In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  ‘What can you do? We check the activities in public streets, and we pounce at random, about twice a week, on the hotels around Roma Termini. When a hotel officially accepts prostitutes, it’s a crime; but renting a room by the hour is legal in Italy. So we intervene if we discover organized pimping, drugs, or minors.’

  Giovanna Petrocca takes her time and we talk about the types of drugs circulating in the area, about the hotels I’ve spotted, and which she knows as well. I’ve rarely come across a police officer so competent, so professional and so well informed. Roma Termini is ‘under control’.

  If the chief inspector didn’t talk to me ‘on the record’ about the number of priests who make use of prostitutes around Roma Termini, other policemen have done so in a detailed and probing way, outside of the office. In this chapter, in fact – but also throughout this book – I often use a lot of information from the association Polis Aperta, a group of about a hundred LGBT soldiers, carabinieri and policemen. Several of its members in Rome, Castel Gandolfo, Milan, Naples, Turin, Padua and Bologna, and in particular a lieutenant colonel of the carabinieri, have given me accounts of the prostitution at Roma Termini and, more broadly, the commercial sex lives of ecclesiastics. (In some cases I also use anonymized information and statistics from the SDI crime database shared by the various Italian law-enforcement organizations.)

  These police officers and carabinieri confirm that there are many incidents: priests who have been robbed, kidnapped or beaten up; priests who have been arrested; priests who have been murdered, in cruising areas off the beaten track. They tell me about the blackmail, the sex tapes, the ‘Catholic revenge porn’ and the countless cases of ‘immorality’ affairs among the clergy. These priests, even if they are victims, seldom make a complaint: the price to be paid for making a report at the police station would be too high. They only do so in the most serious cases. Most of the time they say nothing; they hide and go home in silence, weighed down with their vice and hiding their bruises.

  There are also the homicides, which are rarer, but which eventually make it into the public eye. In his book Omocidi (Homocides) the journalist Andrea Pini revealed the considerable number of homosexuals killed by prostitutes in Italy, particularly after anonymous encounters that occurred in shady places. Among these, police sources agree, priests are over-represented.

  Francesco Mangiacapra is a high-class Neapolitan escort. His testimony is of huge importance here because, unlike other male prostitutes, he agrees to talk to me under his real name. A law student, slightly paranoid, but level-headed, he has drawn up long lists of gay priests who used his services in the region of Naples and Rome. This unique database has been enriched over the years with photographs, videos and, most importantly, by the identity of the people in questions. When he shares this massive amount of confidential information with me, I leave the anonymous qualitative discussion that I was having in the streets around Roma Termini, to enter the quantitative. Now I had tangible proof.

  Mangiacapra was recommended to me by Fabrizio Sorbara, an activist and one of the directors of the Arcigay association in Naples. I’ve interviewed him several times in Naples and Rome, in the presence of Daniele and the activist and translator René Buonocore.

  White shirt open over his chest, fine hair a chestnut colour, slender face, carefully unshaven, he’s a charming young man. If our first contact is cautious, Mangiacapra is quickly at ease with me. He knows very well who I am, because he attended a talk I gave a few months earlier at the Institut français in Naples, after the publication in Italian of my book Global Gay.

  ‘I didn’t start doing this job for money, but to know my value. I have a law degree from the famous Federico II University in Naples, and when I started looking for a job, all doors were closed. There’s no employment here, in Southern Italy, no opportunities. My fellow students did one humiliating internship after another in lawyers’ offices, or were exploited for 400 euros a month. My first client, I remember, was a lawyer: he paid me for 20 minutes what he pays his trainees for two weeks’ work! Rather than sell my mind for a small amount of money, I decided to sell my body for a lot.’

  Mangiacapra is an unusual sort of escort. He’s an Italian prostitute who expresses himself, as I have said, under his real name, showing his face, without any sense of shame. I was immediately struck by the strength of his testimony.

  ‘I know my value and the value of money. I don’t spend much; I save as much as possible. We often think,’ the young man adds, ‘that prostitution is money earned quickly and easily. No. It’s money earned at great cost.’

  Soon Francesco Mangiacapra discovered a line of business that he would never have imagined. Prostitution with gay priests.

  ‘At first it started quite naturally. I had priest clients who recommended me to other priests, who invited me to parties where I met still other priests. It wasn’t a network; these weren’t orgies like people sometimes think. They were just very ordinary priests who simply recommended me in quite a mundane way to other priest friends.’

  The advantages of this kind of client appeared quickly: loyalty, regularity and security.

  ‘Priests are the ideal clientele. They are loyal and they pay well. If I could, I would only work for priests. I always give them priority. I’m lucky, because I’m very much in demand and I’m able to choose my clients, unlike other male prostitutes who get chosen. I wouldn’t say I’m happy with this job, but I look at the other prostitutes, the other students who are unemployed, and I say to myself that I’m lucky in the end. If I’d been born somewhere else or in another time I’d have used my degrees and my intelligence to do something different. But in Naples prostitution is the most accessible job that I’ve been able to find.’

  The young man starts coughing. I sense a certain fragility. He’s frail and sensitive. He tells me he has ‘30 regular priests’ at the moment, clients who he is sure are priests, and many others about whom he has doubts. Since he took up prostitution, he tells me, there have been ‘hundreds of priests’.

  ‘Priests have become my speciality.’

  According to Mangiacapra, ecclesiastics prefer prostitution because it gives them a certain security, an anonymity, while remaining compatible with their double life. The normal ‘chatting up’ process, even in the homosexual milieu, takes time. It implies a long discussion; you have to come out into the open and say who you are. Prostitution is quick and anonymous and doesn’t expose you.

  ‘When a priest contacts me, we don’t know each other; there’s no previous contact between us. They prefer that kind of situation; that’s what they’re looking for. I’ve often had very good looking priest clients. I would gladly have slept with them for free! They would easily have been able to find a lover in gay bars or clubs. But that was incompatible with their priesthood.’

  The young escort doesn’t work ‘la strada’ (the street) like the migrants in Roma Termini. He doesn’t live at the rhythm of Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. He meets his clients on the internet, on specialist sites or on Grindr. He regularly exchanges messages with them on apps like WhatsApp or, for greater discretion, Telegram. Then he tries to turn them into regular clients.

  ‘In Rome there’s a lot of competition; here in Naples it’s calmer. But there are priests who call me to the capital; they pay for my train and my hotel.’

  From his sexual experiences with dozens if not hundreds of priests, Mangiacapra shares some sociological rules with me.

  ‘By and large, among priests, there are two kinds of client. There are the ones who feel infallible and very strong in their position. Those clients are arrogant and stingy. Their desire is so repressed that they lose their sense of morality and any sense of humanity. They feel they’re above the law. They aren’t even afraid of AIDS! Often they don’t hide the fact that they’re priests. They’re demanding and harsh, and they don’t let you take power! They have no hesitation about saying that if there’s a problem they’re going to report you to the police as a prostitut
e! But they forget that, if I want, I’m the one who could report them as priests!’

  The second type of clients with whom Francesco works are of a different kind.

  ‘They’re priests who are very uncomfortable in their skin. They’re very attached to affection, to caresses; they want to kiss you all the time. They have a terrible need for tenderness. They’re like children.’

  These clients, Mangiacapra confirms, often fall in love with their prostitute, and want to ‘save him’.

  ‘Those priests never discuss the price. They’re riven with guilt. They often give us money in a little envelope that they’ve prepared in advance. They say it’s a present to help me, to let me buy something I need. They try to justify themselves.’

  With me, Mangiacapra is happy to use more explicit words. He tells me he is a prostitute, and even ‘marchettaro’ – literally a ‘whore’ (the slang term comes from ‘marchetta’, the ‘receipt’ that made it possible to quantify the number of clients that a prostitute had had in a short-stay hotel). The escort deliberately uses this insult to invert the prejudice, like turning someone’s gun on them.

  ‘Those priests want to see their marchettaro again. They want a relationship. They want to stay in touch. They are often in a state of denial, and won’t understand that we don’t think highly of them, because they think they’re good priests. Then they think that we’re friends; they insist on that. They introduce you to their friends, to other priests. They take big risks. They invite you to church, take you to see the nuns in the sacristy. They trust you very quickly, a little as if you were their best pal. Often they add a tip in kind: a piece of clothing that they’ve bought in advance, a bottle of after-shave. They shower you with attention.’

  Francesco Mangiacapra’s testimony is lucid – and terrible. It’s harsh and brutal testimony, like the world he’s describing.

  ‘The price? Inevitably it’s the highest price that the client is willing to pay. That’s why it’s about marketing. There are escorts who are more handsome, more charming, than I am; but my marketing is better. By virtue of the site or the app that they use to contact me, of what they say to me, I do my first assessment of the price. When we meet, I adapt that price by asking them what area they live in, what they do for a living, I look at their clothes, their watches. I assess their financial capacity very easily. Priests are willing to pay more than a normal client.’

  I interrupt the young escort, asking him how priests, who generally have a salary of a thousand euros a month, can finance such escapades.

  ‘Allora … A priest is someone who hasn’t got a choice. So you’re more exclusive for him. It’s a more sensitive category. They are men who can’t find other boys, so you hike the price. You might say it’s a bit like disabled people.’

  After a pause, still punctuated by a long ‘Allora …’, Mangiacapra continues: ‘Most priests pay well; they rarely haggle. I imagine they scrimp on their leisure activities, but never on sex. A priest has no family, no rent to pay.’

  Like many rent boys I interviewed in Rome, the Neapolitan escort confirms the importance of sex in the lives of priests. Homosexuality seems to give direction to their existence, to dominate their lives: and it does so in different proportions to those of most homosexuals.

  Now the young prostitute tells me some of his marketing secrets.

  ‘The key is customer loyalty. If the priest is interesting, if he pays well, he has to come back. For that to happen, you have to do everything to make sure that he never falls back into reality; he has to stay in the fantasy. I never introduce myself as a “prostitute”, because that breaks the fantasy. I never say that he’s “my client”; I say he’s “my friend”. I always call the client by his first name, taking care never to mix up different clients’ names! Because I need to show him that he’s unique to me. Clients like to be remembered, and that’s what they want; they don’t want you to have other clients! So I’ve opened a list on my phone. For every client I record everything: I note down the first name he’s given me, his age, the positions he prefers, the places we’ve gone to together, the essential things he’s told me about himself, etc. I keep a minutely detailed record of all that. And, of course, I also note the maximum price he’s agreed to pay, to ask for the same, or a bit more.’

  Mangiacapra shows me his ‘files’, and points to the surnames and first names of dozens of priests with whom he says he has had sexual relations. It’s impossible for me to check his information. In 2018 he made public the sex lives of 34 priests in a 1,200-page document that included the names of the clerics concerned, their photographs, audio recordings and screen shots of his sexual exchanges with them, from WhatsApp or Telegram. It all caused a considerable scandal, dozens of articles and television programmes appearing in Italy. (I was able to consult the ‘dossier’ called Preti gay; it reveals dozens of priests celebrating mass in their cassocks and then, stark naked, celebrating other kinds of frolic via webcam. The photographs, alternating homilies and intimate pictures, are quite extraordinary. Mangiacapra sent the whole file directly to the Archbishop of Naples, the versatile cardinal Crescenzio Sepe. This close colleague of Cardinal Sodano – like him, gregarious – is a man of many connections who is said to have hurried, once he received the file, to pass it to the Vatican. Subsequently, Crescenzio Sepe met Mangiacapra secretly, he says.)

  ‘When I sleep with rich married lawyers, important doctors or all those priests with their double lives, I can tell that they aren’t happy. Happiness doesn’t go hand in hand with money or the priesthood. None of those clients have the same happiness and freedom that I do. They have been trapped by their desires; they are incredibly unhappy.’

  After reflection, the young man adds, as if to put into perspective what he had just said: ‘The difficulty of this job isn’t sexual by nature; it isn’t about having relations with somebody you don’t love, or that you find ugly. The difficulty lies in having sex when you don’t feel like it.’

  Night has fallen on Naples now, and I have to catch my train to get back to Rome. Francesco Mangiacapra is smiling, visibly happy to have talked to me. We’ll stay in touch, and I’ll even agree to sign a short preface to the book that he will later publish about his experience as an ‘escort’. Thanks to this little book, Mangiacapra would have his hour of glory, recounting his experience on popular Italian television programmes. But we can only rely on his account.

  As he leaves me, the young man suddenly wants to add something. ‘I’m not judging anybody. I’m not judging those priests. I understand their choices and their situation. But I think it’s sad. I’m transparent. I have no double life. I live in broad daylight, without hypocrisy. That isn’t true of my clients. I think it’s sad for them. I’m an atheist but I’m not anti-clerical. I’m not judging anybody. But what I’m doing is better than what priests do, isn’t it? It’s morally better, isn’t it?’

  René Buonocore, a social worker of Venezuelan origin, who lives and works in Rome, accompanied me to Naples to interview Mangiacapra, and he was also my guide in the homosexual places of the Roman night. Speaking five languages, he was part of the project ‘Io Faccio l’attivo’ (I’m active) of the Mobile Assistance Unit for sex workers in Rome. In this milieu, they use the expression ‘MSM’ (or Men who have Sex with Men), so as to include men who have relations with other men but don’t recognize themselves as homosexual. According to Buonocore and other sources, the priests who are still in the closet tend to favour migrants or the anonymity of public parks rather than commercial establishments.

  In Rome, they tend to frequent the area around the Villa Borghese, the streets surrounding the Villa Medici or the parks near the Coliseum and the Campidoglio. There, with my guide, I see people driving their cars near the National Gallery of Modern Art or walking, looking lost, on the shores of the lake of the Tempio di Esculapio. We also find the same fauna in the beautiful zigzag streets around Villa Giulia. I’m struck by the nocturnal peace of the places, the silence, the passing ho
urs and, all of a sudden, the acceleration, an encounter, a passing car, a boy rushing to get in with a stranger. Sometimes violence.

  If you go eastwards and cross the whole park, you happen on another ‘corner’ that is very prized by the ‘MSM’: the Villa Medici. Here the night-time scene is based essentially around Viale del Galoppaoio, a street as curly as the hair of young Tadzio in Death in Venice. It’s a well-known cruising area where men generally circulate in cars.

  There was a scandal that occurred in the setting of these streets, between the Villa Borghese and the Villa Medici. Several priests of the parish of the Church of Santa Teresa d’Avila were regular visitors to the area. The affair could have continued had not the lover of one of these priests, a homeless man, not recognized him saying mass. The case widened, and several other priests were also recognized by their parishioners. After a press scandal and a petition addressed by about a hundred churchgoers to the holy see, all of the priests concerned, and their superiors who had covered up the scandal, were moved to other parishes – and other parks.

  The garden opposite the Coliseum, called Colle Oppio, was also an open-air cruising spot in the 1970s and 1980s (a gate has been installed in the last few years), as was the park at Via di Monte Caprino, behind the famous Piazza del Campidoglio designed by Michelangelo. One of the pope’s assistants was checked there, according to police sources. A senior Dutch cleric who enjoyed a very high profile under John Paul II and Benedict XVI was also arrested in the little park by the Coliseum in the company of a boy – cases that were leaked anonymously to the press and later suppressed. (The names have been confirmed to me.)

  One of the most influential bishops under John Paul II, a Frenchman, since made a cardinal, was also known for cruising in the parks around the Campidoglio: out of prudence, the cleric had refused to have his official car registered with Vatican diplomatic plates, to attract less attention. You never know!