ROME – After first threatening to excommunicate two Peruvian laypeople for filing criminal charges against a papal investigator, Pope Francis apparently met with the pair over the weekend and annulled their excommunication decree, though it remains unclear under what circumstances.

In a video published on social media Saturday, the pair, Giuliana Caccia and Sebastian Blanco, said “the Holy Father Francis received us in a private audience.”

“He gave us the opportunity to inform him of how the facts really were that brought us to this possible excommunication,” they said.

“With much joy, the Holy Father signed in his own handwriting a document in which this excommunication was annulled, revoked,” they said, adding the pope gave them a blessing and “encouraged us to keep going forward.”

Caccia and Blanco, who have actively discussed their case on social media despite an earlier request from the pope to refrain from public comment, said they would release another video once they return to Lima explaining the meeting in greater detail.

The pair, who are related by marriage, last year lodged a criminal complaint in Peru against Spanish Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, an official of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) for an alleged breach of professional secrecy.

Bertomeu and Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, adjunct secretary for the DDF, had been tapped by Pope Francis to lead a Special Mission investigating the Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), which for years has been shrouded in scandal over allegations of various forms of abuse and financial corruption.

The pope’s meeting with Caccia and Blanco has been broadly condemned by victims of the SCV.

Speaking to Crux, Pedro Salinas, a former member of the SCV who coauthored the book Half Monks, Half Soldiers that brought the SCV scandals to light in 2015, said the decision to meet with Caccia and Blanco before meeting with survivors was a betrayal.

“It shattered every bit of trust we had, and it proved the church is nothing more than a corrupt institute that shelters and protects abusers,” Salinas told Crux.

“For years we have heard promises from the hierarchy that built our expectations, only for them to be shattered again and again. The worst thing is that we all started to have hope again thanks to the Special Mission,” he said, saying the failure to give priority to survivors “is a revictimization.”

Caccia and Blanco made the complaint on the grounds that Bertomeu had allegedly leaked confidential details of testimony they gave to him during interviews the Special Mission conducted in Lima in July 2023.

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Caccia and Blanco reportedly used the meeting to extol the benefits of SCV spirituality and to make a harassment complaint again two victims of the SCV, who have since been identified as Jose Enrique Escardó and Martin Scheuch.

When details of their conversation became public, they filed a criminal complaint against Bertomeu, presuming he must have disclosed the information. (In Peru, private citizens can file criminal charges against others.)

However, participants in the process have said the identities of Caccia and Blanco were discovered by photographers outside the nunciature, and that the contents of their statements, but not their names, were relayed to other witnesses by Scicluna and Bertomeu in order to assess their veracity. As a result, these participants say, the information in question did not have to come from Bertomeu.

Blanco is the brother of Ignacio Blanco, who for over two decades served as personal secretary of Figari. Sebastian Blanco is also on the board of a Peruvian non-profit alongside a former SCV priest who was expelled from the group earlier this year. Caccia is married to Ignacio Blanco.

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After filing their criminal complaint against Bertomeu “and all those responsible” for breach of professional secrecy, the pair received a threat of excommunication in September, accusing them of “publicly arousing hatred against the Apostolic See” and “impeding the free exercise of the ecclesiastical power.”

The warning said the excommunication threat would only be withdrawn if they met several conditions, including the withdrawal of their legal complaint.

Legal experts in Peru have said they expect the complaint to be dismissed anyway, on grounds that Bertomeu, who has travelled on a diplomatic passport for the Holy See since 2018, holds diplomatic immunity.

SCV victims are now asking whether the pope upheld his demand for Caccia and Blanco to back down in order for their excommunication to be lifted, saying that not doing so would undermine the credibility of his own investigative team.

Salinas and other SCV victims have taken to social media to express their disappointment and to call for clarity.

In a series of posts on X, Escardó, who was the first to publicly condemn abuses inside the SCV in 2001, noted that the pope now has met with Caccia and Blanco “while I, as a survivor and real victim, continue waiting for 24 years for some pope, cardinal, or bishop to receive me.”

“This is why I insist that we should not believe anything from the Catholic Church, which covers up,” he said.

“Let no one [believe] the story of Bergoglio’s zero tolerance for pedophilia when he does not receive victims, but perpetrators,” he said, charging that the pope “gives in to the pressures of organizations like the Sodalicio and their friends in the Vatican.”

In his own series of posts, Salinas said the meeting marked “one of the bitterest days” for SCV survivors.

“The pope prefers to flirt with their agents rather than to receive victims,” he said, blaming the Vatican’s nuncio to Peru, Archbishop Paolo Rocco Gualtieri, of helping organize the meeting. Yet he said this “does not exempt the pope from his offensive screw-up, unforgivable from any angle.”

Salinas called it “a pathetic and sad day.”

Similarly, Scheuch in his own series of social media posts asked several questions he believes are crucial not only to understanding the nature of the pope’s meeting with Caccia and Blanco, but to the Vatican’s inquiry of the SCV going forward.

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“Everything we know about their private audience with the pope will come from themselves, so there is no way to corroborate whether what they say is true,” he said, adding that it’s not clear the two were authorized to speak publicly about the encounter.

He also questioned how the audience with the pope came about, and who was responsible for arranging it, saying that to land a meeting with the pope, “You have to have someone with influence in the Vatican…who is this character?”

Scheuch wondered who financed their trip to Rome, noting that making such a trip would have required taking time off work, as well as the money to purchase a plane ticket at the last minute.

Referring to the apparent revoking of their excommunication, Scheuch asked, “Was it done for free, without them having to back down from the criminal complaint against Jordi Bertomeu?”

Scheuch said that in his view, Caccia and Blanco are “the puppets of a sinister puppeteer in the shadows, whose only purpose is to discredit Pope Francis’s Special Mission.”

The complaint against Bertomeu, he said, “is just an excuse. They must know very well that this would not lead to anything, but it serves as a pretext to discredit the investigation” and to prevent the SCV’s dissolution.

Scheuch called the meeting “a misstep by the Vatican, without a doubt.”

In an open letter to the pope last month, a handful of SCV victims said, “It has been 24 long years without the pope receiving us,” referring to when allegations first became public.

They also decried what they said have been “three fraudulently inefficient pontifical commissions” investigating the SCV, “and several pro-Sodalitium nuncios, together with a pro-Sodalitium Roman Curia.”

In this regard, they asked Pope Francis “to do everything possible so that the Special Mission completes its commendable work, which is raising so much hope, without further interference.”

At the time, they said that if the pope were to meet Caccia and Blanco without first meeting with SCV victims, and without asking them to retract their legal complaint against Bertomeu, it would “add one more mockery to all the failed attempts of the Sodalitium to turn the page and relegate us to oblivion.”

Signatories of the letter included former SCV member and victim Renzo Orbegozo, on behalf of survivors of the SCV; Rocio Figueroa, a former member of a related women’s group, the Marian Community of Reconciliation (MCR), and a victim herself, on behalf of the survivors of the MCR; and Camila Bustamante, a Chilean journalist who has reported at length on scandals inside the related Servants of the Plan of God, on behalf of survivors of the SPD.

This is not the first time a papal meeting drew criticism from alleged abuse victims.

Last September, Francis came under fire for granting an audience to a known ally and defender of Slovenian Father Marko Rupnik, accused of abusing at least 40 adult women and who last summer was expelled from the Jesuit order, without ever meeting with any of Rupnik’s accusers.

On Sept. 15, 2023, the pope met with Maria Campatelli, a longtime associate of Rupnik and the current president of the Rome-based Centro Aletti that Rupnik founded.

The meeting came after Rupnik had been incardinated into the Slovenian Diocese of Koper, apparently as a priest in good standing with no legal or canonical action taken against him, and after the Diocese of Rome issued a statement giving Rupnik’s center a clean bill of health.

It was only amid public blowback over these steps that the pope reversed course in the Rupnik case, lifting a statute of limitations in October 2023 that allowed a canonical proceeding to begin.

On Nov. 7, Pope Francis also met with a group of seminarians from the ecclesial province of Toledo, personally greeting several clerics and hierarchs who have been accused by an alleged victim of clerical sexual abuse of covering up for his abuser and testifying against him during a civil trial.

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Francis held the audience and shook hands with the clerics despite having met personally with the victim and promising him he would get justice, prompting the victim to send a letter of complaint to the pope. He said he has yet to receive an answer.

Salinas, in a post on X, said “I didn’t see Pope Francis’s betrayal coming,” and that after decades of trying to sound an alarm, “it’s time for me to leave this topic. I’m tired of plowing the sea. I think I’ve reached the end of another stage in my life.”

Caccia and Blanco did not respond to a Crux request for comment on this story.

Follow Elise Ann Allen on X: @eliseannallen