CultNEWS101 Articles: 8/25/2025

Online Event, Colonia Dignidad, Chile, Siddha Yoga, Book Review, Jagadguru Shri Kripalu

Online Event: How to deal with shame in cult survivorsHow to deal with shame in cult survivors? Free

Join the Webinar on August 28 at. 12.00 Psyflix Scandinavia Host: Anne Hilde Vassbø Hagen

Shame can be crippling - especially for those who have lived under psychological control in sects, extreme groups or other unhealthy communities.

On August 28th, psychologist, author and cult-survivor, Cathrine Moestue, will hold a webinar on Psyflix Scandinavia where she shares her own experiences and valuable knowledge on what it takes to regain mental health and working power after a manipulative community.

In this webinar, you will gain insight into:

• The dynamics of sects and controlling relationships
• Moral injury and common challenges for survivors
• Therapeutic approaches that strengthen security and alliance
• Tools for psycho education and support for increased autonomy
• Sign up for free here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qdB0trP0TRG7ES9XmFggNQ#/registration

BBC: Once home to a cult, the Chilean tourist village haunted by torture and child abuse

"With sloping red-tiled roofs, trimmed lawns and a shop selling home-baked ginger biscuits, Villa Baviera looks like a quaint German-style village, nestled in the rolling hills of central Chile.

But it has a dark past.

Once known as Colonia Dignidad, it was home to a secretive religious sect founded by a manipulative and abusive leader who collaborated with the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Paul Schäfer, who established the colony in 1961, imposed a regime of harsh punishments and humiliation on the Germans living there.

They were separated from their parents and forced to work from a young age.

Schäfer also sexually abused many of the children.

After Gen Pinochet led a coup in 1973, opponents of his military regime were taken to Colonia Dignidad to be tortured in dark basements.

Many of these political prisoners were never seen again.

Schäfer died in prison in 2010, but some of the German residents remained and have turned the former colony into a tourist destination, with a restaurant, hotel, cabins to rent and even a boating pond.

Now, the Chilean government is going to expropriate some of its land to commemorate Pinochet's victims there. But the plans have divided opinions."

The New Leaving Siddha Yoga Site is Live

www.leavingsiddhayoga.net

• Easy to navigate and search
• Several new, compelling stories
• Info on the recent lawsuit against SYDA
• A new academic paper

Book Review: "Sex God: The Secret Life of a Dark, Dark Guru" by Karen Jonson

Karen Jonson's "Sex God: The Secret Life of a Dark, Dark Guru" is a powerful memoir and exposé that reveals the troubling truths about her former spiritual leader, Jagadguru Shri Kripalu Maharaj.

In this unflinching account, Jonson shares her experiences within a cult and details the harrowing realities faced by its victims. The book serves as a critical examination of the dangers of blind faith, the reality of cult abuse, and the resilience required to survive and speak out against such experiences.

Jonson's work is a vital resource for understanding how charisma and spiritual authority can be manipulated for harm. It is essential reading for anyone interested in cult psychology, survivor stories, and the ongoing fight for accountability within religious institutions.

This book is not for the faint of heart—it confronts the darkness that often lies beneath the surface of supposed spiritual enlightenment.

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

CultMediation.com   

Intervention101.com to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.

CultRecovery101.com assists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.

The Dark History of Colonia Dignidad

The Netflix series A Sinister Sect examines not only the history of a German community led by a Nazi in Chile but also the relationship between Latin American governments and the far right.

Ilan Stavans
The Nation
March 24, 2022

In his delightful encyclopedia of invented Hitler sympathizers, Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolaño talks of a large estate located south of Chile’s capital—“at the end of the world”—called Colonia Renacer (Rebirth Colony), which at first glance seems like many other immigrant communities in the region. But upon a closer look, one finds important differences. “To begin with, Colonia Renacer has its own school, medical clinic, and auto repair shop,” Bolaño writes. “It has established a self-sufficient economic system that allows the colony to turn its back on what Chileans, perhaps over-optimistically, like to call ‘Chilean reality,’ or simply ‘reality.’ Colonia Renacer is a profitable business. Its presence is unsettling: the colony’s members hold their festivities in secret; no neighbor, be they rich or poor, are invited. The colonists bury their dead in their own cemetery.” But “perhaps the most vital,” Bolaño continues, is the ethnic origin of its inhabitants: They are all, without exception, German.

Though many of the Hitler sympathizers in the book are fictional, when it comes to this German outpost, Bolaño isn’t making anything up. In South America, colonias is the word used for immigrant colonies. There were plenty of them, many agricultural in nature—places where Jews, for instance, relocated from Poland and other parts of the “Pale of Settlement” starting at the end of the 19th century. Other immigrants, among them Germans, Italians, Swiss, French, and Belgians, had their own colonies too. But one of the most infamous was Colonia Renacer’s real-world analog: Colonia Dignidad, on the banks of the Perquilauquén River, a magnet for Nazi emigrants that, from its founding in 1961 until the early 1990s, was the site of countless atrocities, a vast majority of them committed under the auspices, and with the blessings, of Augusto Pinochet’s military apparatus. The colony, which in many respects resembled a cult compound, was led by a Hitler enthusiast who had served as a medic in a German field hospital in occupied France; its members, including a few Indigenous children “accepted” into the cult in order to be redeemed from their own fate, believed the place to be an arcadian haven.



Chile’s newspapers frequently reported on the rumors surrounding Colonia Dignidad: that its leader, Paul Schäfer, who had a glass eye, was a pedophile who had escaped the German postwar authorities to become a successful “collectivist” entrepreneur (Colonia Dignidad was at times described as a kibbutz); that during Pinochet’s dictatorship, especially in the ’70s, the colony had served as an extermination camp where the regime’s political prisoners were “disappeared,” meaning they were imprisoned, tortured using Nazi techniques, and killed; and that the colonists, only a few of whom were in the know, buried the victims on their own land, albeit not in the communal cemetery so as not to “contaminate” the Aryan purity of those interred there.

With Chile’s return to democracy in 1981, all of these speculations proved to be well-founded. If Latin America’s celebrated magic realism is a literary style in which the unbelievable becomes mundane, Colonia Dignidad is Exhibit A—except that, in this case, the unbelievable was tragically real. In Bolaño’s novel, the suggestion is made that Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, and many other notorious Nazis and other fascists who had escaped from Europe by taking “the ratlines” to South America actually hid in Colonia Renacer. Nobody would be surprised if one or more did the same in Colonia Dignidad. Now a six-part Netflix documentary, A Sinister Sect: Colonia Dignidad, offers an opportunity to look at its history with critical acumen. The series opens up a fresh line of inquiry not only into Latin America as an immigrant destination (in the US media, it is frequently portrayed as the reverse) but also for the role it played as a safe haven for European criminals, Nazi and otherwise, after the Second World War.

Perhaps the most daring aspect of A Sinister Sect is the study it offers of government policies in the region, dating back to colonial times, that embraced white Europeans as “favored” newcomers capable of pushing these countries from what was perceived to be their primitive state of development into a more advanced (meaning cosmopolitan) model. While Colonia Dignidad represents a malevolent example, plenty of others are seen these days as marking a decisive turning point in Latin America’s road to modernity. The region’s hierarchical structure has made it easy for European immigrants to climb the economic ladder rather quickly, and even the best of these colonies, collectivist and egalitarian in nature, only cemented this fact.

As far as documentaries go, A Sinister Sect is fairly conventional. Even the least discerning viewer of a typical Netflix investigative film is by now able to quickly identify its most common tricks. The flashy cinematography keeps the audience enthralled (the use of drone cameras is now a sine qua non) at the expense of any serious plot elaboration. While at the beginning a clear-cut argument appears to be in the making, it soon becomes obvious that the filmmakers are in the business of improvising—that is, they often don’t know where they should be going. And a mixed bag of talking heads, some more prominent than others, become themselves unreliable storytellers.

A Sinister Sect includes all of these tricks and more. In other words, it is in many respects trite, predictable, and—the worst sin of all—frighteningly ahistorical. The audience finishes it with a sense of having participated in a sensationalist trek through the past, one that fully explains the conditions that made such a past possible. Nor is Germany, which partia

lly financed the production, seriously implicated. In fact, as the narrative develops, it often feels as if—simply by virtue of focusing their gaze on Colonia Dignidad’s appalling history, as if this were in and of itself a courageous act—the German filmmakers, Annette Baumeister and Wilfried Huismann, exonerate their country. This is a shameful cop-out, since the ethos of Colonia Dignidad was, at its core, Germanic as well as Chilean. A more probing interrogation of what created it, what cultures and structures of power sustained it, and what these mechanisms say about Latin America would have significantly enhanced its value.

In a self-righteous way, Colonia Dignidad traffics in morbidity in the act of telling a lurid story. Viewers get to follow Margarita Maino, the sister of an activist murdered by the Schäfer cult, as she attempts to locate the exact place where her brother’s remains are buried. Anne Schnellenkamp, the daughter of one of Schäfer’s capos, exculpates her father by positing the well-worn theory that he and others were “hypnotized” by an impeccably constructed dogma. And Salo Luna, a local living near the colony, offers testimony about how Schäfer, “el monstruo,” abused boys like him for decades without anyone at the colony apparently raising an alarm. In 1991, after one too many exposés, Colonia Dignidad’s name was changed to Villa Baviera (Bavarian Villa). Today, it is a museum and tourist destination. If you ever wanted to experience the xenophobic edges of the region’s magic realism, visiting the colony is your chance: A guide will take you on a visit to the rustic cafeteria where Schäfer preached to his captivated audience while one or more adolescent boys leisurely sat on his lap, then through the torture chambers where dozens of desaparecidos were last seen, ending with a stop at the cemetery where unmarked tombs are still the rule.

Yet, despite all of its shortcomings, the series is an invitation to reflect more widely on Latin America as a machine of macabre neofascist dreams. Watching A Sinister Sect alongside reading Bolaño’s phantasmagoria on Nazis themes is a useful reminder of the eugenic discourse that has lurked beneath the surface in Latin American culture. In Chile, writers such as Miguel Serrano—a diplomat, ideologue, and friend of Herman Hesse and Carl Jung who championed, in such writings as his book Adolf Hitler, the Last Avatar (1984), a philosophy he called Esoteric Hitlerism, which anticipated the rise of a Fourth Reich in South America—are gaining increased popularity among Latin American extremists. And Norberto Ceresore, a vociferous anti-Semite and confidant of Hugo Chávez, was among the architects of hate who believed in an Israeli plot, in the spirit of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, designed to usurp a large portion of Patagonian land so as to create another Jewish homeland.

Schäfer represented another track of the racism rife in Latin America. He was a friend of William Marrion Branham, an American Christian minister who believed in the return of the apostolic early Catholic Church, and was convinced that an age of religious and racial purity, a return to a more pristine time, was due and that his actions were a step forward in the advent of such a utopia. In Schäfer’s time, he was hardly alone in embracing these campaigns of political cleansing. Latin America was home to a cesspool of conspiracy theories embraced by the far right, some of which informed the rule of dictators in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and other countries, often with the support of the United States. Fascist forces were involved in the anti-immigrant labor unrest under the watch of Radical Civic Union president Hipólito Yirigoyen (the so-called “father of the poor”), including a kind of pogrom in Buenos Aires in 1919, known as the Tragic Week, that left an estimated 100 people dead, thousands arrested, and scores of businesses looted, many of them Jewish.

Nazism in São Paulo and in Brazil’s southern region of Timbó, Santa Catarina, was rampant. Only the Volksdeutsche—those who defined themselves as pure Germans—could join the nation’s chapter of the Nazi Party. In his memoir, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (1981), about the Dirty War in Argentina, in which an estimated 30,000 people were murdered, journalist Jacobo Timerman recounts being interrogated by military and intelligence figures. A Jew who edited the left-leaning newspaper La Opinión from 1971 to 1977, Timerman was repeatedly told that the job left unfinished by the Nazis would now be completed in the Southern Hemisphere. And in the incendiary—and misconstrued—feature film New Order (2020), by the Mexican director Michel Franco, a coup in Mexico City results in images reminiscent of torture sessions and collective baths that recall Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.

Like his pal Donald Trump, Brazil’s embattled President Jair Bolsonaro frequently employs a racist and authoritarian rhetoric in his speeches. His eugenic views are palpable in the way he talks about Brazil as a homeland. Though he might sound extreme, Bolsonaro sits comfortably in the hall of fame of Latin America dictators like Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, who—as in the case of the Parsley Massacre of Haitian immigrants in 1937 (known as kout kouto-a in Creole and el Corte in Spanish)—annihilated particular groups because of their skin color and religious beliefs. While the majority of Latin America’s colonias served as a springboard for an odyssey of assimilation into mainstream culture, Colonia Dignidad was an exceptional example of the twisted link between a handful of immigrant waves and the far-right forces that they, at crucial historical junctures, assisted in carrying out extremist policies.

ASinister Sect is a helpful resource in documenting the chronology of Colonia Dignidad. After an introductory collage of footage, it traces Schäfer’s background in Germany as a preacher who established a youth home. He was quickly accused of abuse and forced to flee. In spite of his checkered background, Schäfer had no problems entering Chile, nor any problems building a gated colonia southeast of the city of Parral. The allegations against him in Germany also persuaded him to build his colony in such a fashion that he might win public support. Tapping into his experience as a medic during World War II, he insisted that his colony was a philanthropic project, and he built a hospital inside Colonia Dignidad at which the locals could get free medical care.

This approach was successful. In a period when health care was beyond most Chileans’ means, especially in the countryside, the hospital in the colonia was seen as a godsend. Schäfer’s right-wing politics also attracted the attention of those in Chile attempting to thwart the rise of the left in the country, especially after Salvador Allende’s successful presidential campaign in 1970 and Pinochet’s coup d’état on September 11, 1973. Schäfer not only instructed the colonia itself in the doctrines of anticommunism; he also became friends with Pinochet and his wife, Lucía Hiriart. Schäfer proved to be a popular figure with the military regime, wining and dining with the dictator and benefiting politically in all sorts of ways. Building torture chambers, including tunnels and bunkers, in exchange for mining licenses and other perks, Schäfer turned Colonia Dignidad into a veritable economic engine.

There are hints that the East German intelligence services were involved in the coordination of the torture chambers and in the production of weapons, although these suggestions are never developed. There is also a discussion of Schäfer’s chauvinism and his fears about miscegenation and the need for the colonia to resist “impurity” at all costs, especially as it grew to a population in the hundreds. Even in the final years of the Pinochet era, Colonia Dignidad remained an antidemocratic bastion, repudiating any effort to bring about change, including during the national plebiscite, in which the “No” voters asked the Chilean dictator to pack his belongings and get out of La Moneda. The colonia partnered with the “Sí” vote. After the free elections of 1988, the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation concluded that as many 100 people had been murdered at Colonia Dignidad. Even after Pinochet lost power, secret operations continued for a while there. Schäfer antagonized the country’s democratic president, Patricio Alwyn, becoming an emblem of how Chilean conservatism had turned into a horror show.

The last part of the Netflix series follows the escape of two young men from Colonia Dignidad, one a German and the other a local who, like the rest of its population, had reputedly been brainwashed by Schäfer. It is the kind of Hollywood-style chase that, while thrilling in its own right, cheapens the seriousness of the narrative. There is a pursuit by Schäfer’s guards that culminates in an airport sequence designed as a denouement. After it, the scaffolding that supported the pernicious, brutal ecosystem of Colonia Dignidad rapidly falls apart. Given the trashy diet of exposés that viewers are fed on all streaming platforms, A Sinister Sect is a welcome (if flawed) respite. Its valuable message is that tyranny doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All sorts of factors—foreign and domestic, a few of them camouflaged under a facade of innocence—help to lay its foundation and perpetuate its barbarism.

Ilan Stavansis Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and the publisher of Restless Books. Among his most recent books are The Seventh Heaven: Travels Through Jewish Latin America, Popol Vuh: A Retelling, and Selected Translations: Poems 2000-2020.



https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/sinister-sect-colonia-dignidad/

CultNEWS101 Articles: 10/18/2021 (Colonia Dignidad, Chile, Documentary, NXIVM, LuLaRoe, R. Kelly, LDS, Podcast, ICSA, Call For Papers)

Colonia Dignidad, Chile, Documentary, NXIVM, LuLaRoe, R. Kelly, LDS, Podcast, ICSA, Call For Papers

Netflixs:  A Sinister Sect: Colonia Dignidad

"A Sinister Sect: Colonia Dignidad is a true-crime documentary series that was released on Netflix on October 1, 2021. The series is based on the isolated colony established in Chile lead by German fugitive Paul Schäfer during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s."

ET: NXIVM Survivors Sarah Edmondson, Nippy Ames Tease Season 2 of Their 'Culty' Podcast (Exclusive)

"After escaping and blowing the whistle on NXIVM, married couple Sarah Edmondson and Anthony "Nippy" Ames are channeling their lessons learned into the Acast podcast, A Little Bit Culty, which explores abuses of power and cult-like practices through conversations with people who have experienced it firsthand. Ahead of its return with season 2, ET has an exclusive preview of the all-new episodes, which includes guests, like former LuLaRoe retailer Roberta Blevins, who shared her story in the Amazon docuseries LuLaRich; Stolen author Elizabeth Gilpin and more.  

When it comes to speaking to Blevins, Edmondson reveals the two shared a laugh over their similar experiences. 'You know, the patterns are so obvious now. Like, even just the similarities between the sociopathic behavior of both of our respective leaders and the names of the different ranks that you have to climb," she says, adding they were able to "find the humor in this dark content.'" 

Crimson White: 'LuLaRich' shines an ugly light on the manipulation tactics of multi-level marketing companies

"It all started with a pair of leggings. 

"LuLaRich," the limited docuseries on Amazon Prime, shines a terrifying and borderline satirical light on the world of multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes. It exposes LuLaRoe, a massive clothing retailer that mysteriously amassed over $3 billion in profits in 2016, just one year after the company was founded. 

The four-part series follows LuLaRoe co-founders Deanna Brady and her husband Mark Stidham, and it features exclusive interviews from several former LuLaRoe consultants who lost everything by falling prey to the enticing promises of getting rich quickly. 

LuLaRoe's legality and existence are muddy in the eyes of the law, as the retailer is classified as a "multi-level marketing company," which are currently legal in all 50 states. 

Bryan Hochstein, an assistant professor of marketing at The University of Alabama, said that being a multi-level marketing company isn't always a bad thing."

ICSA: Call for Papers: ICSA 2022 Annual Conference - October 31, 2021

Online Conference: June 24-26, 2022

Conference Theme: Exploring the Needs of People Who Leave Groups and Controlling Environments

The International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) is conducting its 2022 Annual International Conference jointly with Info-Secte/Info-Cult of Montreal. The conference will be online and will take place from June 24-26, 2022. The conference will address the needs and interests of ICSA's four main constituencies: former group members, families, helping professionals, and researchers.

The Committee will consider proposals on the theme of the conference as well as other aspects of the cult phenomenon, including victims' perspectives, psychological and social manipulation, coercive control, religious fanaticism, terrorism, law enforcement, treatment, prevention, and legal, social, and public policy aspects of manipulation and victimization.

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Germany proposes to compensate victims of Chilean cult led by ex-Nazi

Today World
November 9, 2018

SANTIAGO/BERLIN - German lawmakers have proposed that former members of a Chilean cult established by an ex-Nazi in the 1960s be offered compensation by the German government, according to the parliamentary group of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives.

The budget committee of the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, said it had included a proposal in its budget plan to pay out a total 1 million euros ($1.13 million) to victims.

The cult and the community that housed it, called Colonia Dignidad, was a secretive sect founded in 1961 by former World War II German army medic Paul Schaefer in the foothills of the Chilean Andes.

Schaefer preached ultra-traditional values while sexually abusing and torturing dozens of youths. During the 1973 to 1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the community also served as a detention and torture site for enemies of the state.

Schaefer died in 2010, while serving a 20-year sentence for sex abuse.

In 2006, former members of the cult issued a public apology and asked for forgiveness for 40 years of human rights abuses in their community, saying they were brainwashed by Schaefer, who many viewed as a god.
"Across political groups and in the near future we want to achieve results with the 'Joint Commission to Assist Victims of Colonia Dignidad'," the parliamentary group's spokesman for human rights, Michael Brand, said in a statement.

The federal draft budget, which includes the proposal to compensate victims, still needs to be approved.

The budget committee was not immediately available for comment.

Colonia Dignidad continues to stir controversy in Chile. The community has been rebranded as a rustic, Bavaria-themed retreat, which victims argue is disrespectful. REUTERS

https://www.todayonline.com/world/germany-proposes-compensate-victims-chilean-cult-led-ex-nazi

Chilean police raid Catholic Church offices amid abuse probe

June 14, 2018

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Police and prosecutors raided Roman Catholic Church offices in two Chilean cities Wednesday looking for files, investigative reports and documents related to a sex abuse scandal that has damaged the clergy’s reputation in the South American country.

The surprise raids targeted the headquarters of Santiago’s Ecclesiastical Court and the bishop’s office in Rancagua in the O’Higgins region, where 14 priests are accused of having had sexual relations with minors.

“In Chile, we are all subject to common justice,” said prosecutor Emiliano Arias, who led the raid in Santiago.

Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, the archbishop of Santiago, said church officials “gave the prosecutor all the requested documentation.” He added that they are “available to cooperate with the civilian justice system in all that is required.”

In May, all of Chile’s 30-plus active bishops offered to quit over their collective guilt in failing to protect Chile’s children from priests who raped, groped and molested them.

Wednesday’s raids came as two leading Vatican investigators — Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Spanish Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu — are in Chile to investigate the sexual abuse of minors committed by clergy.

Scicluna and Bertomeu earlier put together a 2,300-page report that prompted Pope Francis to realize he had misjudged the Chilean situation.

The two men met Wednesday afternoon with four Chilean prosecutors, including Arias and national Attorney General Jorge Abbott.

“We came basically in search of cooperation in the investigations we are carrying out with respect to abuses suffered by minors” by people linked to the church, Abbott said. “The commitment is to a greater cooperation between the institutions.”

Abbott said prosecutors met some resistance in Rancagua, though they are satisfied with the information seized in both raids. He added that in the coming days prosecutors will ask the Vatican for any information it has related to the investigations.

On Monday, Francis began purging Chile’s Catholic hierarchy over the avalanche of sex abuse and cover-up cases, starting with accepting the resignations of the bishop at the center of the scandal and two others. More heads were expected to roll.

A Vatican statement Monday said Francis had accepted the resignations of Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno, Bishop Gonzalo Duarte of Valparaiso and Bishop Cristian Caro of Puerto Montt. He named a temporary leader for each diocese.

Barros, 61, has been at the center of Chile’s growing scandal ever since Francis appointed him bishop of Osorno in 2015 over the objections of the local faithful, the pope’s own sex abuse prevention advisers and some of Chile’s other bishops.

The report exposed evidence that the Chilean hierarchy systematically covered up and minimized abuse cases, destroying evidence of sex crimes, pressuring church investigators to discredit abuse accusations and showing “grave negligence” in protecting children from pedophile priests.

Those findings opened a Pandora’s Box of new accusations that led Francis to become the first pope to refer to a “culture of abuse and cover-up” in the Catholic Church.

The raids in Chile were reminiscent of the police search carried out in 2010 at the headquarters of the Catholic Church hierarchy in Belgium, which prompted Pope Benedict XVI to intervene and protest the “deplorable” intrusion in the Catholic Church’s legal process.

Belgian police took away computers and hundreds of files amid rumors that church leaders were continuing to cover up abuse cases. The raid prompted a Catholic panel investigating abuse to shut down in protest, saying Belgian authorities had betrayed the trust of nearly 500 victims who made complaints to the panel.

https://apnews.com/d16c618e305c4ce5a26043761c520817

Chilean Sex Abuse Victim Meets with Vatican Investigator

Telesur
February 18, 2018

Pope Francis appointed Scicluna to investigate accusations that Chilean Bishop Juan Barros covered up sexual crimes against minors.

On Saturday, the main witness in a case involving a Chilean Catholic bishop – who is accused of covering up sexual misconducts – recounted the abuses he experienced to an investigator assigned by the church.

Juan Carlos Cruz met with Vatican inquisitor Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna for several four hours on the Upper East Side in New York. “It’s been a good experience and I leave here very hopeful today,” he told reporters after the meeting.

“I feel that I was heard ... it was very intense and very detailed and very, sometimes, eye-opening for them. Hopefully, it will lead to good things,” Cruz said.

Pope Francis appointed Scicluna to investigate accusations that Bishop Juan Barros, of the diocese of Osorno in Chile, covered up sexual crimes against minors.

“For the first time I feel that someone is listening,” Cruz explained. “We’ll see what the outcome is of all this, but I feel that Monsignor Scicluna is a very good man, and I think he was sincerely moved by what I was saying. He cried.”

“He was hearing my testimony, and I was telling him about the abuse, about the cover-up [and] the way survivors, not just me, are treated ... the personal toll it takes on someone. He was crying ... it wasn’t an act ... I felt that he was concerned and that he was listening,” Cruz added.

Cruz was reportedly sexually abused by Rev. Fernando Karadima – who was found guilty of the crimes in a 2011 Vatican investigation – as a teenager. Karadima denied the allegations and he escaped criminal prosecution because, under Chilean law, the statute of limitation had run out.

Cruz said Barros, who was mentored by Karadima, had knowledge of the abuse he faced. Barros denied the claim and stated that he was unaware of any wrongdoing on Karadima's part. Cruz is one of several Chilean men who went public in 2010with accusations against Karadima.

Scicluna is expected to travel to Chile, on Tuesday, to continue his investigation.

Cruz stated that all victims should be equaled respected and heard. “The pope needs to understand that is what survivors need. Cases don’t have to come to the media for them to pay attention.”

"Thousands of cases in the world need the same attention that this one has received," he said during the press conference. "It's not enough to say you are sorry. There should be a policy that every survivor in the world should be heard. Everyone should receive the treatment I received today."

During his visit to Chile last month, the Pope initially defended Barros, saying: “The day I see proof against Bishop Barros, then I will talk. There is not a single piece of evidence against him. It is all slander. Is that clear?”

He later apologized to victims, saying his choice of words and tone had “wounded many.” Pope Francis has appointed nine new members of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors Saturday, according to the Associated Press.

Abuse survivor Marie Collins questioned and criticized the Vatican's motive in making the decision to drop several founding members from the commission.

"I'm shocked at the discarding of some of the most active and independent members of the commission," Collins told the National Catholic Reporter.

"Four of the laywomen have gone and they were really the most active and had the most experience of working in child protection and working directly with survivors."

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Chilean-Sex-Abuse-Victim-Meets-with-Vatican-Investigator-20180218-0003.html

A Creepy Sex Cult Scandal and Firebombed Churches Greet Pope Francis In Latin America

Dealing with a Catholic organization that allegedly tortured children may be the easiest of Pope Francis’ challenges as he visits Chile and Peru this week.

BARBIE LATZA NADEAU

The Daily Beast
January 15, 2018

ROME—What is a boy to do when his spiritual mentor, part of a group that claims it is leading young people on the path of Christ, says that God, working in mysterious ways, wants him to fondle and be fondled, to lie naked with grown men, to be sodomized? Too often and for too long in too many parts of the world, those experiences have been kept as guilty secrets, not by the perpetrators but by the victims.

“I thought I had been selected by the devil to provide sexual services to this man,” as one of those boys explained to investigators.

Only when the press has documented the cases has action been taken to expose some of the perpetrators, although far from all of them.

Such is the situation in Peru and Chile, where Pope Francis is paying a visit this week. However beneficent his reputation, the sordid past of such men and institutions keeps coming back to afflict his papacy like a recurrent, debilitating disease.

Luis Fernando Figari, the 70-year-old founder of Peru’s conservative Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV) Catholic movement used psychological manipulation and sexual torture on young members of his Catholic organization, according to his victims. He and three other men stand accused, though not yet officially charged by Peruvian authorities, of sexually and psychologically assaulting dozens of little boys and young men throughout the ‘90s and early 2000s by threatening them with the wrath of God if they didn’t succumb to their wanton pleasures of the flesh.

One of the alleged perpetrators, Jeffrey Daniels Valderrama, now lives in Chicago, where he has told authorities he is innocent of the Peruvian allegations, according to the Chicago Tribune.

One of Daniels Valderrama’s alleged victims, Alvaro Urbina, interviewed by the Tribune, said he had been taken to SCV to escape bullying in school when Daniels gave him attention that soon turned sexual. “I was a child. I didn’t know what I was doing or what I wanted. These are scars that I’ll carry for years,” he told the Tribune in December. “It’s a pain I’m going to carry in my heart forever.”

The reported abuses of SCV founder Figari are remarkably similar to those lodged against the late Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, who founded the Legion of Christ in the 1940s and used it as a pool from which those in charge could recruit young victims for sex acts that often included oral and anal abuse. Maciel Degollado did not limit himself to little boys. While serving as a supposedly celibate priest, he also fathered several children, at least one of whom he later abused.

The SCV, which has chapters throughout Latin America and the United States, formally admitted its founder’s crimes last year in a detailed report (PDF), confessing that Figari and three others, including Daniels Valderrama, sexually abused 19 minors and 10 adults.

The report called Figari “narcissistic, paranoid, demeaning, vulgar, vindictive, manipulative, racist, sexist, elitist and obsessed with sexual issues and the sexual orientation of SCV members.” This from the investigative document:

“In the most egregious case of abuse in the SCV, Jeffrey Daniels (Daniels) abused at least 12 minor males who were associated with SCV ministries between 1985 and 1997. Daniels was well-liked in the community, but he was also considered ‘goofy.’ ‘too affectionate’ and ‘immature.’ … On several occasions he took the boys on mission trips or drove them to different events. A victim recalled this about the offender,

“‘When I was 14 years old Daniels became increasingly friendly with me and gave me affection that I did not get from my family…His affections became sexual…. I thought I had been selected by the devil to provide sexual services to this man… Now I have flashbacks…’” [Italics in the original]

The accusations first came to light in the book Half Monks, Half Soldiers, by investigative journalists Pedro Salinas, a former member of the group (although not a victim of sexual abuse), and Paola Ugaz. It outlined alleged abuse that involved enticing young boys to perform oral sex on Figari and adult men lest they face severe punishment by the Almighty, which could include, but was not limited to, death or illness of friends or parents, failure in school, or general bad omens. The book’s authors also write that victims alleged they were made to participate in group sex that included bondage and keeping young boys in pitch darkness while older men fondled them.

The group’s current leader, Alessandro Moroni Llabrés, released a video in 2016 in which he declared the founder guilty. “After hearing the witness accounts, we find Luis Figari guilty of the alleged abuses. And we declare him a persona non-grata in our organization, which completely deplores and condemns his behavior,” Maroni said.

The bearded and bespectacled Figari is currently living in seclusion in Rome. While he is not an ordained priest, he could still be given protection by the Holy See if it chooses to allow him to live within the protective walls of Vatican City, a sovereign city state.

Last week, the Vatican essentially took over the SCV, putting a Colombian prelate in charge, presumably ahead of the papal visit to Latin America this week. The Vatican issued a statement that the pope “has followed with concern” the goings on in Peru.

The new prelate’s appointment is seen as “too little, too late” by the victims of the alleged abuse, who have asked to meet the pope. No such encounter is on the official agenda, but Vatican spokesman Greg Burke did not rule out a private meeting.

Things aren’t much better for the pope in Chile, where Francis will begin his official apostolic visit when he arrives Monday evening.

Francis recently appointed controversial Bishop Juan Barros to head the diocese of the city of Osorno in the south of the country, even though Barros worked directly under Fernando Karadima, a priest convicted of sexual abuse by the Vatican and sentenced to the usual “life of prayer and penitence” in a secluded monastery. Barros denies knowing of Karadima’s crimes, even though he is named by several witnesses as ultimately aiding in the cover-up, and sent a letter to the Vatican in support of the known predator during the Vatican’s investigation.

According to documents seen by the Associated Press, Francis considered sending Barros on a sabbatical to avoid any potential dust-up among abuse survivors but, as the AP reports, it was a decision “he didn't ultimately take.”

Last Friday, four Catholic churches in Santiago were firebombed ahead of the pope’s visit. A note left behind in the Santa Isabel de Hungría church used Spanish orthography changed to eliminate masculine and feminine gender, declaring, for example, “We will never submit to the dominion they want to exercise over our bodies [nuestrxs cuerpxs]... ” It concluded, “Pope Francis, the next bombs will be in your cassock.”

Francis has been widely criticized for his mixed messaging on clerical sex abuse. He has not yet renewed the mandate of his commission on clerical sex abuse, which expired on Dec. 17. Peter Saunders, a victim of clerical sex abuse and member of the commission who had been on leave for the better part of the year, officially resigned from the commission in December, citing “disappointment that that commission had not done more” as his primary reason. He has been invited by protesters in Chile to join the demonstrations to stand in solidarity with victims in protests against the pontiff.

The pope will begin his apostolic visit late Monday evening in Chile before moving on to Peru later in the week. He will return to Rome Jan. 21.



https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-creepy-sex-cult-scandal-and-firebombed-churches-greet-pope-francis-in-latin-america

Chile sect: German court jails fugitive doctor over child sex abuse

BBC News
August 14, 2017

Colonia Dignidad was founded at Villa Baviera, a German community.

A German court has sentenced a doctor who fled Chile to five years in prison for involvement in child sex abuse at a commune called Colonia Dignidad.

The court upheld a Chilean prison sentence for Hartmut Hopp, a German citizen in his seventies.

Hopp worked with Paul Schäfer, a former Nazi soldier who founded the commune in southern Chile 1961.

Residents were indoctrinated and kept as virtual slaves for more than 30 years.

Hopp's lawyer says he will appeal against the sentence.

Hartmut Hopp, now in his 70s, was convicted in Chile of complicity in child sex abuse in 2011.

Schäfer also collaborated with the government of Augusto Pinochet whose secret police used the colony around 350km (215 miles) south of the capital, Santiago, as a place of torture and to "disappear" his opponents.

Germany last year said it would declassify its files on the sect, and the foreign minister at the time, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, admitted that the diplomatic service had failed to stop the abuses.

The scale of the abuses only came to light after Schäfer faced a series of lawsuits in 1997.

He fled Chile and was arrested in Argentina in 2005. He was convicted in Chile of sexual abuse of children, weapons possession and human rights violations.

He died in a Chilean jail in 2010 at the age of 88.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-40930952

"Colonia Dignidad" at the Diego Rivera Theater, Puerto Montt

Elmostrador
19 February, 2017

Translation by Google

After three full-length performances, the outstanding production "Colonia Dignidad" - starring Emma Watson, Daniel Brühl and Michael Nyqvist - will have a new show this Monday, February 20 at 8:00 pm at the Teatro Diego Rivera, With a value of $ 1,000 pesos.

Organized by the Cultural Corporation, the presentation of the 110-minute film is inspired by real events and tells the story of Lena and Daniel, a young couple, who get caught in the 1973 Chile military coup.

Daniel is kidnapped by the secret police of Pinochet and Lena follows him to an area in the south of the country, called Colonia Dignidad, which is presented as a charitable mission by lay preacher Paul Schäfer, but which, in fact, Is a place where no one has ever escaped from there. Lena decides to join the cult in order to find Daniel.

"Colonia Dignidad" had to be filmed in various locations such as: an abandoned mine on the outskirts of Luxembourg as well as cities such as Berlin, Munich and Buenos Aires. Chile, for various reasons, could not be the place to shoot the film.

Another element to emphasize is the soundtrack that compiles subjects from Janis Joplin to others of Carlos Santana, in addition to the arrangements composed by the French André Dziezuk and the Spanish Fernando Velázquez.

The film, part of the history of the German enclave - established in 1961 in the Region of Maule - is still controversial in establishing that the European State will address the complaints of the victims of that country, denying that right to Chilean children and families Sexually abused or exploited.

http://www.elmostrador.cl/cultura/2017/02/19/colonia-dignidad-en-el-teatro-diego-rivera-puerto-montt/

CultNEWS101 Articles: 1/12/2016

Bikram Yoga, Colonia Dignidad, Unification Church, Scientology

Daily Mail Online: British woman wins control of yogi Bikram's empire and 43 luxury cars after sex case

He made his name and a £60 million fortune from superheated yoga in which devotees, including celebrities such as David Beckham, Lady Gaga and Madonna, sweat through exercise routines in 105F heat.

But The Mail on Sunday has established that Bikram Choudhury, the charismatic 'yogi to the stars', has been stripped of his worldwide empire by a Los Angeles court – the latest twist in a £6.4 million sex harassment case brought by Oxford-educated lawyer Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, a former employee.

As well as being awarded the 700 franchised Bikram Yoga studios around the globe, Miss Jafa-Bodden will also receive Choudhury's multi-million-pound fleet of 43 cars, which includes 13 Rolls-Royces, eight Bentleys and three Ferraris.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4078878/Find-yoga-guru-s-Ferraris-British-woman-wins-control-yogi-Bikram-s-empire-43-luxury-cars-sex-case-ve-vanished.html

India Today: Hot Yoga Founder Bikram Choudhary's 43 exotic cars go missing

13 Rolls-Royces, eight Bentleys and three Ferraris are part of the 43 exotic cars that have gone missing. The garage manager of Bikram Choudhary was summoned to the court and he has said that he is clueless about the location of the cars.

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/auto/story/hot-yoga-founder-bikram-choudharys-43-exotic-cars-go-missing/1/851003.html

DW: Chilean court imposes heavier sentences on German cult leaders

Chile's highest court has increased the prison sentences for three Germans who led the infamous "Colonia Dignidad." The German commune was the site of child molestations and other human rights abuses from 1961.

http://m.dw.com/en/chilean-court-imposes-heavier-sentences-on-german-cult-leaders/a-36961433

​Yonhapnews Agency: ​

Constitutional Court adds Unification Church foundation to list of fact reference organizations

South Korea's Constitutional Court said Monday that it has added a religious foundation to the list of organizations for fact reference for its ongoing review of President Park Geun-hye's impeachment.

​

http://m.yna.co.kr/mob2/en/contents_en.jsp?cid=AEN20170102008300315&site=0200000000&mobile

​USA Today: ​

Scientology ​

x-member says he fought to go to twin's funeral

For the sixth episode of Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath, the A&E series returned to Clearwater, Fla., which The King of Queens’ cohort, Mike Rinder, said was home to “the spiritual headquarters of Scientology.”

Remini and Rinder visited Aaron Smith-Levin, a former parishioner who claimed he was with the Church for approximately 29 years before departing at the age of 33.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2017/01/04/leah-remini-scientology-and-the-aftermath-episode-6/96100626/

​Daily Mail: ​

Scientology lawyer goes on national TV to slam Leah Remini for show on A&E that led to death threats against their leader David Miscavige

The Church of Scientology is publicly attacking Leah Reimini in a new interview and accusing the actress of making up lies about their religion in a desperate attempt for fame.

'Leah Remini seems to be making a career out of attacking Scientology, and frankly the Church would just like her to get on with her life and find something else to do,' said Monique E. Yingling, a lawyer for Scientology, in a rare interview.

The Church is also claiming that Remini's new show 'Scientology and the Aftermath', which speaks to former members of the religion and details the alleged abuses practiced by the Church, is inciting violence against members.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4094800/Scientology-slams-Leah-Remini-saying-alleged-abuses-led-death-threats-against-David-Miscavige-actress-says-not-stop-IRS-takes-away-tax-exempt-status.html

​

Tony Ortega: ​

Phil and Willie Jones launch a new effort for billboard about Scientology disconnection

Phil and Willie are back! After putting up billboards that call attention to Scientology’s ‘disconnection’ policy in Los Angeles and Largo, Florida last year, Phil and Willie Jones say they’re launching a new effort to get their billboard put up again in L.A. And that’s where you come in.

This morning, Phil has launched a new gofundme page to raise money for a new run of the “Call Me” billboard. His goal is $10,000, which will keep the billboard up for about three months. And given the media interest for Scientology right now, we have a feeling that another billboard launch will get some attention.

http://tonyortega.org/2017/01/07/phil-and-willie-jones-launch-a-new-effort-for-billboard-about-scientology-disconnection/

​Philly.com: ​

Scientology 'skyscraper' - could it open in Philly this year?

Asked about the status of the Chestnut Street building, the church replied by email, "maintenance work is being done on the property while we continue preparations for the full build-out and construction."

A website for the Chestnut Street building dubs it the "Philadelphia Freedom Org" and includes renderings of a chapel, a bookstore and an office for Hubbard, who died in 1986.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20170107_Scientology__skyscraper__-_could_it_open_in_Philly_this_year_.html

Stuff: Scientologist doctor invites patients to opening of $16m New Zealand headquarters

Auckland University law professor Bill Hodge said if the contact details of patients had been used to send them an invite for something unrelated to their medical care, then it could constitute a breach of the Privacy Act.

http://i.stuff.co.nz/national/88207117/scientologist-doctor-invites-patients-to-opening-of-16m-new-zealand-headquarters

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