In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  He had already mentioned the 15 ‘Curial diseases’: without naming them, he talked of the Roman cardinals and bishops who had ‘spiritual Alzheimer’s’; he criticized their ‘existential schizophrenia’, their ‘scandal-mongering’, their ‘corruption’ and the way of life of those ‘airport bishops’. For the first time in the history of the Church, the criticisms didn’t come from the enemies of Catholicism, the Voltairean pamphleteers and other ‘Cathophobes’: they came from the holy father in person. That’s how we must understand the whole reach of Francis’s ’revolution’.

  The pope also wanted to act. He wanted to ‘knock down a wall’, in the phrase of one of his colleagues. And he would do so through symbols, acts and the tool of the conclave. He started, with a flourish of his pen, by crossing out from the list of future cardinals all the archbishops, nuncios and bishops compromised under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The Palace of Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of the pope where rumours emerged of the parties that happened there under John Paul II, would be opened to tourists and, eventually, sold.

  On the matter of homosexuality, Francis undertook a long pedagogical task. The Church needed to distinguish, in a new and fundamental way, between the crimes of paedophilia – abuse and aggression directed at minors under the age of 15; acts without consent or within the context of a situation of authority (catechism, confession, seminaries etc.) – and legal homosexual practices between consenting adults. He also turned a page on the debate about condoms, stressing the ‘obligation to care’.

  But what was to be done in the face of the crisis of vocations, not to mention those hundreds of priests every year who asked to be reduced to lay status so that they could get married? Mightn’t it be time to think of future challenges, questions that have been left hanging for too long; to leave the realm of theory and respond instead to concrete situations? That was the point of the Synod. By doing so, he was walking on eggshells.

  ‘Francis had seen the obstacle. By virtue of his function, he was in a situation of responsibility. He was in charge. So he took his time, he listened to all points of view,’ Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri explained to me.

  The texts coming from the epispocates were astonishing. The first, made public in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, were damning for the Church. Roman Catholicism appeared disconnected from real life; doctrine no longer had any meaning for millions of families; the faithful had lost any understanding of Rome’s position on contraception, condoms, cohabitation, the celibacy of the priesthood and, to some extent, homosexuality.

  The ‘brains’ of the Synod, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who was following the German debate from close to, was delighted to see his ideas validated at grass-roots level. Was he too sure of himself? Did the pope trust him too much? The fact remains that the preparatory text followed the Kasper line and suggested a loosening of the Church’s position on sacraments for divorcees and on homosexuality. The Vatican was now willing to acknowledge the ‘qualities’ of young people living together, remarried divorcees and homosexual civil partnerships.

  It was then, in Baldisseri’s modest phrase, that there was ‘a reaction’. Once it was made public, the text immediately came under fire from critics on the conservative wing of the College of Cardinals, with the American Raymond Burke at their head.

  The traditionalists were up in arms about the documents that had been distributed, and some, like the South African cardinal Wilfrid Napier, had no hesitation in claiming that if people in ‘irregular situations’ were recognized, it would inevitably lead to the legitimation of polygamy. Other African or Brazilian cardinals put the pope on guard, for strategic reasons, against any relaxation of the Church’s positions, because of competition from thriving, highly conservative Protestant evangelical movements.

  Of course all of these priests said they were open to debate and ready to add footnotes and codicils where required. But their secret mantra was none other than the famous and much-quoted phrase of the Prince of Lampedusa in The Leopard: ‘Everything must change so that nothing changes.’ Francis would also denounce, without naming them, the ‘hearts of stone’ who ‘wanted everything to stay as it was’.

  Discreetly, five ultra-conservative cardinals (the ‘usual suspects’, Raymond Burke, Ludwig Müller, Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller and Velasio De Paolis) were working on a collective book in defence of traditional marriage, which would be published in the United States by the Catholic publishing house Ignatius. They planned to have it distributed to all participants in the Synod – before Baldessari had the pamphlet seized! The conservative wing cried censorship! The Synod was already turning farcical.

  From the first assembly, litigious points concerning communion for remarried divorcees and homosexuality were the subject of bitter debates that forced the pope to revise his text. Within a few days, the document was modified and watered down, and the position on homosexuality greatly hardened. However, even this new ‘lite’ version was rejected in the final vote by the fathers of the Synod.

  The attack on the text was so powerful, so hard, that it was clear that it was the pope himself who was under fire. His method, his style, his ideas were rejected by part of the College of Cardinals. The most ‘rigid’, the most traditional, the most misogynist rebelled. Were they also those with the strongest ‘inclination’? It is significant, in fact, that this war between conservatives and liberals was being played out, in reverse, on the gay issue. So you need to be counter-intuitive to decode it. Even more significant is the fact that several of the leaders of the anti-Francis rebellion led a double life. Would these closeted homosexuals, crammed full of contradictions and internalized homophobia, revolt out of self-hatred or in order to avoid being unmasked? The holy father was so exasperated that he attacked these very cardinals on their Achilles’ heel: the private lives concealed behind their excessive conservatism.

  That’s what James Alison, an openly gay English priest, highly respected for his theological writings on the subject, summed up in a phrase that is subtler than it seems, when I talked to him several times in Madrid: ‘It’s the revenge of the closet! It’s the vengeance of the closet!’ Alison summarizes the situation in his own way: the homosexual cardinals ‘in the closet’ declared war on Francis, who encouraged gays to come ‘out of the closet’!

  Luigi Gioia, an Italian Benedictine monk, one of the directors of the Benedictine University of Sant’Anselmo in Rome, gives me another clue to what happened in the Vatican: ‘For a homosexual, the Church appears to be a stable structure. In my view, that’s one of the explanations for the fact that many homosexuals chose the priesthood. And yet when you need to hide, to feel secure, you need to feel that your context doesn’t move. You want the structure in which you have taken refuge to be stable and protective, and afterwards you can navigate freely within it. Yet Francis, by wanting to reform it, made the structure unstable for closeted homosexual priests. That’s what explains their violent reaction and their hatred of him. They’re scared.’

  The chief craftsman and witness of the Synod, Cardinal Baldisseri, sums up for his part, and more factually, the state of affairs after the battle: ‘There was a consensus on everything. Except on the three sensitive issues.’In fact, a ‘liberal’ majority emerged from the Synod, but the quorum required for the adoption of the controversial articles, which required two-thirds of the votes, was missing. Three paragraphs out of 62 were therefore rejected – and they were the most to the point. The pope didn’t get his quorum. Francis’s revolutionary project on the family and homosexuality was defeated.

  Francis had lost a battle, but he hadn’t lost the war. To say that he was unhappy with his failure at the Synod would be a euphemism. This man, authoritarian but frank, was annoyed to have been blocked by the conservative cardinals of the Curia. Their hypocrisy, their double game, their ingratitude, revolted him. Those behind-the-scenes manoeuvres, that plotting, that method expressly contrary to the laws of the Curia – it was all too much. To his colleagues, Fr
ancis privately let it be known that he had no intention of giving up. He would fight and launch a counter-offensive.

  ‘He’s stubborn, he’s hard-headed,’ I am told by a monsignore who knows him well.

  The pontiff’s reaction would be played out over several stages. First of all, he was able to prepare a second Synod planned for the following year, which gave him time to get organized. Then he decided to mount a broad campaign in favour of his propositions, from the end of 2014, to win the battle of ideas. He wanted to turn defeat into victory.

  This war would be largely secret, unlike the previous one, which was participatory and consultative. Caught in the trap of democratization, Francis intended to show his opposition what it meant to be an absolute monarch in a Caesarian theocracy!

  ‘Francis bears grudges. He is vindictive. He is authoritarian. He is a Jesuit: he never wants to lose!’ a nuncio hostile to the pope observes.

  Francis had three useful mechanisms at his disposal when it came to reacting. In the short term, he could try and encourage a more modern debate around the world by means of a move on the episcopates and Catholic public opinion – that was the new mission that he entrusted to Baldisseri and his team. In the medium term: to sanction the cardinals who had humiliated him, starting with Gerhard Ludwig Müller, the man in charge of Church doctrine. And in the long term: to modify the composition of the College of Cardinals by creating bishops favourable to his reforms – this was the supreme weapon, the one that only the pontiff could use.

  Sly and cunning, Francis would go on the offensive using these three techniques simultaneously, with extraordinary speed and, his opponents would say, extraordinary vehemence.

  The ‘preparatory’ work for the second Synod, planned for October 2015, got under way. In fact, it was a veritable war machine that went into action, on five continents. The nuncios, the allies, the friendly cardinals, everyone was mobilized. It was Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt. Francis had a kingdom to play with: ‘We are not a tyrant, but a Christian king, and our anger is subject to our leniency.’ Leniency there was; but there was even more anger.

  I was able to follow this offensive in many countries, where I could assess the extent to which the episcopates were divided into two irreconcilable camps, as for example in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil or the United States. The battle raged on the ground.

  First of all in Argentina: there the pope mobilized his friends, his support base. The theologian Víctor Manuel Fernández, a close colleague of Francis and one of his speechwriters, recently promoted as bishop, immediately came out into the open. In a long interview in the Corriere della Sera (May 2015), he fiercely attacked the conservative wing of the Curia and, without naming him, Cardinal Müller: ‘The pope is moving slowly because he wants to be certain that there will be no going back. He is aiming at irreversible reforms … He is absolutely not alone. The people [the faithful] are with him. His adversaries are weaker than they think … Besides, it’s impossible for a pope to please everyone. Did Benedict XVI please everyone?’ It was a ‘declaration of war’ on the Ratzinger wing of the Curia.

  Not far from Buenos Aires, the ‘Bergoglian’ Archbishop of Montevideo in Uruguay, Daniel Sturla, stuck his neck out just as suddenly, expressing his opinion on the question of homosexuals. He would even go on to make public a contribution to the gay question in the Synod.

  ‘I didn’t yet know Pope Francis. I mobilized myself spontaneously, because times have changed and here, in Montevideo, it had become impossible not to have compassion for homosexuals. And you know what? There was no opposition here against my pro-gay positions. I think that society is changing everywhere, which helps the Church to go forward on the question. And everyone discovers that homosexuality is a very wide phenomenon, even within the heart of the Church,’ Sturla told me during a long conversation in his office in Montevideo. (Pope Francis made him a cardinal in 2015.)

  Another friend of the holy father threw himself into the fray: the Cardinal of Honduras, Óscar Maradiaga. The coordinator of ‘C9’, the council of nine cardinals close to Francis, the archbishop travelled around all the capitals of Latin American, accumulating air miles on his Platinum card. Everywhere, he distilled Francis’s thought in public, and set out his strategy in a small committee; he also recruited supporters, informed the pope about his opposition and prepared the plans for battle. (In 2017, the office of the Archbishopric of Óscar Maradiaga would be rocked by allegations of a serious case of financial corruption, one of the alleged beneficiaries of which would be his deputy and a close friend: an auxiliary bishop also suspected by the press of ‘serious misconduct and homosexual connections’ – who would finally resign in 2018. In his ‘Testimonianza’, Mgr Viganò also delivers a severe judgement about Maradiaga on the subject of protecting those accused of homosexual abuse. At this stage, an inquiry into the events is still under way, and the suspected prelates are presumed innocent.)

  In Brazil, a large Catholic country – the largest in the world, with a community estimated at 135 million faithful, and a real influence in the synod with its ten cardinals – the pope relied on his close friends: Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, Emeritus Archbishop of São Paulo, Cardinal João Bráz de Aviz, former Archbishop of Brasilia, and the new archbishop of the Brazilian capital, Sérgio da Rocha, who would be crucial to the synod, and whom Francis would thank by making him cardinal immediately afterwards. He gave them the task of marginalizing the conservative wing, which was particularly embodied by the anti-gay Cardinal Odilo Scherer, Archbishop of São Paulo, who was close to Pope Benedict XVI. The old Hummes–Scherer battle, which had for a long time defined power relations within the Brazilian episcopate, doubled in intensity. Francis would also sanction Scherer, ejecting him from the Curia without warning, while elevating Sérgio da Rocha to the cardinalship.

  The recurring tension was summed up for me by Frei Betto, a famous Dominican friar and Brazilian intellectual close to former president Lula, and one of the key figures in liberation theology. ‘Cardinal Hummes is a progressive cardinal who had always been close to social causes. He was a friend of Pope Francis, and was able to count on his support. Cardinal Scherer, on the other hand, was a limited man and a conservative, who had no social fibre. He was very traditional,’ Betto confirms to me when we meet in Rio de Janeiro.

  When I interviewed him, Cardinal Odilo Scherer made a better impression on me. Affable and a little roguish, he received me in a sky-blue shirt, with a black-and-white Montblanc pen sticking out of his pocket, in his magnificent office in the archbishop’s palace in São Paulo. There, during a lengthy interview, he is careful to play down the tensions within the Brazilian Church, of which he is the highest dignitary: ‘We have a pope, just one: Francis; we don’t have two, even if there is a pope emeritus. Sometimes people don’t like what Francis says, and then they turn towards Benedict XVI; others don’t like Benedict XVI, so they are with Francis. Each pope has his own charisma, his personality. One pope complements the other. You can’t set one pope against the other one.’

  The United States was another crucial country, with 17 cardinals, including 10 with a vote. A strange world, all in all, with which Francis was unfamiliar, and where the rigid cardinals leading double lives were very numerous. Barely having any confidence in the president of the American Bishops’ Conference, the self-styled liberal Daniel DiNardo – an opportunist who was pro-Ratzinger under Ratzinger and then became pro-Francis under Francis – the pope discovered to his alarm that he had few allies in the country. That was why he chose to rely on three little-known gay-friendly bishops: Blase Cupich, whom he had just appointed Archbishop of Chicago, and who was favourable to homosexual couples; Joseph Tobin, the Archbishop of Indianapolis and now of Newark, where he welcomed married homosexuals and LGBT activists; and last of all, Robert McElroy, a liberal, pro-gay priest from San Francisco. These three supporters of Francis in the United States would give their full support to the Synod, and the first two were rewarded by being appointed card
inals in 2016, while McElroy would be made a bishop during the debates.

  In Spain, France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium, Francis also sought allies and allied himself with the most liberal cardinals, such as the German Reinhard Marx, the friendly Austrian Christoph Schönborn, or the Spaniard Juan José Omella (whom he would appoint Archbishop of Barcelona shortly afterwards, and then go on to create cardinal). Also, in an interview in the German newspaper Die Zeit, the pope launched an idea with a bright future: the ordination of the famous viri probati. Rather than suggesting the ordination of women or the end of celibacy for seminarians – a casus belli for conservatives – Francis wanted to ordain older married Catholic men, a way of responding to the crisis in vocations, to limit homosexuality in the Church and to try to halt cases of sexual abuse.

  In launching a series of grass-roots debates on the ground, the pope put conservatives on the defensive. He ‘cornered’ them, to use the word of a priest who worked for the synod, and showed them that they were in a minority in their own country.

  The pope had been clear since 2014: ‘For most people, the family [as imagined by John Paul II in the early 1980s] no longer exists. There are divorces, rainbow families, single-parent families, the phenomenon of surrogate pregnancy, couples without children, same-sex unions … The traditional doctrine will certainly remain, but pastoral challenges require a contemporary response, which can no longer come from authoritarianism or moralism.’ (These daring proposals by the pope, which have not been denied, were reported by the Cardinal of Honduras, Óscar Maradiaga, a personal friend of Francis’s.)

  Between the two synods of 2014 and 2015, the battle between liberals and conservatives therefore broadened, and now extended to all episcopates, while Francis continued with his little-by-little policy.