Denver pastor’s alleged victim says she feels ‘twice betrayed and violated’ by rumors

ROME – After news broke last week that the Vatican had expelled 10 prominent members of a scandal-plagued Peruvian secular group, including the parish priest of a Denver parish, the priest’s victim has fiercely pushed back against the rumors, which he says are not only untrue but revictimization.

“I felt doubly betrayed, doubly persecuted and violated because I was trying to be a good person (but) they didn’t care. They care more about their vanity and their name,” said Aharon Felipe Cardona, formerly Andrés before converting to Judaism about two years ago Point.

Cardona is a former member Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), a lay men’s group founded in Lima in 1971 by Peruvian layman Luis Fernando Figari, who was expelled last month as a result of an ongoing Vatican investigation after sanctions were imposed on him in 2017 for physical, mental , spiritual and sexual abuse of members, including sexual abuse of minors.

He spoke following the Sept. 25 announcement by the Peruvian Bishops’ Conference that 10 prominent members of the group had been expelled as part of an ongoing investigation by the Vatican’s top investigative team, Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, deputy secretary of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Spanish Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu. official in the same department.

Among those expelled was Father Daniel Cardó, parish priest of Holy Name Parish in Denver, which was entrusted to SCV in 2010 and houses a community house on the parish’s grounds.

RELATED: Denver parish at center of scandals involving Peruvian secular group

Cardó did not respond to a Point request for comment.

Cardona, who is Colombian and accused Cardó of physical assault as part of his testimony before two boards of inquiry, said that after Cardó’s expulsion was announced last week, he heard rumors that SCV members were telling parishioners that he had withdrawn his complaints.

“I’m very hurt by what’s happening to Daniel because I don’t hate him. It hurts me a lot. “I put myself in his shoes and say that he must be going through a really difficult time,” he said, but insisted that “I am not withdrawing any complaint.”

Cardona stated that the rumor is a “manipulative response that at no point takes into account how it has affected me, my pain and my feelings about what has happened to me in the community.”

Although Cardona insisted he bore no ill will toward SCV, when he heard the rumors, the word that came to mind was: “bastards!”

Cardona, who grew up in a poor single-parent household, was introduced to SCV at age 13 because there was a community center near his school, and eventually joined the band he was creating.

In 1998, he made an aspirational pledge to the group, committing to spend a year of discernment. He often visited the SCV community house in Carmen de Viboral, where Cardó was his spiritual director and his superior was SCV member Miguel Salazar.

Salazar, former superior of the SCV house in Arequipa and vice-chancellor of the prestigious University of San Pablo in Arequipa, was also among those expelled from the SCV last week.

Cardona said that as a midshipman, “Daniel treated me badly, he was very hard on me. I felt humiliated, there are thousands of such stories. I was with him for two or three years as a spiritual advisor.”

Cardona was among the anonymous authors of the 2015 book Half monks, half soldiers by journalists Pedro Salinas, also a former SCV member, and Paola Ugaz, which exposed abuses at the SCV and led to a series of investigations and reform efforts.

In the book, Cardona describes being regularly molested by Cardó, Salazar and another SCV member, José Alfredo Cabrera.

Among other things, Cardona said that Cardó approached him one evening and told him that he would punch him 11 times in the stomach and that if he fell, Cardó would start over.

Despite falling multiple times and crying in pain, Cardona said he made it through and that Cardó made it clear that he was doing it for his own good, to make him a stronger and better person. He said this happened multiple times and that Cardó often punched him in the face.

Cardona said he was also forced to eat rotten pizza, and at one point Salazar forbade him from smiling for three months because his face was too “sensual” when he smiled. He was also banned from eating for three days after he failed to get a laugh out of a joke he told.

He said he was also made to go through paramilitary zones to swim in a lake at midnight in freezing temperatures to fall asleep while praying, and in winter he was also forced to walk without shoes and perform extreme exercises, including 1,000 sit-ups in one night.

Cardona outlined these and other incidents in his testimony before an ethics committee convened in November 2015, following the publication of Salinas and Ugaz’s book on research and proposal submission, and before a separate internal investigation by the SCV a year later.

As for the actions he described, “they are all true, they are all true,” 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 shortly after Salinas’ book was published in 2015, Cardó contacted her and asked to talk, claiming that his family was struggling with the reports and had stopped supporting him financially, and that he was “surprised” by Cardona’s testimony.

They met in Medellín, and Cardona said he listened to Cardó and offered to talk to the family to help them understand that he had also made complaints about other SCV members.

“I don’t know if he took it as me withdrawing my complaint,” he said, but insisted that “I never wrote a document saying it was false. NO. I never backed down.”

Cardona said he recently met Salazar on a plane and, wanting to forget his past suffering, decided to get closer to him and even offered him a ride to the city and mentioned a potential cooperation between the University of San Pablo and his foundation, ANCLA, dedicated to human rights.

Cardona, seeing Salazar, said to himself, “We must end the war. They suffered too. In the end, he too became a victim of the international structure” and, in his opinion, the meeting went well.

But a week later, he said, he received a call to say that Salazar was telling people that “what Cardona was saying is false” and that his testimony was a lie.

Cardona said he tried to maintain a “nice attitude, forgive a little, get over the pain, but these people couldn’t do it on their own. What they are saying seems very unfair to me. It seems unfair that, in the face of such a costly complaint, they would claim it to be untrue.”

However, the rumor that he had withdrawn his testimony, he stated, “hits me much harder… these people have not learned. That is, there is really no sense of admitting a mistake and saying: let’s change because they want to save themselves at my expense.

“The issue of repentance is false. The issue of asking for forgiveness is false. I have not withdrawn any complaint,” he said, saying: “I wanted to show solidarity with Daniel and told him I could talk to your family if you wanted (but) I never told him that what I said was false at any point.”

Cardona said SCV’s apparent attitude of denial and lack of acknowledgment of victims’ experiences brings back difficult memories.

“Who cares how we felt when they threw us out like dogs?” he said, saying he felt an obligation to set the record straight because “not only is my suffering on my back, but also the suffering of the other victims who may not be Daniel’s victims but come from the institution.”

“I would never forgive myself for the rest of my life because it would be a betrayal of my friends’ pain,” he said.

Cardona said that during their 2015 conversation, Cardó never apologized for his actions, but rather was concerned 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 institutional nature of what was happening. He was very concerned about what his family was saying,” Cardona said. “I was worried he might be suffering from Stockholm syndrome.”

Cardona said that after his testimony, SCV offered him approximately $50,000 in compensation, but on the condition that he sign a letter stating that he would never again file a formal complaint of a similar nature.

“They thought they were buying silence, but you can’t really do that in a human rights context,” he said.

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