Father Marcó, young and friendly, is a good professional. We talk for a long time in front of a very visible Nagra recording device, the kind used by professional radio journalists. Talking about a classical battle, he speaks of the inevitable conflict between city priests and country priests: ‘Cardinal Bergoglio lived in Buenos Aires, an urban area, unlike other provincial bishops in rural regions. In contact with the big city, he developed a lot. He understood issues of drugs, prostitution, the problems of the favelas, homosexuality. He became an urban bishop.’
According to two different sources, Cardinal Bergoglio had shown understanding with regard to Argentinian priests who blessed homosexual unions. And yet, when the debate on same-sex couples began in 2009, Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio’s attitude changed.
Bergoglio hurled himself into battle. He had very harsh words on the subject of gay marriage (‘an attack designed to destroy God’s plans’) and even summoned politicians, including the mayor of Buenos Aires, to give them a lecture on the subject. He publicly opposed the president, Cristina Kirchner, engaging with her in a tug of war that would turn into a settling of scores – and that he would lose in the end. The future pope also tried to silence priests who expressed opinions in favour of gay marriage, and punished them; he encouraged Catholic schools to take to the streets. This image of harshness contrasts, at the very least, with that of the pope who uttered his famous line, ‘Who am I to judge?’
‘Bergoglio isn’t Francis,’ the journalist Miriam Lewin commented acidly.
The Argentinian Lutheran pastor Lisandro Orlov adds: ‘That’s what explains why everyone was anti-Bergoglio in Buenos Aires! Even though they’ve all become pro-Francis since he’s been pope!’
However, the militant homosexuals who fought Bergoglio on the question of gay marriage agree that they have to take account of the situation. This is true of Osvaldo Bazan, the author of a key work on the history of homosexuality: ‘We must remember that Cardinal Antonio Quarracino, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, wanted to deport homosexuals to an island! Héctor Aguer is such a caricature that it’s better not to mention him! Bergoglio had to position himself in relation to this viscerally homophobic milieu,’ he tells me.
Cardinal Bergoglio is supposed to have been equally understanding in his response to the Bishop of Santiago del Estero, Juan Carlos Maccarone, when Maccarone was denounced as a homosexual. This highly respected prelate, close to liberation theology, had to resign after a video cassette showing him with a 23-year-old man was passed to the Vatican and the media. Convinced that this was a settling of political scores and an act of blackmail, Bergoglio gave his spokesman, Guillermo Marcó, the task of defending and expressing ‘his affection and understanding’ for the priest. Pope Benedict XVI, on the other hand, demanded that he be dismissed from his functions. (Here I am not going to turn to the case of the priest Julio Grassi, which is outside the scope of this book. According to some in the media, the Argentinian priest suspected of acts of sexual abuse against 17 minors was protected by Cardinal Bergoglio, who went so far as to ask the episcopal conference of which he was president to finance the defence of the abuser, by launching a counter-inquiry to try and have the accusations against him dropped. In 2009, Father Grassi was given 15 years in prison, a sentence confirmed by the Argentinian supreme court in 2017.)
One of the specialists in Argentinian Catholicism, an influential adviser to the current government, sums up the debate more or less as follows: ‘What do you expect of Francis? He’s an 82-year-old Peronist priest. How do you expect him to be modern and progressive at his age? He’s rather left-wing on social issues and rather right-wing on moral matters and sexuality. It’s a bit naïve to expect an old Peronist to be progressive!’
So it’s in this overall context that we need to locate the positions of Cardinal Bergoglio. According to one person within his circle, he has been ‘conservative about marriage, but not homophobic’. The same person adds, saying out loud what everyone is thinking: ‘If Jorge Bergoglio had been in favour of gay marriage, he would never have been elected pope.’
5
The Synod
‘There has been a reaction.’
Lorenzo Baldisseri is a calm and thoughtful man. And at this stage in our conversation the cardinal chooses his words even more carefully, with extreme prudence. He takes his time before saying about the Synod on the Family: ‘There has been a reaction.’
I listen to Baldisseri playing the piano. He takes his time in that as well, unlike so many pianists, who can’t stop racing about. He is calm when he interprets the composers he particularly likes: Vittorio Monti, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy or Frédéric Chopin. And I like his rhythm, particularly in the pieces he excels at, such as the danzas españolas by Enrique Granados or ‘Ave Maria’ by Giulio Caccini.
In his huge office in the Vatican, the cardinal has installed his baby grand piano, which has gone with him everywhere since Miami, where he bought it when he was the nuncio to Haiti. It’s a well-travelled piano, which has visited Paraguay, India and Nepal, and lived for nine years in Brazil!
‘I play the piano from eight till eleven every evening in this office. I can’t do without it. Here, in the Vatican, they call me God’s pianist!’ he adds with a chuckle.
A cardinal playing the piano on his own, at night, in this deserted palace in the Vatican: it’s an enchanting image. Baldisseri hands me three CDs brought out by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. His own.
‘I also do concerts. I played for Pope Benedict XVI in his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. But he’s German, he likes Mozart! I’m Italian: I’m romantic!’
At 78, the musician cardinal, to preserve his touch and dexterity, plays every day, wherever he is, at the office, at home or on holiday.
‘I’ve even played for Pope Francis. That was a challenge. He doesn’t really like music!’
Baldisseri is one of Francis’s right-hand men. Since Francis’s election, to which Baldisseri contributed as conclave secretary, the new pope has given the Italian bishop the task of preparing an extraordinary Synod on the Family, in 2014–15, and then one on youth in 2018. And he was also made cardinal, to give him the necessary authority.
A synod called by the pope is an important moment for the Church. Bringing together the cardinals and a large number of bishops in an assembly affords an opportunity to debate fundamental questions and issues of doctrine. The family is one of these, and a more sensitive issues than some others.
Francis knew from the beginning that to have ideas accepted, and not to rush the rigid cardinals, most of them appointed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he would have to demonstrate diplomacy. Baldisseri was a nuncio, trained at diplomatic school – the great one, the school of Casaroli and Silvestrini, not the more recent one, that of Sodano and Bertone.
‘I worked in a spirit of openness. Our model was the Second Vatican Council: bring the debate to life, appeal to laypeople and intellectuals, inaugurate a new method, a new approach. Besides, that was Francis’s style: a Latin American pope, open, accessible, behaving like a simple bishop.’
Was he experienced enough? Was he incautious?
‘I was very new, it’s true. I learned everything putting that first synod together. Nothing was taboo, nothing was held back. All questions were open. Burning! Everything was on the table: celibacy of the priesthood, homosexuality, communion for divorced couples, the ordination of women … All the debates were opened at once.’
Surrounded by a sensitive, cheerful and smiling little team, some of whom I meet in the offices of the secretariat of the Synod – Archbishops Bruno Forte, Peter Erdö, and Fabio Fabene, all since promoted by the pope – Lorenzo Baldisseri constructed a veritable war machine at Francis’s service.
From the outset, Baldisseri’s gang worked with the most open and gay-friendly cardinals: the German Walter Kasper, the head of the liberals at the Vatican, who was in charge of writing the preparatory report, as well as the Austrian Christoph Schönborn and the H
onduran Óscar Maradiaga, a personal friend of the pope.
‘Our line was essentially Kasper’s. But what was also important was the method. The pope wanted to open doors and windows. The debate had to take place everywhere, in the episcopal conferences, in the dioceses, among the faithful. The people of God had to choose,’ Baldisseri tells me.
This method is unheard-of. And what a change from John Paul II, the archetype of the ‘control freak’, or Benedict XVI, who refused to open this kind of debate, both out of principle and out of fear. By delegating the preparation of the Synod to the base, by launching a huge consultation on 38 questions all over the world, Francis thinks he can change the deal. He wants to get the Church moving. By doing so, he seeks most of all to get round the Curia, and the existing cardinals – who are used to absolute theocracy and papal infallibility – spotted the trap immediately.
‘We’ve changed habits, that’s true. It’s the method that surprised people,’ the cardinal explains to me prudently.
Baldisseri’s gang are fast workers, that’s for sure. Confident and perhaps even foolhardy, Walter Kasper announced publicly, even before the Synod, that ‘homosexual unions, if they are lived in a stable and responsible manner, are respectable’. Respectable? The very word is already a revelation.
On the basis of that huge reconnaissance mission, the secretary of the Synod had to prepare a preliminary text that the cardinals would go on to discuss. ‘The text was debated. The replies came in en masse, from everywhere, in all languages. The episcopal conferences replied; experts replied; many individuals also replied,’ Baldisseri rejoices.
About fifteen priests were urgently mobilized to read all these notes – these letters that had come in by the thousand, an unexpected flood, an unprecedented wave. They also had to deal with the answers from the 114 episcopal conferences and almost 800 Catholic associations, in countless languages. At the same time, several secretaries (including at least one homosexual activist who I met) were mobilized to write the first drafts of a text that would, a year later, become the famous apostolic exhortation: Amoris laetitia.
One statement is deliberately added to this draft document: ‘Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer the Christian community.’ Another is an explicit reference to AIDS: ‘Without denying the morally problematic areas connected with homosexual unions, we note that there are cases when mutual support to the point of sacrifice constitutes precious help for the lives of partners.’
‘Francis came here every week,’ Baldisseri tells me. ‘He personally presided over the sessions where we debated the propositions.’
Why did Francis choose to move on questions of family and sexual morality? Apart from Cardinal Baldisseri, and some of his collaborators, I went to interrogate dozens of cardinals, bishops and nuncios, in Rome and 30 countries, opponents or supporters of Francis, partisans or adversaries of the Synod. Those discussions enabled me to retrace the pope’s secret plan and the unimaginable battle that would soon be fought between two homosexualized factions of the Church.
Since the start of his pontificate, the pope has put the Curia on its guard, concerning both financial and sexual affairs: ‘We are all sinners, but we are not all corrupt. Sinners must be accepted, not the corrupt.’ He sought to denounce double lives, and preached zero tolerance.
Even more than traditionalists and conservatives, the people that Francis hates above all, as we have seen, are rigid hypocrites. Why go on opposing the sacrament for remarried divorcees when so many of the priests themselves are living with women in Latin America and Africa? Why go on hating homosexuals when they are so much in the majority among cardinals and those around him at the Vatican? How to reform the Curia, which is tangled up in denial and lies, when an insane number of cardinals and the majority of secretaries of state since 1980 practise a contrary life (three out of four according to my information)? If it’s high time to do some spring cleaning, as they say, where do we start when the Church is on the brink of the abyss because of its programmed obsolescence?
When Francis hears his opponents, these inflexible cardinals who deliver conservative and homophobic speeches and publish texts against his sexual liberalism – people like Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra, Joachim Meisner, Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Walter Brandmüller, Mauro Piacenza, Velasio De Paolis, Tarcisio Bertone, George Pell, Angelo Bagnasco, Antonio Cañizares, Kurt Koch, Paul Josef Cordes, Willem Eijk, Joseph Levada, Marc Ouellet, Antonio Rouco Varela, Juan Luis Cipriani, Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Norberto Rivera, Javier Errázuriz, Angelo Scola, Camillo Ruini, Robert Sarah and many others – he can’t help but be cast down.
Francis is, most importantly, exasperated by the cases of sexual abuse – thousands, in fact hundreds of thousands – that are infecting the Catholic Church all over the world. Every week new charges are pressed, bishops are accused or found guilty, priests are sentenced, and scandal follows scandal. In over 80 per cent of cases, these affairs concern homosexual abuse – very rarely heterosexual.
In Latin America, episcopates are highly compromised and suspected by the press and victims of playing down the facts – in Mexico (Norberto Rivera and Juan Sandoval Íñiguez) and Peru (Juan Luis Cipriani). In Chile, the scandal is such that all the bishops in the country have had to resign, while most of the nuncios and prelates, starting with Cardinals Javier Errázuriz and Riccardo Ezzati, have had the finger pointed at them for ignoring sexual abuse allegations. Wherever you look, the Church has been criticized over its handling of sexual abuse, up to the highest level: in Austria (Hans Hermann Groër), in Scotland and Ireland (Keith O’Brien, Sean Brady), in France (Philippe Barbarin), in Belgium (Godfried Danneels), and so on to the United States, Germany etc. In Australia, it was the ‘minister’ of the economy, George Pell, who was himself charged and put on trial in Melbourne. Dozens of cardinals – when they weren’t being accused of such acts themselves – were denounced by name in the press or summoned by the law for covering up, whether by inertia or hypocrisy, the sexual misdeeds committed by priests. In Italy, cases of the same kind were proliferating, implicating dozens of bishops and several cardinals, even though the press, curiously, showed a kind of reticence about revealing them. But the pope and his immediate entourage knew that the dyke would eventually yield, even in Italy.
During an informal discussion in Rome, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, described to me the unimaginable explosion in cases of sexual abuse. The man is an expert in double-speak: he is a Ratzingerian who claims to be defending Pope Francis. The figures that the Québécois quoted to me are terrifying. He paints a picture of a Church that is literally falling apart. In his view, all the parishes in the world, all the bishops’ conferences, all the dioceses are sullied. The image is horrific: the Church seems like a Titanic that is sinking while the orchestra goes on playing. ‘It’s unstoppable,’ one of Ouellet’s colleagues told me, frozen with shock. (In a second ‘memo’, Mgr Viganò was to denounce the gay entourage of Marc Ouellet.)
Where sexual abuse is concerned, Francis therefore no longer intends, as John Paul II and his right-hand men Angelo Sodano and Stanisław Dziwisz did for too long, to close his eyes or, as Benedict XVI tended to do, to demonstrate indulgence. Yet despite affirming this position he has not acted on it publicly.
Most importantly, his analysis is different from that of Joseph Ratzinger and his right-hand man, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who turned this question into an intrinsically homosexual problem. According to Vatican experts and the confidences of two of his close colleagues whom I interviewed, Pope Francis thinks, on the contrary, that the deep root of sexual abuse lies in the ‘rigidity’ of a façade that hides a double life and, alas, perhaps also in the celibacy of priests. The holy father is said to believe that cardinals and bishops who cover up sexual abuse do it less to support the paedophiles than because they are afraid. They fear that their homosexual inclinations would be revealed if a scandal erupted or a case came to trial. So, a new rule of The Closet, the
sixth in this book, and one of the most important, can be put as follows: Behind the majority of cases of sexual abuse there are priests and bishops who have protected the aggressors because of their own homosexuality and out of fear that it might be revealed in the event of a scandal. The culture of secrecy that was needed to maintain silence about the high prevalence of homosexuality in the Church has allowed sexual abuse to be hidden and predators to act.
For all of these reasons, Francis has realized that paedophilia is not an epiphenomenon – not the ‘latest gossip’ that Cardinal Angelo Sodano talked about: it is the most serious crisis that the Roman Catholic Church has had to confront since the great schism. The pope even anticipates that the story is just beginning: in a time of social media and VatiLeaks, in a time of freedom of the press and a readiness in modern societies for people to resort to the law, not to mention the ‘spotlight effect’, the Church is a Tower of Pisa that is threatening to fall. Everything needs to be rebuilt and changed, or there is a risk that we will witness the disappearance of a religion. That was the philosophy underlying the 2014 Synod.
So Francis chose to speak. At his morning masses in Santa Marta, in talks improvised on aeroplanes or at symbolic meetings, he began regularly denouncing the hypocrisy of the ‘hidden and often dissolute lives’ of the members of the Roman Curia.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 12
