Now I speak to him about some great Catholic literary figures, like the writer François Mauriac, who was such an influence on him in his youth. The publication of Jean-Luc Barré’s biography of Mauriac, as is well documented, definitively confirmed Mauriac’s homosexuality.
‘You see, sometimes it’s only in retrospect that we understand people’s true motivations, their well-protected secrets,’ I tell him.
Stafford is shattered. ‘Even Mauriac,’ he seems to say, as if I had delivered a shocking revelation, although the writer’s homosexuality is no longer a matter for debate. Stafford seems a little lost. He is no longer sure of anything. I see in his eyes his unfathomable distress, his fear, his grief. His eyes cloud over, now full of tears.
‘I don’t weep often,’ Stafford tells me. ‘I don’t cry easily.’
Along with the Frenchman Jean-Louis Tauran, James Francis Stafford will certainly remain my favourite cardinal in this long investigation. He is gentleness personified, and I find myself very drawn to this frail, elderly man whom I cherish for his very frailty. I know that his mysticism isn’t feigned.
‘I hope you’re wrong, Frédéric. I really hope so.’
We talk about our shared passion for America, for its apple pies and ice creams, which, as in On the Road, become better and creamier the further one drives towards the American West.
I hesitate to tell him about my trip through Colorado (he was the Archbishop of Denver) and my visits to the most traditional churches of Colorado Springs, the bastion of the evangelical American right. I would like to talk to him about those priests, and those violently homophobic priests whom I interviewed at Focus on the Family or in the New Life Church. The founder of the latter, Ted Haggard, finally revealed himself to be homosexual after being denounced by an escort shocked by his hypocrisy. But do I need to provoke him? He isn’t responsible for these religious madmen.
I know that Stafford is conservative, pro-life and anti-Obama, but if he can appear hard-line and puritanical, he has never been sectarian. He isn’t a polemicist, and he doesn’t approve of the cardinals who have taken charge of the ultra-conservative Dignitatis Humanae Institute. I know he expects nothing from Burke, even if he has a nice word, a polite one, about him.
‘He is a very good man,’ Stafford tells me.
Was our conversation – in the autumn of his life; he is 86 – the end of his illusions?
‘Soon I am going to return to the United States for good,’ Stafford confides in me as we walk through the different libraries, arranged in a long line, in his vast apartment on Piazza di San Calisto.
I promised I would send him a little present, a book I’m fond of. In the course of my investigation, this same little white book would become, as we shall see, a code of which I would rather remain silent. Once I was hooked, month after month I would give it to about twenty cardinals, including Paul Poupard, Leonardo Sandri, Tarcisio Bertone, Robert Sarah, Giovanni Battista Re, Jean-Louis Tauran, Christoph Schönborn, Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Achille Silvestrini, Camillo Ruini, and of course Stanisław Dziwisz and Angelo Sodano. Not to mention the archbishops Rino Fisichella and Jean-Louis Bruguès, or indeed Mgr Battista Ricca. I also gave it to other eminences and excellencies who will have to remain anonymous.
Most of the priests appreciated the double-edged gift. Some of them talked to me about it again afterwards, others wrote to thank me for giving them this book of sinners. Perhaps the only one who really read it, Jean-Louis Tauran – one of the few genuinely cultured cardinals at the Vatican – told me he had been very inspired by that little white book, and that he quoted it often in his homilies.
As for old Cardinal Francis Stafford, he talked to me affectionately about the little alabaster-coloured book when I saw him again a few months later. And added, staring at me: ‘Frédéric, I will pray for you.’
The daydream that had taken me so far away was suddenly interrupted by Don Adriano. Cardinal Burke’s assistant poked his head into the drawing room once more. He apologized again, even before passing on his last bit of information. The cardinal wouldn’t arrive in time for the meeting.
‘His Eminence apologizes. He (‘Elle’) is genuinely sorry. I’m very embarrassed, I’m sorry,’ Don Adriano repeats helplessly, sweating deferentially and staring at the floor as he speaks to me.
I would learn from the papers shortly afterwards that the cardinal had been sanctioned again by Francis. I am sorry to leave the apartment without being able to shake His Eminence’s hand. We’ll make another date, Don Adriano promises. Urbi et Orbi.
In August 2018, when I once again spent several weeks living peacefully in an apartment inside the Vatican, and at the same time as I was finishing this book, the surprise publication of the ‘Testimonianza’ of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò caused a regular conflagration inside the Roman Curia. To say that this document ‘was like a bomb going off’ would be a euphemism crossed with a litotes! There were immediate suspicions raised in the press that Cardinal Raymond Burke and his American networks (including Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former political strategist) might have had some involvement. Even in his worst nightmares, old Cardinal Stafford could never have imagined such a letter. As for Benjamin Hanwell and the members of his Dignitatis Humanae Institute, they had a moment of joy … before becoming disillusioned.
‘You were the first to talk to me about this secretary of state and those cardinals being homosexual and you were right,’ Harnwell tells me during a fifth lunch in Rome, the day after the outbreak of hostilities.
In an eleven-page letter published in two languages by ultra-conservative websites and newspapers, the former nuncio in Washington, Carlo Maria Viganò, wrote a pamphlet that was a vitriolic attack on Pope Francis. Deliberately published on the day of the pope’s trip to Ireland, a country where Catholicism was ravaged by cases of paedophilia, the prelate accused the pope of personally covering up the cases of homosexual abuse by the former American cardinal Theodore McCarrick, now aged 88. McCarrick, a former president of the American bishops’ conference, a powerful prelate, a great collector of money – and lovers – was stripped of his status as cardinal and dismissed by Pope Francis. However, Viganò saw the McCarrick affair as the moment to settle his scores, uninhibited by any super-ego. Supplying a large amount of information, notes and dates to back up his thesis, the nuncio inelegantly took advantage of the situation to call for the pope’s resignation. Even more cunningly, he named the cardinals and bishops of the Roman Curia and the American episcopate who, according to him, took part in this huge ‘cover-up’: it’s an endless list of names of prelates, among the most important in the Vatican, who were thus ‘outed’, whether for right or wrong. (When the pope dismissed the allegations, his entourage indicated to me that Francis ‘was initially informed by Viganò that Cardinal McCarrick had had homosexual relations with over-age seminarians, which was not enough in his eyes to condemn him’. In 2018, when he learned for certain that he had also, apart from his homosexual relations, sexually abused minors, ‘he immediately punished the cardinal’. The same source doubts that Benedict XVI took serious measures against McCarrick, and if they ever existed they were never applied.)
A real ‘VatiLeaks III’, the publication of the ‘Testimonianza’ of Mgr Viganò enjoyed an unprecedented international resonance in the late summer of 2018: thousands of articles were published around the world, the faithful were dumbfounded and the image of Pope Francis was dented. Consciously or not, Viganò had just given arguments to everyone who had thought for a long time that there was complicity within the Vatican itself over crimes and sexual abuse. And even though the Osservatore Romano only devoted a single line to the report (‘a new episode of internal opposition’ was all that the official organ of the holy see had to say on the matter), the conservative and far-right press unleashed, demanded an internal inquiry, and in some instances the resignation of the pope.
Cardinal Raymond Burke – who had already stated a few days before: ‘I think it’s
high time to acknowledge that we have a very serious problem with homosexuality in the Church’ – was one of the first to claim a kill: ‘The corruption and filth which have entered into the life of the Church must be purified at their roots,’ the prelate thundered, demanding an ‘investigation’ into Viganò’s ‘Testimonianza’, taking into account the serious pedigree of the accuser, of whose authority there was, in his view, no doubt.
‘Cardinal Burke is a friend of Mgr Viganò,’ Benjamin Harnwell confirmed to me just after the publication of the vexatious letter. (Harnwell also told me he had a meeting with Burke that day ‘to exchange ideas’.)
Subsequently, several ultra-conservative prelates dived into the open breach to weaken Francis. The reactionary Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, for example, put his head over the parapet to accredit and legitimize Viganò’s ‘serious’ and ‘disinterested’ text, and violently to denounce the homosexualization of the Church – which is amusing in itself, in a way.
The right wing of the Curia had just declared war on Francis; there is nothing to stop us thinking that this war had been declared by one gay faction of the Curia against another one, the former being on the left and pro-Francis, the latter on the far-right and anti-Francis. A remarkable split that the priest and theologian James Alison would sum up for me, during an interview in Madrid, in a significant couple of sentences: ‘It’s an intra-closet war! The Viganò affair is the war of the old closet against the new closet!’
This gesture of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, whose seriousness was generally acknowledged, was not above suspicion. Certainly, the nuncio knew by heart the situation of the Church in the United States, where he spent five years as ambassador for the holy see. Before that he was secretary general of the governorate of the Vatican City, which enabled him to point to countless dossiers and to be informed about all internal affairs, including those concerning the contradictory morals of the most senior prelates. It’s even possible that he kept sensitive files on a large number of them. (In this post, Viganò succeeded Mgr Renato Boccardo, now Archbishop of Spoleto, whom I interviewed: he told me some interesting secrets.)
Having also been placed in charge of the appointment of diplomats of the holy see, an elite body that produced a large number of cardinals in the Roman Curia, Viganò still appears to be a reliable witness, and his letter is irrefutable.
Many people have said that this ‘Testimonianza’ was an operation conducted by the hard wing of the Church to destabilize Francis, since Viganò was closely linked to the networks of the Catholic far right. According to my information, this point is far from proven. In fact it is less a ‘plot’ or an attempted ‘putsch’, as some have claimed, than an isolated and slightly fanatical act. For a conservative, Viganò is primarily a ‘Curial’, a man of the Curia and a pure product of the Vatican. According to one witness who knows him well, he is ‘the kind of man who is generally loyal to the pope: pro-Wojtyła under John Paul II, pro-Ratzinger under Benedict XVI and pro-Bergoglio under Francis’.
‘Mgr Viganò is a conservative, let’s say in the line of Benedict XVI, but first and foremost he is a great professional. He backs himself with dates and facts, he is very precise in his attacks,’ the famous Italian Vatican specialist Marco Politi tells me over lunch in Rome.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, one of the few people quoted positively in the document, was still harsh in his judgement when I spoke to him at his apartment in the Vatican in October 2018.
‘Sad! How sad it is! How could Viganò have done such a thing? There’s something going wrong in his head … [He gestures to indicate a lunatic.] It’s unbelievable!’
For his part, Father Federico Lombardi, former spokesman for Popes Benedict XVI and Francis, suggested to me at one of our regular discussions, after the publication of the letter: ‘Mgr Viganò has always tended to be rigorous and brave. At the same time, in each of the posts that he has held, he was a very divisive figure. He was always somewhat at war. By appealing to well-known reactionary journalists, he therefore put himself at the service of an anti-Francis operation.’
There is no doubt that the Viganò affair was made possible thanks to the help of the media and ultra-conservative journalists opposed to the line of Pope Francis (the Italians Marco Tosatti and Aldo Maria Valli, the National Catholic Register, LifeSiteNews.com or the extremely wealthy American Timothy Busch of the Catholic television network EWTN).
‘This text was immediately instrumentalized by the reactionary Catholic press,’ the Italian Benedictine monk Luigi Gioia, who knows the Church extremely well, tells me during an interview in London. ‘The conservatives frantically attempted to deny the cases of sexual abuse and the cover-up by the Church: clericalism. That is, an oligarchic and condescending system devoted to the preservation of its own power regardless of the price. To refuse to acknowledge that it is the very structure of the Church that is at stake, they look for scapegoats: gays who have infiltrated the institution and compromised it because of their dark inability to rein in their sexual appetites. That is Viganò’s thesis. The right had no trouble in grasping that unexpected opportunity to impose his homophobic agenda.’
If that anti-Francis campaign is attested, it nonetheless seems to me that Viganò’s gesture is more irrational and lonely than one imagined: it is a desperate act, a personal revenge, and first and foremost the fruit of a deep and intimate wound. Viganò is a wolf – but a solitary wolf.
So why did he suddenly break with the pope? An influential monsignore in the immediate entourage of Mgr Becciu, who was at the time a ‘substitute’, or the pope’s ‘minister’ of the interior, gave his hypothesis to me during a meeting at the Vatican shortly after the publication of the letter (this conversation, like most of my interviews, was recorded with the agreement of the minutante): ‘Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who has always been vain and slightly megalomaniacal, dreamed of being created cardinal. It was his ultimate dream, in fact. The dream of his life. It is true that his predecessors were generally elevated to the rank of cardinal. But not him! First of all Francis dismissed him from Washington, then he deprived him of his superb apartment here in the Vatican, and he had to move to a residence where he was surrounded by retired nuncios. During all this time, Viganò was champing at the bit. But he went on hoping! Once past the consistory of June 2018, when he was not created cardinal, his last hopes had foundered: he was about to turn 78 and he realized that he had missed his chance. He was desperate and decided to take his revenge. It was as simple as that. His letter has little to do with sexual abuse and everything to do with that disappointment.’
For a long time Viganò was criticized for his infatuation, his gossiping, his paranoia, and he was even suspected of feeding stories to the press, which led to his being fired from Rome and sent to Washington on the order of the then cardinal secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone under Benedict XVI (the VatiLeaks notes are explicit on these different points). There are also rumours about his inclinations: his anti-gay obsession is so irrational that it could conceal repression and ‘internalized homophobia’. That is, incidentally, the thesis of the American Catholic journalist Michael Sean Winters, who ‘outed’ Viganò: his ‘self-hatred’ led him to hate homosexuals; he had become the very thing he denounced.
The pope, who refused to comment on this controversial pamphlet, suggested a similar analysis. In a coded homily of 11 September 2018, he let it be understood that the ‘Great Accuser speaking out against the bishops’, who ‘was trying to reveal sins’, would be better off, rather than accusing others, ‘accusing himself’.
A few days later, Francis repeated his attack: once again he took issue with Viganò, without naming him, in another homily directed at ‘hypocrites’, a word that he would repeat a dozen times. ‘The hypocrites within and without,’ he insisted, adding: ‘the devil is using hypocrites […] to destroy the Church’. The lady doth protest too much!
Whether or not it was written by a ‘drama queen’ betrayin
g his internalized homophobia, the most interesting aspect of the ‘Testimonianza’ lies elsewhere. Not only in the secret motivations of Mgr Viganò, which were probably multiple, but in the veracity of the facts that he revealed. And it is here that his letter becomes a unique document, a major and for the most part incontestable testimony concerning the ‘culture of secrecy’, the ‘conspiracy of silence’ and the homosexualization of the Church. In spite of the opacity of his text, a mixture of facts and insinuations, Viganò eschews double-speak: he deems it necessary to ‘confess publicly the truths that we have kept hidden’, and thinks that ‘the homosexual networks present in the Church must be eradicated’. To this end, the nuncio names the three last cardinal secretaries of state – Angelo Sodano under John Paul II, Tarcisio Bertone under Benedict XVI and Pietro Parolin under Francis – as being suspected, according to him, of being guilty of covering up sexual abuse or belonging to the ‘corrento filo-omosessuale’, the ‘pro-homosexual trend’ in the Vatican. Good heavens!
For the first time, a senior Vatican diplomat reveals the secrets of cases of paedophilia and the major presence of homosexuality in the Vatican. But I would suggest, following the analysis of several seasoned Vatican experts, that the monsignore is less interested in the issue of sexual abuse (he himself has been accused in the press of seeking to close the investigation into Archbishop John Nienstedt – allegations Viganò strongly denies) than in the gay question: ‘outing’ appears to be the sole true motivation of his letter.
In this the nuncio committed two major errors. First of all, in a single critique, he lumped together several categories of prelate that were largely unconnected, namely priests who were suspected of committing acts of sexual abuse (the Cardinal of Washington Theodore McCarrick); prelates who he claims had covered up these predators (for example, according to his letter, Cardinals Angelo Sodano and Donald Wuerl); prelates he claims ‘belong to the homosexual current’ (without any evidence, he mentions the American cardinal Edwin Frederick O’Brien and the Italian, Renato Raffaele Martino); and prelates who he claims are ‘blinded by their pro-gay ideology’ (the American cardinals Blase Cupich and Joseph Tobin). Overall, nearly forty cardinals and bishops were singled out or ‘outed’. (Mgr Cupich and Mgr Tobin firmly denied the nuncio’s allegations; Donald Wuerl offered the pope his resignation, which was accepted; the others did not comment.)
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 7
