In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Why have these two old men stayed in this isolated monastery, still saying mass at dawn every morning for the rare parishioners of their congregation? I wonder about the disturbing and magnificent intention of these clerics. One can be a non-believer – as I am – and still admire this devotion, this piety, this asceticism, this humility. These two monks, whom I deeply respect, represent the mystery of faith as far as I am concerned.

  At the end of the meal, clearing the plates and cutlery in the kitchen, austere but vast, I notice a calendar on the wall to the glory of Il Duce. Every month, a different photograph of Mussolini.

  ‘Here in the South of Italy you will very often find pictures of Mussolini,’ says Harnwell in a bid for self-justification, visibly embarrassed by my discovery.

  Harnwell and Burke’s plan is to transform the monastery into the Italian headquarters of ultra-conservative Catholics and a seminary. In his plans, which he describes to me at length, Harnwell suggests opening a ‘retreat’ for hundreds of seminarists and American believers. By staying in the abbey of Trisulti for several weeks or several months, these new kind of missionaries will take courses, learn Latin, recharge their batteries and play together. Over time, Harnwell wants to create a huge mobilization movement to set the Church back ‘in the right direction’, and I understand that the plan is to fight against the ideas of Pope Francis.

  To bring this battle to its conclusion, Burke’s association, the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, has received the support of Donald Trump and his famous far-right former adviser Steve Bannon. As I am informed by Harnwell, who organized the meeting between Burke and the Catholic Bannon, in that same ante-room in which I found myself in Rome, the understanding between the two men was ‘instant’. Their closeness grew as their meetings turned into colloquia. Harnwell speaks of Bannon as if he were his mentor, and he is part of the close Roman entourage of the American strategist every time he plots at the Vatican.

  The ‘fundraising’ being the nerve end of the activities, Harnwell set out to raise money in order to finance his ultra-conservative project. He appealed to Bannon and right wing foundations in the USA to help him. He even had to pass his driving test in order to reach the Carthusian monastery at Trisulti on his own initiative. During a lunch with me in Rome, he announced to me with a beaming smile that he had finally passed his driving test after trying for 43 years.

  Trump has sent another emissary to the holy see in the person of Callista Gingrich, the third wife of the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, who was appointed ambassador. Harnwell has wooed her as well since her arrival in Rome. An objective alliance has formed between the American ultra-right and the ultra-right of the Vatican.

  Pursuing this idea, I take advantage of my time with Harnwell to ask him again about the gay question in the Church. The fact that the close entourage of John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis consisted, and continues to consist, of many homosexuals is an open secret well known to Harnwell. But when I tell him that a former cardinal and secretary of state was gay, the Englishman doesn’t believe it.

  Sitting opposite me, he says over and over again: ‘The cardinal secretary of state was gay! The cardinal secretary of state was gay!’ And the assistant to a particular pope was gay too! And another one, gay as well! Harnwell seems to be filled with wonder at our conversation.

  Then, during another lunch with him in Rome, he will tell me that he has carried out a little inquiry of his own. And he will confirm that, according to his own sources, I was well informed: ‘Yes, you’re right, the cardinal secretary of state was in fact gay!’

  Benjamin Harnwell stops talking for a moment; in this stuffy Christian restaurant, he crosses himself and prays out loud before eating. The gesture is anachronistic here, slightly out of place in this secular part of Rome, but no one pays him any attention, and he goes on politely eating his lasagne, washed down with a glass of (very good) Italian white wine.

  Our conversation takes a strange turn now. But each time he protects ‘his’ Cardinal Raymond Burke: ‘he isn’t a politician’, ‘he is very humble’, even though he wears the cappa magna.

  Harnwell is a kindly man, and on the sensitive subject of the cappa magna he stubbornly defends the tradition, and not the transvestism. On other subjects and other church figures he opens up, he takes risks. Now he shows me his true face.

  I could give a lengthier account of our conversations and our five lunches and dinners; could pass on the rumours spread by the conservatives. Let’s save that one for later, because the reader certainly wouldn’t want me to reveal everything right now. At this stage I need only say that if I had been given an outline of the unimaginable story that I am about to tell in all its details, I confess that I wouldn’t have believed it. Truth is definitely stranger than fiction. The lady doth protest too much!

  Still sitting in the drawing room of Cardinal Burke, who’s yet to arrive, cheered by his absence because observing an apartment is sometimes better than a long interview, I start gauging the extent of the problem. Is it possible that Cardinal Burke and his co-religionist Benjamin Harnwell are unaware that the Vatican is populated by gay clerics? The American cardinal is both a clever hunter of homosexuals and a passionate scholar of medieval history. More than anyone, he knows the dark side of the Vatican. It’s a long story.

  As early as the Middle Ages, Popes John XII and Benedict IX committed the ‘abominable sin’, and everyone in the Vatican knows the name of the boyfriend of Pope Adrian IV (the famous John of Salisbury), and of the lovers of Pope Boniface VIII. The marvellously scandalous life of Pope Paul II is equally famous: he is said to have died of a heart attack in the arms of a page. As for Pope Sixtus IV, he appointed several of his lovers cardinal, including his nephew Raphael, who was made cardinal at the age of 17 (the expression ‘cardinal-nephew’ has been passed down to posterity). Julius II and Leo X, both patrons of Michelangelo, and Julius III, are also generally presented as bisexual popes. Sometimes, as Oscar Wilde observed, some popes were called Innocent by antiphrasis!

  Closer to our own time, Cardinal Burke is aware, like everyone else, of the recurring rumours about the morals of Pope Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI. Pamphlets and booklets exist, the film director Pasolini, for example, having dedicated a poem to Pius XII in which he mentions an alleged lover (A un Papa). It is possible that these rumours are based on curial grudges, to which the Vatican and its gossiping cardinals hold the secret.

  But there is no need for Burke to go back so far. To assess these close friendships fully, he would need only to look towards his own country, the United States. Having stayed there for so long, he knows his co-religionists by heart, and the endless list of scandals surrounding a large number of American cardinals and bishops. Contrary to what one might expect, sometimes it has been the most conservative clerics, the most homophobic, who have been ‘outed’ in the United States by a vengeful harassed seminarian, an overly chatty rent boy, or the publication of a risqué photograph.

  A two-tier morality? In America, where everything is bigger, more extreme, more hypocritical, I found a ten-tier morality. I was living in Boston when the first revelations of the huge ‘Spotlight’ paedophilia scandal came out, and I was startled, as everyone was, by what had happened. The investigation in the Boston Globe freed the tongues of people all over the country, bringing to light a systematic network of sexual abuse: 8,948 priests were accused, and over 15,000 victims identified (85 per cent of them boys between the ages of 11 and 17). The Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, became the symbol of the scandal: his cover-up campaign, and his protection of numerous paedophile priests, finally forced him to resign (with an exfiltration to Rome, handily organized by cardinal secretary of state Angelo Sodano, which allowed him to enjoy diplomatic immunity and thus escape American justice).

  A fine connoisseur of the American episcopate, Burke could not have been unaware of the fact that most of the Catholic hierarchy in his country – the cardinals, t
he bishops – are homosexual: the famous and powerful cardinal and Archbishop of New York, Francis Spellman, was a ‘sexually voracious homosexual’, if we are to believe his biographers, the testimony of Gore Vidal and confidential remarks by the former head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Similarly, Cardinal Wakefield Baum of Washington, recently deceased, lived for many years with his personal assistant – a classic of the genre.

  Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington, was also a practising homosexual: he was well known for his ‘sleeping arrangements’ with seminarians and young priests whom he called his ‘nephews’ (finally accused of sexual abuse, he was forbidden to hold public office by the pope in 2018). Archbishop Rembert Weakland was ‘outed’ by a former boyfriend (he has since described his journey as a homophile in his memoirs). One American cardinal has been banned from the Vatican and sent back to the United States for his improper conduct with a Swiss Guard.

  Another American cardinal, the bishop of a large city in the United States, ‘has lived for years with his boyfriend, a former priest’, while an archbishop of another city, a devotee of the Latin mass and a man much given to cruising, ‘lives surrounded by a flock of young seminarians’, a fact confirmed to me by Robert Carl Mickens, an American Vaticanologist familiar with the gay lifestyle of the senior Catholic hierarchy in the United States. The Archbishop of St Paul and Minneapolis, John Clayton Nienstedt, is also a homophile, and was investigated by his Archdiocese in connection with allegations that he had inappropriate sexual contact with adult men (allegations he categorically denies). He subsequently resigned when criminal charges were brought against the Archdiocese concerning its handling of allegations of inappropriate behaviour by a priest who was later convicted of molesting two boys; another resignation that was accepted by Pope Francis.

  The private lives of the American cardinals, in a country where Catholicism is a minority religion and has long had a bad press, is often the subject of probes in the media, which have fewer scruples than in Italy, Spain or France about revealing the double life of the clergy. Sometimes, as in Baltimore, it was the cardinal’s entourage that came under fire for its bad habits and lively behaviour. The cardinal in question, Edwin Frederick O’Brien, the former archbishop, was unwilling to answer my questions about the special friendships in his diocese. He now lives in Rome, where he bears the title and attributes of the Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem – one could hardly make it up. He had me received by his deputy, Agostino Borromeo, then his spokesman, François Vayne, a pleasant Frenchman who was careful, over three meetings that I had with him, to deny all rumours.

  According to my information, however, as gathered by my researchers across 30 countries, a significant number of ‘lieutenants’, of ‘grand priors’, ‘grand officers’ and ‘chancellors’ of the Equestrian Order, in the countries where they are represented, are ‘closeted’ and ‘practising’. So much so that some people are amused by this Equestrian Order, whose hierarchy is said to be ‘an army of horse-riding queens’.

  ‘The presence of many practising homosexuals in the hierarchical structures of the Equestrian Order is no secret to anyone,’ I am assured by a grand officer of the order, himself openly homosexual.

  The American cardinal James M. Harvey, appointed prefect of the Pontifical House in the Vatican, a sensitive post, was subjected to a fast-tracked removal process, ‘promoveatur ut amoveatur’, by Benedict XVI, who was said to have rebuked him for recruiting Paolo Gabriele, the pope’s butler and the one from whom the stories put out by VatiLeaks originated. Might Harvey have played a part in this scandal?

  What does Cardinal Burke make of these repeated scandals, these strange coincidences and the large number of cardinals who are part ‘of the parish’? How can he put himself forward as a defender of morals when the American episcopate has been so discredited?

  Let us also remember that about a dozen American cardinals were implicated in sexual abuse scandals – whether they were responsible for them, like Theodore McCarrick, who was dismissed; whether they protected the predatory priests by switching them from parish to parish, like Bernard Law and Donald Wuerl; or whether they were insensitive to the fate of the victims, playing down their suffering to protect the institution. (Cardinals Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, Timothy Dolan of New York, William Levada of San Francisco, Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, Edwin Frederick O’Brien of Baltimore or Kevin Farrell of Dallas.) All were criticized by the press or by victims’ associations, or by Mgr Viganò in his ‘Testimonianza’. Cardinal Burke himself was referenced by the important American association Bishop Accountability for his inadequate management of paedophile questions in the dioceses of Wisconsin and Missouri when he was bishop and then archbishop: he was said to have tended to play down the facts, and to have been somewhat ‘insensitive’ to the fate of the plaintiffs.

  Pope Francis, keeping the American cardinals specifically in mind, had harsh words on the plane coming back from his trip to the United States in September 2015: ‘Those who have covered these things [paedophilia] up are also guilty, including certain bishops who have covered them up.’

  Francis, exasperated by the American situation, also appointed three replacement cardinals: Blase Cupich in Chicago, Joseph Tobin in Newark, and Kevin Farrell, called to Rome as prefect to deal with the ministry in charge of laity and the family. Poles apart from Burke’s reactionary homophobia, these new cardinals are pastors who are inclined to be sensitive to the cause of migrants or LGBT people, and partisans of zero tolerance on the question of sexual abuse. If one of them were homosexual (Mgr Viganò accuses all three of espousing a ‘pro-gay’ ideology), apparently the two others aren’t part ‘of the parish’, which would tend to confirm the fourth rule of The Closet: The more pro-gay a cleric is, the less likely he is to be gay; the more homophobic a cleric is, the more likely he is to be homosexual.

  And then there’s Mychal Judge. In the United States, this Franciscan friar was the anti-Burke par excellence. He had an exemplary career marked by simplicity and poverty, often in contact with those excluded from society. A former alcoholic, Judge managed to kick the habit and then dedicated his life as a friar to helping the poor, drug addicts, the homeless and even AIDS patients, whom he went so far as to hold in his arms – an image that was still rare in the early 1980s. Appointed chaplain to New York City Fire Department, he attended fires with the firefighters and, on the morning of 11 September 2001, he was among the first to hurry to the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It was there that he died, at 9.59 in the morning, struck by falling masonry.

  His body was carried by four firefighters, as is shown by one of the most famous photographs from 9/11, immortalized by Shannon Stapleton for Reuters – a true ‘modern pietà’. Immediately identified in hospital, the priest Mychal Judge was the first official victim of the 11 September attacks: No. 0001.

  Since then, Mychal Judge has become one of the heroes of the story of the attacks: 3,000 people attended his funeral in St Francis of Assisi Church in Manhattan, in the presence of Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Republican mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, who declared that his friend was ‘a saint’. A block of a New York Street was rechristened in his name; his fireman’s helmet was given to Pope John Paul II in Rome; and France posthumously made him a member of the Légion d’Honneur. During an investigation in New York in 2018, when I spoke to several ‘firefighters’ and came into contact with the spokesman for the city Fire Service, I noted that his memory is still alive.

  Shortly after his death, his friends and work colleagues revealed, despite this, that Mychal Judge was a gay priest. His biographers confirmed his sexual orientation, as did the former commander of the New York Fire Department. Judge was a member of Dignity, an association that brought gay Catholics together. In 2002, a law granted social rights to the homosexual companions of firefighters and police officers killed on 11 September. It was called the Mychal Judge Act.

  The homop
hobic cardinal Raymond Burke and the gay-friendly priest-chaplain Mychal Judge: two opposing sides of the Catholic Church in the United States.

  When I deliver the initial results of my inquiry and these raw data to the American cardinal James Francis Stafford, former Archbishop of Denver, at two interviews in his private apartment in Rome, he is stunned. He listens to me religiously and takes all the blows. I knew immediately, the first impression is always good: my ‘gaydar’ works quite well; his attitude and sincerity convince me that Stafford is probably not homosexual himself – in itself a rare thing in the Roman Curia. His reaction is no less scathing for that: ‘No, Frédéric, it’s not true. It’s false. You are mistaken.’

  I mention the name of an important American cardinal whom he knows well, and Stafford categorically denies his homosexuality. I have wounded him. And yet I know that I’m not mistaken, because I have first-hand testimony, since confirmed; I also discover that the cardinal has never really asked himself the question concerning his friend’s possible double life.

  Now he seems to reflect and hesitate. His curiosity wins out over his legendary prudence. In a silent interior monologue I make a note to myself that the cardinal ‘has eyes but he doesn’t see’. He himself will tell me later that he was sometimes ‘a little naïve’, and that he often learned only belatedly of things that the whole world knew.

  To defuse the atmosphere, I take the cardinal aside, obliquely mention other names, precise cases, and Stafford admits that he has heard certain rumours. We talk quite openly about homosexuality, about the countless cases that have tarnished the image of the Church in the United States and in Rome. Stafford seems genuinely appalled, horrified by what I tell him, things that he can now barely deny.