In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  So his alleged homosexuality was only a pretext for weakening Francis. The aggression of which he was victim when ‘outed’ was exploited, when it would have been more Catholic to defend him against his aggressors, given the violence to which he was subjected. As for the young man with whom he was found in the lift, should we point out here that he was a consenting adult? Let us add that one of Ricca’s accusers was known, according to my sources, to have been homophobic and homosexual! A double game that is fairly typical of the Vatican way of operating.

  So the Ricca affair falls within a long sequence of score-settling between different gay factions within the Roman Curia – whose victims include Dino Boffo, Cesare Burgazzi, Francesco Camaldo and even the former secretary general of the Vatican City, Carlo Maria Viganò – and we will have the opportunity to tell their story. Each time, priests or laypeople were denounced by clerics, most of whom had been themselves financially corrupted or demoted for sexually inappropriate behaviour. And here we have yet another rule of The Closet, the fifth: Rumours, gossip, settling of scores, revenge and sexual harassment are rife in the holy see. The gay question is one of the mainsprings of these plots.

  ‘Did you know that the pope was surrounded by homosexuals?’ I am asked wide-eyed by an archbishop whose nickname in the Roman Curia is ‘la Païva’, in tribute to a famous marquess and courtesan. So that is what I will call him in this book.

  His Excellency La Païva, with whom I have regularly enjoyed lunch and dinner, knows all the secrets of the Vatican. I act as though I’m naïve: ‘By definition, no one practises heterosexuality in the Vatican do they?’

  ‘There are many gays,’ La Païva goes on, ‘very many.’

  ‘I knew there were homosexuals in the entourage of John Paul II and Benedict XVI’s entourage, but I didn’t know about Francis.’

  ‘Yes, lots of people in Santa Marta are part of the parish,’ La Païva says, using and abusing this esoteric formula. ‘Being of the parish,’ he repeats, laughing. He is proud of his expression, a little as if he had invented sliced bread. I guess that he has used it hundreds of times in the course of his long career, but on this occasion, reserved for the initiated, it still has the intended effect.

  ‘Being of the parish’ could even be this book’s subtitle. The expression is an old one in both French and Italian: I have found it in the homosexual slang of the 1950s and 1960s. It may pre-date those years, so similar is it to a phrase in Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah and Jean Genet’s Notre Dame des Fleurs – even though I don’t think it appears in either of those books. Was it more of a vernacular phrase, from the gay bars of the 1920s and 30s? Not impossible. In any case, it heroically combines the ecclesiastical universe with the homosexual world.

  ‘You know I like you,’ La Païva announces suddenly. ‘But I’m cross with you for not telling me if you prefer men or women. Why won’t you tell me? Are you at least a sympathizer?’

  I’m fascinated by La Païva’s indiscretion. The archbishop is thinking out loud, and even enjoying himself in letting me have a glimpse of his world, in the belief that it will allow him to win my friendship. He starts revealing the mysteries of Francis’s Vatican, where homosexuality is a hermetic secret, an impenetrable freemasonry. The truculent La Païva shares his secret: curious man that he is! Twice as curious as the average on the subject: bi-curious, in fact. Here he is itemizing the names and titles of ‘practitioners’ and ‘non-practitioners’, while at the same time acknowledging that homophiles added to homosexuals together constitute the great majority in the cardinals’ college!

  The most interesting thing, of course, is ‘the system’. According to La Païva, the homosexual presence within the Curia is broadly constant from one pope to the next. So the majority of the entourage of Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis are said to be ‘of the parish’.

  Sentenced to live with this very unusual fauna, Pope Francis does what he can. With his phrase ‘Who am I to judge?’ he tried to change the basic deal. To go further would be to touch upon doctrine, and immediately start a war within the College of Cardinals. So ambiguity remains preferable, which suits this Jesuit pope, who is quite capable of saying a thing and its opposite within a single sentence. Being both gay-friendly and anti-gay – what a gift! His public words are sometimes at odds with his private actions. So Francis is constantly defending migrants but, as an opponent of gay marriage, he prevents undocumented gay immigrants from enjoying regularization when they have a stable partner. Francis also calls himself a ‘feminist’, but deprives women who are unable to have children of choice by refusing the option of medically assisted fertility treatment. Mgr Viganò would accuse him in his 2018 ‘Testimonianza’ of being surrounded by homosexuals and appearing too gay-friendly; at the same time, Francis would suggest resorting to ‘psychiatry’ for young homosexuals (statements that he says he regrets).

  In a speech before the conclave and his election, Jorge established his priority: the ‘peripheries’. In his eyes this concept, which will serve him well, takes in the ‘geographical’ peripheries, the Christians of Asia, South America and Africa, which are a long way from westernized Roman Catholicism, and the ‘existential’ peripheries, bringing together everyone that the Church has left by the roadside. Notably among them, according to the interview that he would go on to give to the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, are divorced couples, minorities and homosexuals.

  Beyond ideas there are symbols. That was how Francis publicly met Yayo Grassi, aged 67, one of his former gay students, in the company of his Indonesian boyfriend, Iwan at the embassy of the holy see in Washington. Selfies and a video show the couple hugging the holy father.

  According to a number of sources, the broadcast of this meeting between the pope and the gay couple was not a matter of chance. Initially presented as a ‘strictly private’, almost fortuitous encounter, by the pope’s spokesman, Federico Lombardi, it was promoted a little later into a real ‘audience’, also by Lombardi.

  In the meantime, it should be said that a controversy had broken out. The pope, on that same trip to the United States, met – under pressure from the very homophobic apostolic nuncio Mgr Viganò – a local politician from Kentucky, Kim Davis, who refused to authorize gay marriages in her region, even though she herself was twice divorced. In the face of the outcry provoked by this favour granted to a high-profile homophobic figure, the pope went into reverse and denied that he supported Ms Davis’s position (the politician was arrested and briefly imprisoned for refusing to obey American law). To show that he had no intention of allowing himself to be trapped in this debate, and while regretting the damage caused behind his back by Viganò (whom he would soon exfiltrate from Washington), the pope therefore counter-balanced his initial homophobic gesture by publicly receiving his gay former pupil and his companion. A twofold process with all the trappings of a very Jesuit irenicism.

  The example of the chaotic appointment of a French ambassador to the holy see reveals the same ambiguity, and also a certain Machiavellianism, on the part of Pope Francis. The man in question is called Laurent Stéfanini: he is a high-ranking diplomat, a practising Catholic, held to be rather right-wing and a lay member of the Order of Malta. A highly esteemed professional, he was chief of protocol at the Élysée Palace under Nicolas Sarkozy, and was in the past the no. 2 in the same embassy. President François Hollande chose to appoint him French ambassador to the Vatican in January 2015, and his appointment was officially presented to the pope. Was the public announcement, which appeared in the satirical journal Le Canard Enchaîné, premature? It remains the case that the pope withheld his agreement. Motive: the diplomat was gay!

  It isn’t the first time that a French ambassador has been questioned by Rome because of his homosexuality: it was true in 2008 for the candidacy of Jean-Loup Kuhn-Delforge, openly homosexual and in a civil partnership with his companion, a diplomat whom Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to move to the Vatican. Pope Benedict XVI refused t
o give his agreement for a year, imposing a change of candidate. On the other hand, it should also be pointed out that in the past several French ambassadors to the holy see have been openly homosexual, proof that this rule may sometimes be broken.

  This time the Stéfanini case was blocked at a high level. Pope Francis vetoed it. Was he wounded that other people had tried to force his hand? Did he think that an attempt was being made to manipulate him by imposing a gay ambassador on him? Was the process of agreement via the apostolic nuncio to Paris bypassed? Was Stéfanini the victim of a campaign hatched against him in France (we know that ambassador Bertrand Besancenot, close to the Order of Malta, had his eye on the job)? Should we instead seek the intrigue within the right wing of the Curia, which sought to use the affair to trap the pope?

  The imbroglio assumed the appearance of an acute diplomatic crisis between Francis and François when President Hollande lent forceful support to Stéfanini’s candidacy, a nomination refused once again by the pope. There would be no French ambassador to the Vatican, Hollande insisted, if they refused to accept M. Stéfanini!

  In this case, the plotters were barely concerned with the consequences for the party in question, whose private life was now put on public view. As for defending the Church, as they imagined, they were in fact weakening it by putting the pope in a highly awkward situation. Francis was obliged to receive Stéfanini with all due honours, and by way of apology, with one of those ironies of Jesuit diplomacy, he told him that he had nothing against him in person!

  The Archbishop of Paris was mobilized in turn to try and sort out the affair, like the French cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, a man close to the pope, who found nothing unusual in the nomination of a gay ambassador – quite the contrary! On the Roman side, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, no. 2 at the Vatican, even had to go to Paris to meet François Hollande, who, in the course of a tense discussion, asked him straight out whether the problem might be ‘Stéfanini’s homosexuality’. According to the story that the president told one of his advisers, Parolin, who was visibly very uneasy about the matter, and personally affected, crimson with shame, terrified, stammered that the problem had nothing to do with his homosexuality …

  Pope Francis’s ignorance of France came to light as a result of this affair. Francis, who had not appointed a single French cardinal and, unlike all his predecessors, does not speak French, and who – alas! – seems to confuse laïcité with atheism, seems to be the victim of a manipulation whose codes he does not understand.

  A collateral victim, Laurent Stéfanini was caught in the cross-fire of criticisms, in a battle that was beyond him, and of which he was no longer the focus. In Rome, it was an offensive by the Ratzinger wing, itself broadly homosexualized, which was moving its pawns around the board to embarrass Pope Francis. The Order of Malta, of which the diplomat is a member, divided between a rigid ‘closeted’ trend and a flexible ‘un-closeted’ trend, clashed around his case (Cardinal Raymond Burke, a patron of the sovereign order, was said to have ‘atomized’ Stéfanini’s candidacy). The nuncio in Paris, Mgr Luigi Ventura, a former nuncio in Chile (who was close to Cardinal Angelo Sodano and the Legion of Christ led by Marcial Maciel) himself currently under fire from the press for failing to denounce the paedophile crimes of Father Fernando Karadima, played a double game by opposing the appointment of Stefanini that would take interested parties in Paris and Rome a long time to decode. In France, the affair was an opportunity for the right and left to settle their scores against a background of the debate surrounding the law on gay marriage: François Hollande against Nicolas Sarkozy; ‘La Manif pour tous’, an anti-gay-marriage organization, against Hollande; and the extreme right against the moderate right. President Hollande, who sincerely supported Stéfanini’s candidacy, was amused at the end of the day to see the right tearing itself apart over the fate of this senior Sarkozyist diplomat, a practising Catholic … and a homosexual. He taught the right a sound lesson about their hypocrisy! (Here, I am using my interviews with several advisers to President Hollande and French prime minister Manuel Valls, as well as a meeting with the first adviser to the apostolic nunciature in Paris, Mgr Rubén Darío Ruiz Mainardi.)

  In a more Machiavellian bit of manoeuvring, one of François Hollande’s advisers suggested that, if Stéfanini’s candidacy was torpedoed, one of the three eminent Paris-based nuncios or Vatican representatives be summoned to the Élysée and dismissed, because his homosexuality was well known in the Quai d’Orsay (which is the address of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where there are just as many homosexuals, so much so that it is sometimes referred to as the ‘Gay d’Orsay’).

  ‘You know the Vatican diplomats in Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, London! Rejecting Stéfanini because of his homosexuality is the funniest decision that this pontificate has made! If the gay nuncios of the holy see were rejected, what would become of any apostolic representation left anywhere in the world?’ smiled a French ambassador who had once held the post in the holy see.

  The French Foreign Affairs minister Bernard Kouchner confirmed during a discussion at his home in Paris: ‘The Vatican strikes me as poorly placed to reject homosexual candidacies! I had the same problem when we wanted to appoint Jean-Loup Kuhn-Delforge as French ambassador to the Vatican, when he had a civil partnership with his partner. We came up against the same rejection. It was absolutely inadmissible to discriminate against a senior diplomat on the grounds of his homosexuality. We couldn’t accept it! So, I can reveal to you today that I called my counterpart, Mgr Jean-Louis Tauran, who was the equivalent of the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the Vatican, and asked him to withdraw his apostolic nuncio from Paris, which he did. I said to him: “It’s tit for tat!”’ (Two Vatican diplomats that I have spoken to contest this version of events, and maintain that the nuncio left at the end of his normal five-year-term of office.)

  One piece of testimony is significant here: the Argentinian Eduardo Valdés is close to the pope, and he was ambassador to the holy see during the Stéfanini affair.

  ‘I’m certain’, he explains to me during a conversation in Buenos Aires, ‘that everyone opposed to Stefanini’s appointment as ambassador was just as [homosexual] as he was. It’s always the same hypocrisy! Always the same double standard! It’s the most practising ones who are quickest to condemn homosexuals.’

  For over 14 months the post remained vacant, until François Hollande yielded and appointed a mutually agreed diplomat coming to the end of his career, married with children. For his part, Stéfanini would good-humouredly declare that this diplomatic appointment no longer belonged to him, any more than he had chosen his homosexuality! (My sources on this ‘Stéfanini dossier’ are, apart from the names mentioned above, Cardinal Tauran, Archbishop François Bacqué and a dozen other Vatican diplomats; four French ambassadors to the holy see: Jean Guéguinou, Pierre Morel, Bruno Joubert and Philippe Zeller; and of course the ambassadors Bertrand Besancenot and Laurent Stéfanini.)

  So is Francis as gay-friendly as they say? Some people think so, and tell me this story to back up their thesis. During an audience between the pope and the German cardinal Gerhard Müller, the then prefect of the important Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the latter arrived with a file on an old theologian who was said to have been denounced for his homophilia. He questioned the pope about the sanction he expected to take. The pope was said to have answered (according to the story I was told by two witnesses inside the Congregation, who heard it from the lips of Müller): ‘Wouldn’t it be better to invite him for a beer, talk to him like a brother and find a solution to the problem?’

  Cardinal Müller, who made no secret of his hostility against gays, was caught utterly off guard by Francis’s answer. Back in his office, he hurried to tell the anecdote to his colleagues and his personal assistant. He was said to have criticized the pope harshly for his ignorance of the Vatican, his error of judgement concerning homosexuality and in managing case files. These criticisms reached the ears of Francis, who would go on
to punish Müller methodically, first of all by depriving him of his colleagues one after the other, then by publicly humiliating him, before failing to renew his post a few years later and making him take early retirement. (I asked Müller about his relationship with the pope during an interview at his home, and I’m partially basing this account on his testimony.)

  Might the pope have been thinking about conservative cardinals like Müller or Burke when he denounced the gossip of the Curia? In a solemn mass at the Vatican on 22 December 2014, less than a year after his election, the holy father launched his attack. That day, facing the cardinals and bishops assembled for the Christmas blessings, Francis let them have it: he drew up the catalogue of the 15 ‘diseases’ of the Roman Curia, including ‘spiritual Alzheimer’s’ and ‘existential schizophrenia’. He particularly targeted the hypocrisy of the cardinals and bishops who led ‘a hidden and often dissolute life’, and he criticized their ‘gossip’, a genuine ‘terrorism of loose talk’.

  The charges were severe, but the pope had not yet found his killer phrase. He would do so the following year, in one of his morning homilies at Santa Marta, on 24 October 2016 (according to the official transcript of Radio Vatican, which I shall quote here at some length, given the importance of his words): ‘Behind the rigidity there is something hidden in a person’s life. Rigidity is not a gift from God. Gentleness, yes, goodness, yes, benevolence, yes, forgiveness, yes. But rigidity, no! Behind rigidity there is always something hidden, in many cases a double life, but there is also something like an illness. How the rigid suffer: when they are sincere and realize that, they suffer! And how much they suffer!’