From the jaws of the beast: Two stories of Heralds’ survivors

One is a former member of the Heralds and lay person, born and recruited in the Global North. The other is also a former member and current priest in Latin America.

Their testimonies provide first-hand accounts of how the Heralds, a Vatican-approved order-like organization, bet on predatory, sect-like practices.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

For this fourth installment on what explains abuse within the Heralds of the Gospel or Arautos, as they are known in the Global South after their original Portuguese name, newly accessed documents tell two sides of a remarkably similar story.

Both documents are part of the many files sent to the Vatican after Pope Francis started the so-called Apostolic Visitation that ultimately led to the current intervention of the Arautos, a procedure still formally presided over by Brazilian Cardinal Raymundo Damasceno Assis, who is now assisted by José Aparecido Gonçalves de Almeida, the head of the diocese of Itumbiara, and Marián Ambrósio, the Superior General of the Sisters of Divine Providence (content in Portuguese).

The documents provide painfully detailed accounts of how predatory practices were normalized by Rome during the latter years of John Paul II’s pontificate. They offer two narratives of how complex abuse in religious settings is. Both were written by male survivors.

One, 326 pages long, is the direct response of a former member of the Arautos to a request from the Vatican officials dealing with abuse in that order-like religious organization. He will be identified only as Charles, to protect his identity and that of his friends and family. Charles is currently a lay person, born in and currently a resident of the Global North, where he was recruited back in the 1980s and sent to Brazil to continue what was expected to be his formation as a priest of that organization.

The second is a 135-page account from a current priest in Latin America, who also left the order and who is now a pastor of a parish in his home country. He will only be identified as José to protect him from a potential backlash from the most radicalized members of the Arautos in his country and elsewhere in Latin America.

While Charles’s document builds from his own experience as a survivor of the many forms of abuse practiced by the leaders and members of the Arautos, the kind of broad and generalized practices that prevented Brazilian authorities from identifying who was the main culprit of the abuse against him, José’s document delves deeper into the kind of theological and ecclesiological analyses one would expect from a priest who, otherwise, seems to be in good standing in his diocese and Rome.

Both documents were sent by their authors to the Vatican authorities dealing with this specific case so, at least for the purposes of the internal or canonical procedures, they remain under the “pontifical secret.” Even if there is no obligation to comply with the arcane rules of “pontifical secret,” since the documents do not come from Vatican sources, the anonymization of the victims’ identities tries to avoid affecting a potential ruling from Rome on the future of this organization and its many associated groups and so-called “movements.”

That is also the reason why the documents as such are not released at this point, because even though the original intervention began already more than nine years ago, there is the expectation that Rome will do something with this and many other order-like organizations affected by similar sectarian and predatory practices.

Above all else, it tries to shield both Charles, José, and many other former members of the organization who have been ready to call out the Arautos’ excesses, and perhaps more tellingly Rome’s slow reaction. So slow, that it borders on what many see as disinterest in actually addressing the current situation at the Arautos’ houses and communities.

As far as Charles’s is concerned, a version of his testimony appears in the files shaping the probe into the Arautos that Brazilian authorities, represented by Catharina Verboonen, decided to end and send to the Dead Archive, the Arquivamento procedure, as it is called in Portuguese.

Going back to Catharina Verboonen’s memorandum of Arquivamento, available after this paragraph, it is necessary to keep in mind that it was issued not because she was unable to find evidence of the abuse. At no point in the memorandum, where Charles is quoted repeatedly, does Verboonen dismiss his complaints or grievances. Quite the opposite, every time the identifiers used by Verboonen refer to Charles, she agrees that there is merit in his claims, but she also claims to be unable to build an actual case and bring it to a judge.

She does so because the main culprit, João Clá Dias, the founder of the Arautos, has died, because the crimes happened many years ago, so the statute of limitations has expired and, to add insult to injury, because the abuse was so pervasive, so institutionalized, as to become an unsolvable puzzle of sorts for the Brazilian system of justice.

In Verboonen’s document, it is possible to read how she, as a top official of the Brazilian government, accepts that wrongdoing, even systematic human rights violations, occurred, but declares her office unable to actually address the crimes, much less to find a way to offer a measure of justice to those affected by the Heralds’ practices.

It is also necessary to keep in mind that ever since Pope Francis’s death in April 2025, friends and allies of the Arautos in other religious organizations facing similar processes in Rome and, more significantly, their allies in the Latin American political elites launched a full campaign to put an end to the intervention of the Arautos.

It must be stressed that the Apostolic Visitation and a subsequent intervention is a procedure Rome has used before to deal with the Legion of Christ, and that as recently as December 8, 2024 (content in Spanish), has been ordered for a fourth time in less than 40 years for the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word.

Rome’s intervention in these kinds of groups comes with no warranties as to how effective it will be. Despite the many hours of “Catholic prattle” about humbleness and obedience to the Vicar of Christ—one of the titles used to refer to the Pope—organizations that claim to follow a military-like discipline reminiscent of medieval crusading orders, or a twisted understanding of the Jesuits' “fourth vow” of obedience to the Pope, are more than willing to challenge papal authority.

In the most extreme cases—such as the now schismatic Society of Saint Pius X—they do so by invoking the authority of a long-dead Pontiff, Pius X, but even when the organizations claim to be in full communion with Rome, as the Arautos do, one only needs to look at how they use their Italian cyber-infrastructure to wage a war against the late Pope Francis’s decision to place them under intervention.

From there, they have flooded Catholic social media with a campaign to render themselves the victim of Pope Francis or, more attuned with Catholic practice, to render themselves as victims of people close to the late Argentine pontiff who offered him false or misguided information.

The image above is the cover of a PDF generously distributed by the Arautos and their allies where they exploit those tropes as much as possible. Beneath the author credits, the Portuguese title reads:

• The Commissariat of the Heralds of the Gospel
• Chronicle of facts, 2017-2025
• Punished without dialogue / without proofs / without defense

There are at least four simultaneous editions—English, Spanish, and Italian, alongside the original Portuguese—weaponized across a coordinated network of social media accounts spanning Instagram, TikTok, X and Facebook. On every platform, they play the perpetual victim, using these digital beachheads to attack Pope Francis’s decision to place them under what is, for all practical purposes, a caretaker management.

And what one sees with the Heralds is reminiscent, to say the least, of what one sees these days in the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word (content in Spanish), where a separate cyber-infrastructure had to be launched, with a new and independent URL (verboencarnado.org) instead of the “historical” ive.org.

In a conflict reminiscent of medieval quarrels inside monasteries, two functional websites now exist: one controlled by the old guard loyal to Carlos Miguel Buela’s methods, and the other operated by José Antonio Satué Huerto, the current bishop of Málaga, Spain.

Satué Huerto was forced to launch that parallel cyber-infrastructure to prevent the Argentine organization’s old guard from hijacking his communications with Rome and other actors in the ongoing drama within the order founded by Buela, and offers a proxy of the ongoing conflict surrounding the Arautos, revealing how thin these predatory organizations’ commitment to obedience really is when they perceive a threat to their future.

This is more relevant in the case of the Arautos as they remain a key player in the coalition supporting the Bolsonaro family in the Brazilian far-right. Even if they lost their political bet to support Jair Bolsonaro’s reelection, the now-jailed former head of state, they are fully behind his son Flávio, who is trying to defeat the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who seeks to achieve a first-ever milestone in Brazilian politics: a fourth presidential term, when he is about to reach 81 in less than a month.

As if they were already covering a potential loss in their home country, the Arautos have become an amulet of sorts for Abelardo de la Espriella, the recently inaugurated President of Colombia, who recently featured members of that organization during a vigil in Bogotá’s Bolívar Square as a controversial act of unity after the August 10, 2026, 7.5-magnitude earthquake.

The Arautos’ pageantry and paraphernalia fit De la Espriella’s performative far-right populism like a glove, with frequent military “salutes” to his crowds, mixed with his peculiar brand of identitarian Catholicism.

Recruited in the Global North, abused in Latin America

Charles’s account of his experience as a former member of the Arautos goes well beyond the anecdote, not only because his account is now an element of the Vatican’s delayed decision over the future of that order-like organization. Also, because his testimony was relevant enough to be quoted as a source by Verboonen’s Arquivamento memorandum.

He explains his own interest in the Arautos as a byproduct of his upbringing in a Catholic household in the Global North, where the threat of communism was a serious matter, so central to shaping a person’s identity that Charles’s testimony puts it front and center as the reason why, as a teenager, he fell for the idea of a total, unflinching commitment to cast such demon from the face of the Earth.

And if the rhetoric looks out of place it merely tries to match what the Arautos themselves were doing with the ritual of exorcism. Popularized after the 1973 film, exorcism among the Arautos became a sort of one-size-fits-all cure for all kind of illnesses, but also a weapon used to render their leaders as a threat to Satan himself.

Just as Marcial Maciel framed himself as the victim of an imaginary Mexican Communist Party willing to kill him to explain away rumors about his private life, Correia and Clá Dias “let” their underlings play around with alleged messages from demonic entities chastised during alleged “in house” exorcisms.

Oddly enough, in doing so they were going against the Catholic Church’s own teachings about how to deal with such messages going back to the Middle Ages. Dismissive of such teachings, Tradition, Family and Property leaders were more than willing to “leak” messages about Clá being identified by such entities not only as a worthy rival, a foe relevant enough to become the target of their evil, but also as a future Pope.

The “leaking” of such messages was already an established strategy to raise Clá Dias’s profile in 1988 when, at fifteen years old, Charles first contacted a TFP center in a major metropolitan area of the Global North. Drawn by what he now understands as the organization’s traditional Catholic aesthetic and anti-communist rhetoric, he quickly integrated into their local youth activities.

By the end of that year, local directors began encouraging a deeper commitment, leading him to abandon his formal secondary education. In July 1989, at sixteen, he moved into what was then a TFP center but was already doubling down as what eventually became, at least formally, the Arautos in Brazil little over ten years later.

It is unclear what was the actual canonical status of TFP in that diocese, but Charles became a full-time resident. In doing so, he followed a path common at the time for the aspiring members of the Legion of Christ, Opus Dei, the Sodalitium of Christian Life and the Institute of the Incarnate Word: breaking off regular contact with his family and entering an extremely structured regime of daily prayer, recruiting tasks, and ideological training.

Transfer to Brazil and entering the Eremos (1989–1994)

In late 1989, TFP leadership transferred Charles to Brazil, the central operational base of the movement led by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, who at the time was still very much active and a visible presence on what would become the Arautos.

Following a pattern of continually repurposing Latin words that share roots across Portuguese and other Western languages, TFP labeled their training process, the one Charles joined in Brazil, with the Latin term for a hermitage: the Eremos.

The language trick was not limited to those relatively major transitions, something similar to rituals of passage in the lives of the young aspiring members, but a key element of TFP-Arautos’ “branding”: rendering themselves as the most recent iteration of a long-lineage of order-like foundations in the Catholic Church, using as much Latin or Latin-related terms to describe the world and the role of the young aspiring monk in it as they were able.

One of such uses of Latin words or phrases is the so-called Praesto Sum, a process designed for the intense spiritual and physical formation of young recruits, leading ultimately to the annihilation of the so-called “inner forum,” that is to say, the ability of members of this kind of organizations to decide on their own.

Once again, similar practices, although with different names or emphases, were already used by the Mexican Legion of Christ, Opus Dei in Spain, the Peruvian Sodalitium, and the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word.

Life in the Brazilian hermitages was governed by the Ordo. There, one finds yet another adaptation of a Latin root that echoes, through cognates, across Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and English: order. The Ordo or order was an unwritten but strictly enforced code of conduct dictating every aspect of daily life.

The Arautos were hardly unique among modern authoritarian or sect-like movements in the Global North and Latin America anchoring their identities in an idealized notion of the Late Roman Empire through the use of Latin.

By appealing to very specific Latin words at least partially intelligible in contemporary Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and even English—they are trying to tap into a cultural code that equates absolute hierarchy with divine law, etymology with natural order, allowing them to sell rigid internal control as the ultimate defense of civilization.

Forcing the Ordo upon the young recruits was not an easy task. The leaders of TFP and later the Arautos were well aware of how hard it is to force relatively naive novices into a life of deprivation, submission, and violence—especially when recruiting from Catholic parishes in the Global North or affluent households in Latin America. Much like the leadership of the Peruvian Sodalitium at the time, TFP-Arautos leaders had to frame it as a heroic exchange: pain as the necessary price for preserving or, even more, for saving, an idealized notion of Western civilization.

Some of the main elements of life in the Eremos included:

Absolute obedience: Complete submission to superiors, particularly João Scognamiglio Clá Dias, who functioned as TFP’s primary director under Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira.

Strict discipline and silence: Daily routines were regulated down to the minute, incorporating prolonged periods of obligatory silence, rigid postures during meetings, and strict limits on personal autonomy as the ultimate proof of obedience and docility towards the organization.

Vows and ceremonies: Recruits took formal vows of spiritual servitude to the movement’s leaders and certain devotions to the Virgin Mary, most notably, as it happened in Bolívar Square in Bogotá last August, Our Lady of Fatima, a frequent sight in the global Catholic far-right movements.

That was coupled with the adoption of unique dressing. The Arautos attire is a mind-blowing combination of certain elements of the Carmelite habit, with tunic-style robes with large crosses, a far cry from the “discalced Carmelites” of 16th century Spain as promoted by Saint Teresa de Ávila and other Iberian mystics.

The Arauto habit, an aesthetic hallucination that never goes all the way down to the ankle joint, is paired with boots the Arautos leadership claims are military-inspired. Yet such footwear would only pass as military among elite cavalry units of 18th- and 19th-century armies during the Napoleonic Wars; they were entirely unknown to medieval military orders of the 9th or 10th centuries.

If one was forced to find similar boots in military uniforms, they only exist in the ceremonial uniforms of cavalry units as contemporary military boots are for the most part made from synthetic materials, for performance, not aesthetics. That is why the best place to find that kind of boots would be in the uniforms used by participants in equestrian competitions in the Olympics, the so-called dressage.

Despite these historical inaccuracies, what became the Arautos already operated under a rigid military-like structure, demanding absolute obedience to house leaders, in yet another nod to what was common currency at the time in the Mexican Legion of Christ or the Peruvian Sodalitium.

Finally, per Charles’s account, there is the issue of the punishment and “penances.” The disciplinary infractions or perceived spiritual flaws were met with formal reprimands, physical chores, corporal penances, and public self-criticism sessions, the so-called “chapters,” an additional nod to TFP-Arautos’ “reimagination” of the Middle Ages.

As it was also the case in the Legion of Christ, Opus Dei and other similar predatory organizations of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Charles was cut off from outside news, family communication, and personal financial resources, receiving all lodging, clothing, and basic necessities directly through the movement’s internal channels.

The Bagarre, an Arauto apocalypse

What is strikingly peculiar of the Arautos identity, of how they explain their own role in the Catholic Church’s history is the notion of Bagarre. One must be aware that Bagarre itself is not a Portuguese word.

It was borrowed by Corrêa de Oliveira and Clá Dias despite the fact that Portuguese has a direct equivalent (briga), which parallels the concept of 'Tribulation' found in apocalyptic literature regarding the end of times or the end of the world.

In Charles’s carefully reconstructed explanation of what the Bagarre is, one needs to see it as the very key to the Arautos’ worldview. The Bagarre is the consequence of a radical anti-communist stance infused with an end-of-times sense of existential emergency. It is not an election race or a philosophical or academic debate. It is the very manifestation of an existential threat justified in the Arautos’ interpretation of what the alleged secret messages of Our Lady of Fatima were in the early 20th century.

In that regard, the Bagarre provides a narrative of imminent conflict but also an excuse to kill, if required those who, for whatever reason come to be identified as “communists.” The Bagarre is also what justifies the very idea of the need for what the Arautos’ understanding of Catholic theology understands as “sacred slavery” as a total and absolute commitment of the self to a Messianic Triad formed not by the Holy Trinity, not even by that notion of the Christian God as one and trine, but by Plinio Corrêa, his mother Lucilia Corrêa de Oliveira and Clá Dias as the Arautos’ true spiritual North.

The Bagarre is the “Sixth Crusade” wrapped around the most radical possible interpretation of the Book of Revelation justified by Plinio Corrêa’s and Clá Dias’s self-serving understanding of the alleged secret messages of Our Lady of Fatima.

Such rewriting of Catholic and Christian theology has the Arautos as the ultimate guardian of civilization itself. No human law, Brazilian, Colombian or from any other nation has true authority over them as ultimately the very hierarchy of the Catholic Church has not either.

As he did with his testimony to Catharina Verboonen, Charles is not trying to convince Vatican officials that there were isolated excesses. He was warning Pope Francis and Cardinal Damasceno Assis that the excesses at the Arautos emerged as the logical consequence of the internal structure of belief developed first by Plinio Corrêa and later amended by Clá Dias.

Charles is not reporting simple misconduct. He is describing an organizational design imbued with a historical mythology that challenges the very authority of the Catholic Church. It is reminiscent of a phrase John Paul II used to use to chastise and humiliate the Liberation Theology in the 1970s and 1980s: A parallel church.

Charles was witness of the changes brought by the death of founder Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in October 1995. At the time, the movement underwent a major organizational realignment under João Scognamiglio Clá Dias. Internal disputes over leadership and property split the original TFP structures. During this transition, Clá Dias spearheaded the restructuring that led to the creation of the Heralds of the Gospel (Arautos do Evangelho).

Charles was assigned to various international missions during these transitional years, including assignments in North America and Brazil. His duties included managing internal property logistics, driving leadership figures, organizing youth recruiting campaigns, and collecting donations for the expanding enterprise. Despite his long service, he remained under total organizational surveillance and tight control over his schedule and movements.

Over his ten years within the group, persistent physical exhaustion, enforced isolation from his family, and growing doubts regarding internal devotional practices directed toward the movement's leaders created profound psychological strain.

In October 1999, while stationed at an operational base, Charles decided to break away. Lacking personal savings, formal educational credentials, or external identity documentation, he coordinated with external family support to secure transportation and escape the property.

Following his exit in late 1999, Charles, already back in his home country, with the kind of support only a Welfare state can provide, underwent extensive psychological rehabilitation to process the trauma and identity loss resulting from his decade of isolation. To prevent similar experiences for other youth, he compiled his diaries, internal rulebooks, and personal recollections into a comprehensive formal narrative.

He formally submitted this documentation to ecclesiastical authorities in his home country, the Holy See, and civil investigative bodies in Brazil (including the Public Ministry of São Paulo) to document the reach of psychological, labor and emotional abuse, recruitment of minors, and canonical irregularities within the organization.

José’s testimony

Unlike Charles, José spent nearly 24 years within the movement. He actually entered at a local branch of Tradition, Family and Property in 1993, and subsequently in the Arautos when it first created its clerical society the so-called Virgo Flos Carmeli, word from a fragment of a 13th-century prayer asking for the intercession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, until his departure in September 2017.

José focuses most of his criticism of the Arautos on what he keenly identifies as their dual identity or “two faces”: a public, charming side defined by “splendid liturgy,” traditional Medieval Catholic art, and youthful vigor; and an internal side, hermetic, pseudo-secret face operating under rigid internal coercion and esoteric doctrines centered around its leaders.

He pays consideration to how under Clá Dias’s leadership the group cleansed, some would call it “whitewashed” some of the most radical aspects of its theology in a way reminiscent of what the Sodalitium of Christian Life did when it recalled all the first editions of their primary documents to eliminate the most radical aspects of them.

As it happened with the Sodalitium, the Arautos softened some of its anti-communist stances, while adopting a more “spiritual” stance that facilitated the fast-tracked transition from a diocesan entity in one single Brazilian diocese to one with Pontifical (global) approval in 2001 as a Private International Association of the Faithful, and the later creation of clerical (Virgo Flos Carmeli) and female (Regina Virginum) societies of apostolic life, the ones closer to a more traditional understanding of an order.

As Charles does in his own testimony, José also calls out the “Messianic Triad” with Plinio, Lucilia and João, who are the center of the movement’s spirituality. The three of them receive some degree of veneration centered around a virtue: Plinio Corrêa as the “prophet and founder”, Lucilia Corrêa as an ideal of innocence and mercy, and Clá Dias as Corrêa’s “perfect disciple,” and “alter ego,” going as far as to use a title Catholics usually reserve to the Bishop of Rome: that of Pontiff and even more troublingly that of “Eternal Pontiff.”

Following their own understanding of Louis de Montfort, a 17th century French saint, the Arautos developed a notion of Sacred Slavery where members undergo an internal consecration not merely to Mary, but directly as slaves to Corrêa and Clá. Slaves willing to relinquish individual identity, referring to themselves as “this slave” and obeying their leaders without question.

José’s account of the Bagarre is similar in all respects to Charles’s. It is a predicted imminent, universal divine chastisement that will destroy the modern “Revolution,” sinners, and corrupt clergy. Members view themselves as instruments of God's wrath during this cosmic event.

Once the Bagarre is realized, they expect a “Grand Retour,” French for Great Return and the creation of a Kingdom of Mary, a post-apocalyptic golden age where Corrêa and Clá will rule and guide society following the ideas they had about how medieval societies were, one that does not fit with historically accurate knowledge. One, as their habit, closer to a hallucination than to reality.

Obviously, to imbue this kind of radical beliefs, the Arautos require a machinery able to deliver and perform a kind of psychological manipulation that only “total institutions,” as discussed in the first installment of this series on the Heralds, see above, can deliver.

To achieve that, there is a clear need to first recruit teenagers as young as it could possibly be and to isolate them from their families, friends and even regular Catholic schools. In that regard, per José’s account the Heralds instills aversion toward natural families, internally designated as “Source of My Revolution.”

As a consequence, young recruits are pressured to sever ties with relatives to safeguard their “vocation,” and to develop a series of attitudes shaped by what José characterizes as “rigorism” and “fear-based culture.”

The internal environment relies on constant fear. Fear of hell, of losing the so-called “vocation,” losing purity and to substitute the internal forum with a strict adherence to the minute rules of the aforementioned Ordo, sometimes called “Ordo de Costumes” in an odd mix of Latin and Portuguese or “Ordo de costumbres” in an equally odd mix of Latin and Spanish, the unwritten daily behavioral code based on fear.

As it is usually the case in the Legion of Christ, Opus Dei, Institute of the Incarnate Word and the now suppressed Sodalitium of Christian Life, there is also an active attempt to build an “academic façade.” Unlike members of the Jesuits who are encouraged to attend graduate courses in universities outside their order, these relatively new “orders” do their best to keep themselves in the so-called “academic incest loop,” that is to say, to avoid non-Catholic universities or even universities outside their own orders.

And even more, they often substitute formal academic rigor with the study of Plinio Corrêa’s and Clá Dias’s documents. José goes further to point how academic degrees were sometimes obtained through institutional agreements with minimal actual study or through proxy arrangements.

Spiritual practices

José’s document emphasizes how beginning around 2013, Clá Dias and his underlings in the Heralds began practicing unauthorized exorcisms using non-canonical formulas, often commanding demons “in the name of Monseigneur João,” that is in the name of Clá himself who, oddly enough was identified there with a title in French, in yet another parallelism with Marcial Maciel’s preference for “Mon père,” as the way to address him.

More tellingly, it was possible to perceive a clear and striking distance between the set of beliefs admitted in public and the actual spiritual private or communal practices in the Arautos’ houses, many of which, to no one’s surprise, will challenge and contradict the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, the Ordo Missae, as set in 1969 by Paul VI, and the teachings of post-conciliar Popes.

In both José’s and Charles’s documents, the Heralds are not simply a Catholic association that later experienced scandals. They are the institutional continuation of a worldview inherited from Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira and transformed under João Scognamiglio Clá Dias into a tightly controlled internal system centered on obedience, charismatic authority and an end-of-times or apocalyptic vision of history.

Almost ten years after the Vatican’s original decision to intervene, the question about their future remains. If one takes the cases of the Sodalitium or the Institute of the Incarnate Word, there is no reason to be optimistic.

The Sodalitium became the target of suppression only after it openly challenged the authority of the sitting Pope and even now, almost two years after the original news, it is unclear what will happen with what is now a formally suppressed entity still active, affluent, and protected by the Peruvian authorities.

The Institute of the Incarnate Word is already in its fourth or fifth Vatican intervention, depending on how one measures them. When, back in 1999, the full Argentine Conference of Bishops called John Paul II to suppress them, there was always a helping hand, whether in Rome or in the United States, willing to help them survive with nothing but minor changes to their practices.

How many more years the Vatican will need to figure out a solution in the Arautos’ case is, up until now, anybody’s guess. Unlike the Vatican’s passive attitude towards this and other cases, the Arautos sustain a multimedia, multiplatform social media operation, doing their best to render themselves as victims of Pope Francis and a cabal of “leftist” and “modernist” clergy, echoing Pius X’s condemnation, for practical purposes, of any change in the Catholic Church. More significantly, as proven by the Bolívar Square vigil in Bogotá, they are actively searching for political patronage to cover potential losses in their native Brazil.

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A summary of this piece is available as audio after this paragraph.

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