozo said.

Murguía was acquitted a year and a half after his arrest by Justice Javier Villa Stein, who is the relative of one of Murguía’s then-superiors within the SCV, Eduardo Regal Villa, who last month was expelled from the SCV amid the Vatican’s ongoing investigation.

The acquittal was due in part to the fact that the accuser changed an aspect of the story, saying there had been no genital contact as originally suggested, although there was no alteration of the claims of nudity and photographing nude minors.

Despite the possibility of pursuing charges against Murguía for child pornography, the case was archived by Villa Stein, a high-ranking judge in Peru’s legal system who is also Regal’s maternal uncle.

Baertl did not immediately respond to a Crux request for comment.

Follow Elise Ann Allen on X: @eliseannallen