The wardrobe of the American Eminence did not reveal all its secrets to me. Don Adriano, the superintendent in charge of the cardinal’s outfits, led me back to the drawing room, cutting short my exploration and depriving me of the opportunity to see the cardinal’s famous cappa magna.
Burke is well known for wearing this garb from another era. The photographs of him wearing this big ceremonial altar-boy outfit are famous. He’s a big man; in his cappa magna he becomes a giant – he looks like a Viking bride! Performance. Happening. In his long robe (he could be wearing a curtain), Burke shows himself in his full plumage.
This billowing jacket is a cape of red moiré silk, with a hood buttoned by the neck and fastened at the front (the hands emerge from a slit) and involving a train which is said to vary according to the solemnity of the occasion. Burke’s train can reach a length of 12 metres. Is this ‘larger-than-life’ cardinal trying to enlarge himself at the same time as the pope is trying to shrink him?
Francis, who isn’t worried about confronting the Vatican’s Nobility of the Robe, is said to have told Burke, repeatedly and in vain, that wearing the cappa magna in Rome is out of the question. ‘The carnival is over!’ he is supposed to have said (according to a phrase reported by the media). Unlike his predecessor, the pope is not keen on the frills and furbelows of the ‘traditional’ cardinals. He wants to shorten their robes. To tell the truth, it would be a shame if Burke obeyed him: his portraits are so unorthodox.
On the internet, the photographs of his extraordinary outfits have caused a stir. Here we see him wearing the galero cardinalice, a big red hat with tassels that was abandoned by almost all prelates after 1965, but Burke still wears it, even if, at the age of almost seventy, it makes him look like a vindictive old woman. At the Order of Malta, where he wasn’t considered quite so shocking, in a ritualistic sect that had its own capes, crosses and regalia, he can dress in the medieval style without troubling its members.
There, His Eminence wears farthingale robes that give him breadth while concealing his rolls of flesh. In this other photograph, he clashes with his cape and a thick white ermine stole around his neck, giving him a triple chin. Here he is again, smiling with braces above his knees and stockings below them, looking like the King of France waiting to go to the guillotine. Often we see him surrounded by young seminarians kissing his hand – also magnificent in that our Hadrian seems to follow the cult of Greek beauty, which, as we know, was always more male than female. Winning both the admiration and the laughter of Rome, Burke always appears surrounded by obsequious chaperones, Antinous-like figures kneeling in front of him or page boys carrying the long red train of his cappa magna, as choirboys might for a bride. What a spectacle! The skirted cardinal playfully slaps his young men, and they in turn adjust his rolled-up robes. He makes me think of the Infanta Margarita in Velázquez’s Las Meninas.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never seen anything quite so fantastical. At the sight of this man disguised to display his virility, one is utterly lost for words. There are no adjectives to describe this cardinal draped in his female attire. And there you have your gender theory! As reviled by Burke himself, of course: ‘Gender theory is an invention, an artificial creation. It is a madness that will cause immense damage in society and in the lives of those who support this theory … Some men [in the United States] insist on going into women’s rest rooms. It is inhuman’, the cardinal was bold enough to explain in an interview.
Burke is a mass of contradictions. In fact he sets the bar remarkably high. He can stroll about in full sail, in his cappa magna, in an unthinkably long robe, in a forest of white lace or dressed in a long coat shaped like a dressing gown, while at the same time, in the course of an interview, denouncing in the name of tradition a ‘Church that has become too feminized’.
‘Cardinal Burke is the very thing he denounces,’ a cleric close to Francis states starkly. The same man believes that the pope might have had him in mind in 2017 when he denounced ‘hypocritical’ priests with ‘made-up souls’.
‘It’s a fact, these days Burke feels isolated within the Vatican. But he’s unique rather than alone,’ disagrees the Englishman Benjamin Harnwell, one of Burke’s loyal colleagues, whom I have interviewed five times.
The prelate can probably still count on a few friends who try and match him in terms of their bright-red, goose-poop or marron glacé outfits: the Spanish cardinal Antonio Cañizares, the Italian cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, the Sri Lankan cardinal Albert Patabendige, the patriarch and Archbishop of Venice Francesco Moraglia, the Argentinian archbishop Héctor Aguer, the late American bishop Robert Morlino, or the Swiss Vitus Huonder, all of whom compete with him in terms of the cappa magna. These ‘self-caricatures’ could still try their chances in Drag Race, the TV reality show that chooses the prettiest drag queen in the United States, but in Rome they have all been marginalized or relieved of their functions by the pope.
His partisans at the holy see claim that Burke ‘gives spirituality back to our era’, but they avoid appearing with him; Pope Benedict XVI, who brought him to Rome because he thought he was a good canon lawyer, remained silent when he was punished by Francis; Burke’s detractors, who don’t want to be quoted, whisper to me that he’s ‘a bit mad’, and circulate rumours, but none of them has yet delivered the slightest proof of real ambiguity. Let’s just say that, like all men of the Church, Burke is ‘unstraight’ (a nice neologism invented by the hero of the Beat Generation, Neal Cassady, in a letter to his friend Jack Kerouac to describe a non-heterosexual or one who is sexually abstinent).
What makes Burke stand out is his appearance. Unlike most of his fellow Catholics, who think they can hide their homosexuality by issuing one homophobic declaration after another, he practises a kind of sincerity. He is anti-gay and rages against homosexuality in broad daylight. He makes no attempt to conceal his tastes: he displays them with provocative affectation. There’s nothing effeminate about Burke: it is a matter of respecting tradition, he says. Still: his accoutrements and his unusual drag-queen appearance tell another story.
Julian Fricker, a German drag artist who aims to achieve a high artistic standard, explained to me during an interview in Berlin: ‘What strikes me when I look at Cardinal Burke’s cappa magna, robes or hats topped by floral ornaments, is its overstatement. The biggest, the longest, the tallest: it’s all very typical of drag-queen codes. He has this sense of “extravagance”, this boundless artificiality – the rejection of “realness” as it’s called in drag jargon, to refer to those who want to parody themselves. There’s a certain “camp” irony, too, in the choice of robes by these cardinals, which the androgynous Grace Jones or Lady Gaga could have worn. These clerics are playing with gender theory and gender identities that are not fixed, but fluid and queer.’
Burke isn’t ordinary. He’s not run-of-the-mill, or common-or-garden. He’s complex and unusual – and therefore fascinating. It’s very strange. A masterpiece. Oscar Wilde would have loved him.
Cardinal Burke is the spokesman for the ‘traditionalists’, and the front-runner in terms of homophobia within the Roman Curia. On this question he has issued no end of resounding declarations, collecting the beads of a genuine anti-gay rosary. ‘You shouldn’t,’ he said in 2014, ‘invite gay couples to family gatherings when children are present.’ A year later, he considered that homosexuals who live in stable couples are like ‘the person who murders someone and yet is kind to other people’. He has denounced ‘the pope, who is not free to change the Church’s teaching with regard to the immorality of homosexual acts and the indissolubility of marriage’. In a book of interviews, he even theorized about the impossibility of love between people of the same sex: ‘When homosexual love is spoken of as a conjugal love, it is impossible, because two men or two women cannot experience the characteristics of conjugal union.’ For him, homosexuality is a ‘grave sin’ because it is, in a classic formula of the Catholic Catechism, ‘intrinsically disordered’.
‘B
urke falls within the traditionalist line of Pope Benedict XVI,’ the former priest Francesco Lepore tells me. ‘I am very hostile to his positions, but I must acknowledge that I appreciate his sincerity. I don’t like cardinals who practise double-speak. Burke is one of the few with the courage of his convictions. He is a radical opponent of Pope Francis, and has been sanctioned by Francis for that reason.’
Obsessed with the ‘homosexual agenda’ and gender theory, Cardinal Burke has condemned the ‘gay days’ in Disneyland in the United States, and the permission granted to men to dance together at Disney World. As for ‘same-sex marriage’, he clearly sees it as ‘an act of defiance against God’. In an interview, he says of gay marriage that ‘there is only one place these types of lies come from, namely Satan’.
The cardinal is leading his own crusade. In Ireland in 2015, at the time of the gay marriage referendum, his remarks during the debates were so violent that they forced the president of the Irish episcopal conference to break with him (the ‘yes’ vote won by 62 per cent against 38 per cent).
In Rome, Burke is like a bull in a china shop: his homophobia is so intense that it even disturbs the most homophobic Italian cardinals. His legendary ‘hetero-panic’, the characteristic of a heterosexual who exaggerates his fear of homosexuality to such an extent that he arouses doubts about his own inclinations, raises smiles. His misogyny is unsettling. The Italian press mocks his blue-stocking pretensions, his crocus-coloured dresses and his lacy Catholicism.
During Francis’s visit to Fátima, in Portugal, Cardinal Burke went so far as to provoke the pope by ostentatiously reciting his rosary, clutching the beads in his hands, flicking through the Vulgate, while the pope pronounced his homily: the photograph of this disdainful gesture was on the front pages of the Portuguese press.
‘With a pope who doesn’t wear red shoes or eccentric outfits, Burke goes literally mad,’ one priest in the Vatican told me, hardly containing his mirth.
‘Why are there so many homosexuals here in the Vatican, among the most conservative and traditionalist cardinals?’
I put that question directly to Benjamin Harnwell, that close associate of Cardinal Burke’s, after talking to him for less than an hour. At the time, Harnwell was busy explaining the difference between ‘traditionalist’ and ‘conservative’ cardinals within the right wing of the Church. For him, Burke, like Cardinal Sarah, is a traditionalist, while Müller and Pell are conservatives. The former reject the Second Vatican Council, while the latter accept it.
My question catches him off guard. Harnwell looks at me beadily. And, at last, he says: ‘That’s a good question.’
Harnwell, in his fifties, is English, and speaks with a strong accent. An enthusiastic celibate, slightly esoteric and close to the far right, he has a complicated CV. He takes me back in time, and along with his conservatism I have a sense of dealing less with a subject of Elizabeth II than with one of Queen Victoria. He is a minor character in this book, not even a priest; but I very quickly learned to take an interest in these secondary characters, who allow the reader to understand what is going on through the prism of complex logics. Most importantly, I learned to like this radical and fragile Catholic convert.
‘I support Burke, I defend him,’ Harnwell warns me from the outset. I am already aware that he is one of the confidants and close advisers to the ‘traditionalist’ cardinal (not ‘conservative’, he insists).
I met Harnwell for almost four hours one evening in 2017, first on the first floor of a sad little trattoria near Roma Termini station, where he had cautiously arranged to meet me, before pursuing our discussion in a more bohemian restaurant in the centre of Rome.
With a black Panizza hat in his hand, Benjamin Harnwell is the head of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, an ultra-conservative association, and a political lobby of which Cardinal Burke is president among a dozen cardinals. The administrative council of this ‘traditionalist’ sect brings together the most extremist prelates of the Vatican, and includes the most obscure orders and groupuscules of Catholicism: legitimist monarchists, the ultras of the Order of Malta and the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, the partisans of the ancient rite, and certain European fundamentalist Catholic parliamentarians (for a long time, Harnwell was assistant to a British Member of the European Parliament).
A spearhead for the conservatives in the Vatican, this lobby is openly homophobic and viscerally opposed to gay marriage. According to my sources (and the ‘Testimonianza’ of Mgr Viganò, which we will come to speak of shortly), some of the members of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute in Rome and the United States are homophilic or practising. Hence my direct question to Benjamin Harnwell, which I repeat now.
‘Why are there so many homosexuals here in the Vatican, among the most conservative and traditionalist cardinals?’
That was how the conversation branched off and continued. Strangely, my question freed our man to speak. Previously we were having a polite and tedious conversation, but now he looks at me differently. What does this soldier of Cardinal Burke think? He must have investigated me. It would only have taken him two clicks on the internet to know that I have already written three books on the gay question and am an ardent supporter of civil partnerships and gay marriage. Is it possible that those details would have escaped him? Or is it the attraction of the forbidden, a kind of paradoxical dandyism, that led him to see me? Or was it the sense that he was untouchable (the source of so many lapses)?
The Englishman makes a point of distinguishing, as if establishing a hierarchy of sins, the ‘practising’ homosexuals from those who abstain.
‘If there is no act, there is no sin. And besides, if there is no choice, there are no sins either.’
Benjamin Harnwell, who was in a hurry at first, and had little time to devote to me between two trains, now appears not to want to leave me. He invites me to join him for a drink. He wants to talk to me about Marine Le Pen, the far-right French politician with whom he strongly sympathizes; and also about Donald Trump, whose politics he approves of. He also wants to discuss the gay question. And here we are in the midst of my topic, which Harnwell is now reluctant to let go of. He suggests that we go for dinner.
‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’ I only discovered the deeper meaning of this phrase of Shakespeare’s, which I was going to use as the epigraph for this book, later on, after that first conversation with Benjamin Harnwell and my visit to Cardinal Burke. I wasn’t able to interrogate these two Anglo-Saxons about the famous line from Hamlet.
Haunted by the ghost of his father, Hamlet is convinced that his uncle has murdered the king before marrying the queen, his mother, so that his stepfather could ascend the throne in place of his father. Should he take his revenge? How can he be sure of this crime? Hamlet hesitates. How can one know?
It is here that Shakespeare invents his famous dumb show, a real play within a play: Hamlet will try to trap the usurping king. To do so he resorts to the theatre, asking some travelling players to act out a scene in front of the real characters. This shadow-play, with a comical king and queen at the heart of the tragedy, allows Hamlet to discover the truth. His actors, under borrowed names, manage to penetrate the real characters psychologically in such a way as to bring out the most secret aspects of their personalities. And when Hamlet asks his mother, who is watching the scene, ‘Madam, what think you of this play?’ she replies, speaking of her own character: ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’
The phrase, which reveals hypocrisy, means that when one protests too violently against something there is a strong likelihood that one is being insincere. That excess gives you away. Hamlet understands by her reaction, and the king’s, mirrored in the king and queen in the play, that the couple probably poisoned his father.
Here is a new rule of The Closet, the third one: The more vehemently opposed a cleric is to gays, the stronger his homophobic obsession, the more likely it is that he is insincere, and that his vehemence conceals something.<
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That was how I found the solution to the problem of my inquiry: by basing it on the dumb show in Hamlet. The objective is not to ‘out’ any living homosexuals on principle, however homophobic they might be. I don’t want to implicate anybody, certainly not to add to the problems of priests, monks or cardinals whose experience of their homosexuality – as almost a hundred of them confessed to me – was one of suffering and fear. My approach is what one might call ‘non-judgemental’: I’m not a judge, so I’m not concerned with judging gay priests. Their sheer numbers will be a revelation to many readers, but in my eyes that is not a scandal.
If we are right to denounce their hypocrisy – which is the subject of this book – it is not with a view to rebuking them for their homosexuality, and there is no point giving out too many names. Instead, the intention is to ‘inspect the invisible and hear the unheard’, as the poet has it. So it’s through the theatre of those who ‘protest too much’ and the ‘fantasies’ of a system built almost entirely on the secret of homosexuality that I would like to explain matters. But at this stage, as the Poet has said, ‘I alone hold the key to this wild parade’!
Almost a year after my first meeting with Benjamin Harnwell, which was followed by several others lunches and dinners, I was invited to spend the weekend with him in the abbey of Trisulti in Collepardo, where he now lives, far away from Rome.
The Dignitatis Humanae Institute, which he runs with Burke, was put in charge of this Cistercian abbey by the Italian government, on condition that they maintained this heritage site, classified as a national monument. Two monks still live there, and on the evening of my arrival I am surprised to see them sitting at either end of the U-shaped table, eating in silence.
‘They are the last two brothers of a much larger religious community, all of whose members are dead. Each one had his seat and the last two still sit where they have always sat, as the seats between them have gradually emptied,’ Harnwell explains to me.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 5
