In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  ‘Imkamp is a well-documented ultra-conservative priest. He wanted to become a bishop, but that was blocked for personal reasons. He is very close to the radical conservative wing of the German Church, particularly Cardinal Müller and Georg Gänswein,’ the Süddeutsche Zeitung journalist Matthias Drobinski tells me in Munich.

  This turbulent Imkamp is a curious priest: he appears to be well in with the Vatican, where he is a ‘consultant’ for several congregations. He was also assistant to one of the most delicately anti-gay German cardinals, Walter Brandmüller. Why did these active connections and his Ratzingerian friendships not enable him to become a bishop under Benedict XVI? That is a mystery that deserves explanation.

  David Berger, an ex-seminarian and theologian, now a gay militant, explains during an interview in Berlin: ‘Every morning, Mgr Imkamp celebrates mass in Latin according to the ancient rite in the chapel of Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. He is an ultra-conservative close to Georg Gänswein; she is a Madonna of the gays.’

  The decadent aristocrat Gloria ‘TNT’ is not short of means, or indeed of paradoxes. She describes her collection of contemporary art, which features works by, among others, Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, including a magnificent and famous portrait of her by the latter. Koons is still alive, while two of these artists, Haring and Mapplethorpe, were homosexual and died of AIDS; Basquiat was a drug addict; Mapplethorpe was rejected by the American Catholic far right for his work, which was judged to be homoerotic and sadomasochistic. Contradictory, at all?

  The princess summed up her divided feelings about homosexuality in a debate with the Bavarian Conservative Party (CSU) in the presence of Mgr Wilhelm Imkamp: ‘Everyone can do what they like in their bedroom, but it mustn’t be turned into a political programme.’ We understand the code: great tolerance for ‘closeted’ homosexuals; zero tolerance for gay visibility!

  An explosive cocktail, this ‘Gloria TNT’: a religious devotee and an aristo-punk jetsetter; a fervent Catholic and crazed fundamentalist surrounded by a cloud of gays. A ‘cocotte’ of the first order!

  Traditionally close to the conservatives of the CSU in Bavaria, over the last few years she seems to have absorbed certain ideas from the AfD, the right-wing reactionary German party, although she has not formally joined it. She has been seen marching beside its deputies at the ‘Demos für Alle’, the anti-gay-marriage demonstrations; she also declared, in an interview, her affection for Duchess Beatrix von Storch, vice-president of the AfD, while at the same time acknowledging her disagreements with her party.

  ‘Gloria von Thurn und Taxis is typical of the grey area between the Christian Socialists of the CSU and the hard right of the AfD, who agree on their hatred of “gender theory”, their fight against abortion, gay marriage or the denunciation of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policy,’ I am told by the German theologian Michael Brinkschröder in Munich.

  Here we are at the heart of what is called the ‘Regensburg network’, a constellation in which the Sun-Queen Gloria ‘TNT’ is the bright star around which ‘a thousand blue devils dance’. The prelates Ludwig Müller, Wilhelm Imkamp and Georg Gänswein have always seemed at ease in this ‘friendly’ coterie in which the butlers are in livery and the cakes are decorated with ‘60 marzipan penises’ (we are told by the German press). A princess by nature, Gloria TNT also supplies an after-sales service: she promotes the anti-gay books of her friends, reactionary cardinals like Müller, or the Guinean ultra-conservative Robert Sarah, or the German Joachim Meisner, with whom she has co-written a book of interviews. Meisner was the quintessence of the hypocrisy of Catholicism: he was at once one of the enemies of Pope Francis (one of the four ‘dubia’); a committed homophobe; a bishop who knowingly ordained, both in Berlin and Cologne, practising gay priests; someone who was locked firmly in the closet since his late puberty; and an aesthete who lived with his effeminate and largely LGBT entourage. An impressive set of qualities!

  Should Cardinal Müller’s thought be taken seriously? Important German cardinals and theologians have been critical of his writings, which lack authority, and his thought, which is not always trustworthy. Perfidiously, they stress that he has coordinated the publication of Ratzinger’s complete works, thus insinuating that the closeness between the two men might explain his elevation to cardinal and his appointment to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

  These harsh judgements need to be qualified: Müller was made cardinal by Francis and not by Benedict XVI. He was a priest in Peru and is the author of serious books, particularly on liberation theology in Latin America, which allows us if not to put his conservatism into perspective, then at least to show its complexity. During our conversation, he insists that he is a friend of Gustavo Gutíerrez, the ‘founding father’ of this religious movement, which whom he wrote a book.

  On the other hand there is no doubt about his homophobia: when the pope showed empathy in a private conversation with Juan Carlos Cruz, a homosexual who was the victim of sexual abuse – ‘The fact that you are gay is irrelevant. God made you how you are and loves you like that and it doesn’t matter to me. The pope loves you like that. You must be happy as you are,’ Francis would say – Cardinal Müller immediately made a series of outraged declarations, publicly insisting that ‘homophobia is a hoax’.

  This severity, this confidence, sits uneasily with the inaction that Cardinal Müller has demonstrated in cases of sexual abuse of which he has been informed. Under his leadership the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in charge of the paedophile dossiers at the Vatican, demonstrated negligence (which Müller has firmly denied), and little empathy with the victims. Its lack of support also contributed to the departure of the influential Irish laywoman Marie Collins, herself a victim of paedophile priests, from the commission for the protection of minors set up by the Vatican to fight against sexual abuse in the Church.

  At the Synod on the Family, Müller clearly rallied opposition to Pope Francis, although he tells me today, with a hint of hypocrisy, that he didn’t want to ‘add confusion to confusion, bitterness to bitterness, hatred to hatred’. He led the ‘dubia’ rebellion, he elevated the refusal of communion to remarried divorcees to a dogma, and he proved radically hostile to the ordination of woman and even of ‘viri probati’. To him – a man who knows by heart all the verses of the Old Testament and the epistles that mention this ‘evil’ – homosexual people must be respected on condition that they remain chaste. In the end the cardinal seems to be a firm opponent of ‘gender ideology’, which he has coarsely caricatured, without the subtlety that he showed in his analysis of liberation theology.

  Pope Francis did not appreciate Müller’s critiques of the Synod on the Family, and in particular of Amoris Laetitia. In his Christmas wishes in 2017, he singled out Müller without naming him, by denouncing those people ‘who betray [his] trust [and] allow themselves to be corrupted by ambition or vainglory; and when they are delicately expelled falsely declare themselves to be martyrs to the system, rather than doing their mea culpa’. Even more sternly, the pope has denounced those behind ‘plots’, and who represent ‘a cancer’ in these small circles. As we can see, Francis and Müller are hardly on the best of terms.

  We are suddenly interrupted, during our conversation in the cardinal’s sitting room, by a phone call. Without apologizing, the priest in flip-flops gets up and answers it. Surly a moment ago, here he is, having seen the number on the display, assuming a pose and an affected voice: now he has manners. He starts talking in German, in a perfumed voice. The flowery conversation lasts only a few minutes, but I understand that it is a personal one. If I didn’t have a man in front of me – a man who had taken a vow of chastity – and if I didn’t hear echoing down the line, from far away, a baritone voice, I would have understood it to be an intimate call.

  The cardinal comes back and sits down close to me, vaguely worried. And all of a sudden he asks me, inquisitorially: ‘Do y
ou understand German?’

  In Rome, you sometimes feel you’re in a Hitchcock film. Also living in the same building where Müller lives is his great enemy: Cardinal Walter Kasper. I would even end up by getting to know the caretaker of the soulless art-deco building, to whom I would pass on messages left by the two rival cardinals, or the famous white book, which I would drop off as a present for Müller.

  The two Germans have been crossing swords for a long time, and their theological jousting is memorable. They had a rematch in 2014–15: As Francis’s inspiration and unofficial theologian, Kasper found himself entrusted with the task of giving the keynote speech for the Synod on the Family, and it was Müller who demolished it!

  ‘Pope Francis backtracked, that’s a fact. He had no choice. But he’s always been very clear. He accepted a compromise while trying to steer his course,’ Kasper tells me during an interview at his house.

  The German cardinal, wearing a very smart dark suit, talks in a warm and infinitely gentle voice. He listens, meditates in silence, before throwing himself into a long philosophical explanation, which reminds me of my long conversations with the Catholics of the journal Esprit in Paris.

  Here is Kasper, discoursing on Saint Thomas Aquinas, whom he is rereading and who was, in his view, betrayed by the neo-Thomists, those exegetes who radicalized and travestied him, as the Marxists did with Marx and the Nietzscheans with Nietzsche. He talks to me about Hegel and Aristotle and, while he is looking for a book by Emmanuel Levinas and trying to find another one by Paul Ricoeur, I realize that I am dealing with a real intellectual. His love of books isn’t feigned.

  Born in Germany the year Hitler came to power, Kasper studied at the University of Tübingen, whose rector was the Swiss theologian Hans Küng, and where he regularly saw Joseph Ratzinger. It was during those crucial years that these two essential friendships began, which would last until the present day in spite of the mounting disagreements he would have with the future pope, Benedict XVI.

  ‘Francis is closer to my way of thinking. I hold him in great esteem, I have a lot of affection for him, even though in the end I don’t see him very much. But I also maintained very good relations with Ratzinger, in spite of our differences.’

  Those ‘differences’ date back to 1993, and already concerned the debate about remarried divorcees – Kasper’s real concern, even more than the homosexual question. With two other bishops, and probably with the encouragement of Hans Küng, who had broken with Ratzinger, Kasper had a letter read out in the churches in his diocese to open up the debate on the communion of divorcees. He talked about mercy and the complexity of individual situations, a little like Francis today.

  In the face of this act of gentle dissidence, Cardinal Ratzinger, who was then running the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, halted these adventurers mid-flow. In a letter as rigid as it was severe, he warned them to return to the ranks. With that simple piece of samizdat, Kasper found himself in opposition to the future Benedict XVI, just as Müller, facing in the other direction from his next-door neighbour, would do with Francis.

  Kasper–Müller is thus the dividing line of the synod, another battle refought in 2014–15 after being waged in the same terms and almost with the same warriors, 25 years earlier, between Kasper and Ratzinger! The Vatican often seems like a big ocean liner that is coming to a standstill.

  ‘I’m pragmatic,’ Kasper corrects me. ‘The path set out by Francis, and the small-step strategy, is the right one. If you advance too quickly, as in the ordination of women or the celibacy of the priesthood, there will be a schism among Catholics, and I don’t want that for my Church. On divorcees, on the other hand, you can go further. I’ve defended that idea for a long time. When it comes to recognizing homosexual couples, that’s a more difficult subject: I tried to move the debate forward at the synod, but we weren’t listened to. Francis found a middle way by talking about people, about individuals. And then, very gradually, he moved the lines. He’s also broken with a certain kind of misogyny: he’s appointing women everywhere: in the commissions, in the dicasteries, among the experts. He is moving in his own rhythm, in his own way, but he has a goal.’

  Walter Kasper adopted a position, after the victory over ‘same-sex marriage’ in Ireland, that the Church would accept the verdict of the vote. This referendum in May 2015 was held between the two synods, and the cardinal thought at the time that the Church would have to take account of it, as he told Corriere della Sera: in his view, the question of marriage, which was still ‘marginal’ before the first Synod, became ‘central’ when, for the first time, marriage was opened up to same-sex couples ‘by a popular vote’. And the cardinal added in that same interview: ‘A democratic state must respect the will of the people. If a majority [of the citizens of a country] wants this kind of union, it is the duty of the state to recognize those rights.’

  We talk about all of these subjects in his apartment, during the two interviews that he grants me. I admire the cardinal’s sincerity and his probity. We talk with great freedom of tone about the homosexual question and Kasper proves open; he listens, he asks questions, and I know from several of my sources, and also by intuition – and what is known as ‘gaydar’ – that I am probably dealing with one of the few cardinals in the Curia who aren’t homosexual. That’s the seventh rule of The Closet, which almost always proves to be true: The most gay-friendly cardinals, bishops and priests, the ones who talk little about the homosexual question, are generally heterosexual.

  We mention a few cardinals’ names, and Kasper is actually aware of the homosexuality of several of his colleagues. Some of these are also his opponents, the most ‘rigid’ in the Roman Curia. We have doubts about some of the names, and agree about others. At this stage our conversation is private, and I promise to keep our little ‘outing’ game confidential. He simply tells me, as if he had just made a disturbing discovery: ‘They hide. They dissemble. That’s the key.’

  Now we turn our attention to the ‘anti-Kaspers’ and, for the first time, I sense that the cardinal is becoming irritated. But at the age of 85, Francis’s theologian no longer wants to fight against the hypocrites, the reactionaries. With a wave of his hand he closes the debate and says, in a phrase that might sound vain and smug, but which is in fact a stark warning against the pointless little games of those prelates who are cut off from reality and, worse, from their own reality: ‘We will win.’ And when he utters those words, I suddenly see a beautiful smile appear on the face of the cardinal, generally so austere.

  On a low table is a copy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the newspaper he reads every day. Kasper talks to me about Bach and Mozart, and I can hear his German soul resonating. On the wall of the drawing room I see a painting showing a village, and ask him about it.

  ‘You see, that’s reality. My village in Germany. I go back to my region every summer. There are bells, churches. At the same time, today, people don’t go to mass very much and seem to be happy without God. That’s the big question. That’s what worries me. How to find the way of God? I feel it’s lost. We’ve lost the battle.’

  6

  Roma Termini

  Mohammed is talking to a girl, clutching a beer with one of the ‘meufs’ he hopes to ‘emballer’ (get off with), as he will tell me later using French-Arab slang. It’s late afternoon, Happy Hour at Twins – ‘With Your Cocktail, A Free Shot’, a flyer I’m given says in English.

  Mohammed is sitting on a moped, in the street, outside the little bar. The moped isn’t his, but he uses it, like everyone around here, so as not to stand up all evening. Around him is a group of migrants, his gang. They call each other noisily by their first names, they whistle, are aggressive, affectionate and roguish among themselves, and their shouts mingle with the hubbub of Roma Termini.

  Now I see Mohammed going into Twins, a marvellously louche little bar on Via Giovanni Giolitti, opposite the southern entrance of Rome’s central station. He wants to take advantage of Happy Hour to buy a
drink for that passing girl. In Twins, they welcome the most exotic clienteles – migrants, addicts, transvestites, prostitutes (boys or girls) – with the same benevolence. If necessary, you can get a sandwich at four in the morning, a cheap slice of pizza, and dance in the back room to outdated reggae. Drugs circulate freely on the surrounding pavements.

  Suddenly, I see Mohammed leaving, abandoning the moped and girl after, it would seem, he received a mysterious phone call. I watch him. He’s now in the Piazza dei Cinquecento, at the crossing with Via Manin and Via Giovanni Giolitti. A car has stopped on the roadside. Mohammed is talking to the driver, and now he’s getting into the car and off they go. In front of Twins the girl continues a conversation with another boy – a young Romanian – also perched on a moped. (All the names of the migrants have been altered in this chapter.)

  ‘I am one of the immigrants who defends Pope Francis,’ Mohammed tells me with a smile a few days later. We’re back in Twins, the headquarters of the young Tunisian, who uses it to arrange meetings with his friends: ‘If you want to talk to me, you know where to find me; I’m there from 6.00 every night,’ he will tell me on another occasion.

  Mohammed is a Muslim. He came to Italy on a small fishing boat, without an engine, at the risk of losing his life on the open Mediterranean. I met him for the first time in Rome when I was starting this book. I followed him for almost two years, before losing sight of him. One day Mohammed’s phone stopped answering. ‘The number’s unavailable,’ the Italian operator told me. I don’t know what happened to him.

  In the meantime I interviewed him a dozen times, for several hours, in French, with one of my researchers, often over lunch. He knew I would tell his story.

  When he came back from the Greek island of Lesbos in 2016, Pope Francis brought with him, on his plane, three families of Syrian Muslims: a symbol to assert his defence of refugees and his liberal vision of immigration.