In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Finally, one of the outside meeting places most highly prized by priests is none other than St Peter’s Square: the Vatican is the only real ‘gaybourhood’ in Rome.

  ‘In the 1960s and 1970s I remember that Bernini’s columns in St Peter’s were the cruising area for the people of the Vatican. The cardinals went out for a little walk and tried to meet ragazzi,’ the literary specialist Francesco Gnerre tells me.

  More recently, an American cardinal amused the Vatican with his attempts to stay fit: he systematically went jogging in shorts around the columns. Even today some prelates and monsignori have their habits: strolls at nightfall in a state of creative ascesis, perhaps the hope of impromptu encounters that might go further.

  A phenomenon of which the wider public is largely unaware, the commercial homosexual relations in which Italian priests are involved constitute a very far-reaching system. They are one of the two options offered to practising ecclesiastics; the second being to cruise within the Church.

  ‘A lot of people here in the Vatican have been seriously burned,’ I am told in confidence by Don Julius, a confessor at St Peter’s whom I meet several times in the ‘Parlatorio’. (His name has been changed at his request.)

  Sitting on a green velvet sofa, the priest adds: ‘We often think that to talk freely about the Curia you have to go outside the Vatican. A lot of people think you have to hide. In fact, the easiest way to talk without being under surveillance is to do it here, in the very heart of the Vatican!’

  Don Julius reveals the tangled lives of the inhabitants of The Closet, and sums up the alternative that is offered to so many priests: cruising inside or outside the Church.

  In the first case, priests are among their own kind. They are interested in the co-religionists or the young seminarians who have just arrived from their Italian province. It’s a cautious form of cruising, conducted in the bishops’ palaces and sacristies of Rome; it shows social restraint, with priests undressing each other with their eyes. It’s generally safer, since religious seldom run into laypeople in their chosen erotic life. This physical security has its downside: it inevitably leads to rumours, and sometimes to blackmail.

  Robert Mickens, an American Vaticanologist, who is well versed in the subtleties of gay life in the Vatican, believes that this is the option favoured by most cardinals and bishops, who would risk being recognized outside. Their rule: ‘Don’t fuck the flock’, he tells me, a daring phrase with obviously biblical connotations (there are other variants in English: ‘Don’t screw the sheep’ or ‘Don’t shag the sheep’ – in other words, don’t sleep with your people, the lost flock waiting for their shepherd).

  So here we may talk in terms of ‘extraterritorial’ relations, because they take place outside of Italy, within the sovereign state of the holy see and its dependencies. This is the code of homosexuality ‘from within’.

  Homosexuality ‘from without’ is very different. It, on the contrary, is a matter of cruising within the religious world to escape rumours. Then gay night-life, public parks, saunas and prostitution are favoured by active gay priests. More dangerous, the homosexuality of commercial transactions, of dates with escorts and other kinds of escapades, are no less frequent. The risks are greater, but so are the benefits.

  ‘Every evening priests have these two options,’ Don Julius says, summing up the situation.

  Vatican ‘in’, or Vatican ‘out’: both choices have their supporters, their practitioners and their experts, and both have their own codes. Sometimes priests hesitate for a long time – when they don’t mix the two – between the dark, harsh world of external cruising, the city at night, its violence, its risks, its laws of desire, this ‘Du côté de chez Swann’, the truly dark version of The Closet; and on the other hand there is the luminous world of interior cruising, with its worldliness, its subtleties, its games, the ‘Côté de Guermantes’, which is a white version of The Closet, more dazzling and radiant, the version of caps and cassocks. In essence, whichever the path chosen, the ‘way’ one chooses to take in the Roman night is never that of a peaceful, orderly life.

  It is in terms of this fundamental opposition that the story of the Vatican needs to be written, and that is the story I will tell in the chapters that follow, going back in time to the pontificate of Paul VI, and returning to the present day via those of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. This tension between a closet ‘from within’ and a closet ‘from without’ grants us an understanding of most of the workings of the holy see, because the rigidity of doctrine, the double lives of individuals, the atypical appointments, the countless intrigues, the moral scandals, are almost always inscribed in one or other of these two codes.

  After we had been talking for a long time in this Parlatorio inside the Vatican, only a few metres from Pope Francis’s apartment, the confessor of St Peter’s says to me: ‘Welcome to Sodoma.’

  Part II

  Paul

  7

  The Maritain Code

  Cardinal Paul Poupard has one of the finest libraries in the Vatican: I counted 18 shelves on 11 levels. Made to measure, in an arc, it occupies the full length of a huge oval reception room.

  ‘There are almost 15,000 books in all’, Cardinal Poupard tells me with false modesty, receiving me in his slippers, surrounded by his folio volumes and autograph manuscripts, on one of my many visits.

  The French cardinal lives on the top floor of a palace attached to the holy see, overlooking the Piazza di San Calisto, in the bobo district of Trastevere in Rome. The palace is vast; so is the apartment. Two Mexican nuns serve His Eminence, who sits in splendour like a prince in his castle.

  Facing the library, the cardinal has his portrait on an easel. A large work, signed by a Russian artist, Natalia Tsarkova, for whom John Paul II and Benedict XVI have also sat. Cardinal Poupard spreads himself out magnificently, sitting on a high chair, one hand delicately stroking his chin, the other holding the pages of a handwritten speech. On his right ring finger: an episcopal ring decorated with a precious Veronese blue-green stone.

  ‘The artist made me pose for almost two years. She wanted it to be perfect, and for my whole universe to fill the painting. You can see the books, the red biretta, it’s very personal,’ Poupard tells me. Before adding: ‘I was a lot younger …’

  Behind this Dorian Gray, whose model seems strangely to have aged more quickly than his portrait, I notice two other paintings, hung more discreetly on the wall.

  ‘They are two works by the French Catholic writer Jean Guitton, who gave them to me,’ Poupard explains.

  I look at the daubs. Interesting as the portrait on the easel is, the church-blue Guittons look like pallid Chagalls.

  Using a green ladder, the cardinal is able to take down books of his choice from his panoramic library. He is showing off his own works and countless off-prints of articles from theological journals, which fill a whole shelf. We talk for a long time about the francophone authors that he likes: Jean Guitton, Jean Daniélou, François Mauriac. And when I mention the name of Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher, Cardinal Poupard gets to his feet, shivering with delight. He walks towards a shelf to show me the complete works of the French philosopher.

  ‘It was Paul VI who introduced Maritain to Poupard. It was on 6 December 1965, I remember very clearly.’

  The cardinal is now talking about himself in the third person. At the start of our discussion I felt a vague unease: that I might be more interested in Maritain than in the work – oh, how significant! – of Poupard. And here he was joining in, without batting an eyelid.

  We discuss at length the work of Maritain and his sometimes stormy relations with writers André Gide, Julien Green, François Mauriac and Jean Cocteau, and it occurs to me that all these French pre-war Christian writers were very gifted. They were also homosexual. All of them.

  Now we’ve come back to stand in front of Jean Guitton’s daubings, which Poupard studies as if searching them for a secret. He tells me he has kept almost two hund
red letters from him: an unpublished correspondence that might itself contain plenty of secrets. Standing in front of Guitton’s paintings, I ask Poupard about his mentor’s sexuality. How is it that this erudite and misogynist man, a member of the Académie française, essentially lived his life in chastity, on the model of Jacques Maritain, only late in life marrying a woman whom he very seldom spoke about, whom nobody saw very often, and who prematurely left him a widower, after which he never sought to remarry?

  The cardinal launches into a continuous, Mephistophelian fit of the giggles, hesitates, and then says: ‘Jean was made to have a wife, just as I was made to be a cobbler!’ (He was in slippers.)

  Then, suddenly serious, carefully weighing his words, he adds: ‘We are all more complicated than we think. Behind the appearance of the straight line things are more complex.’

  The cardinal, essentially so controlled and restrained, so guarded with his emotions, opens up for the first time. He adds: ‘Continence, for Maritain, for Guitton, was their own way of coming to terms with things; that was how they did it. A personal matter, a long time ago.’

  He won’t say more than that. He guesses that he may have gone too far. And, performing a skilful pirouette, he boldly adds this quotation, which he will often repeat in the course of our regular conversations: ‘As Pascal, my favourite author, would say: that’s all of a different order.’

  To understand the Vatican and the Catholic Church, at the time of Paul VI or today, Jacques Maritain is a good entry point. I have gradually discovered the importance of this codex, this complex and secret password, a real key to understand The Closet. The Maritain code.

  Jacques Maritain was a French writer and philosopher who died in 1973. He is not well known among the general public today, and his work seems dated. Nevertheless, his influence was considerable in the European religious life of the twentieth century, particularly in France and Italy, and it’s a textbook example for our investigation.

  This Catholic convert’s books are still quoted by Popes Benedict XVI and Francis, and his closeness to two popes, John XXIII and Paul VI, is well attested, and especially interesting for us.

  ‘Paul VI saw himself as one of Maritain’s disciples,’ Poupard confirms to me.

  The future pope Giovanni Montini, an enthusiastic reader of Maritain from 1925 onwards, even translated one of his books (Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau) and wrote the preface. Having become Pope Paul VI, he would remain very closely connected with the French theologian and philosopher, and even considered appointing Maritain a cardinal.

  ‘I would like to put that rumour to bed once and for all. Paul VI was very fond of Maritain, but there was never any question of creating him a cardinal,’ Poupard says, using a time-honoured phrase.

  Definitely not a cardinal, then; but Maritain still charmed Paul VI. How can we explain that atypical influence? According to the witnesses I have interviewed, their relationship was not one of connivance or personal friendship, as would be the case between Paul VI and Jean Guitton: ‘Maritainism’ really exercised a lasting fascination on the Italian Church.

  It would have to be said that Maritain’s thought, focused on sin and concentrated on grace, illustrates a generous, albeit sometimes naïve Catholicism. The extreme piety of Jacques Maritain, his sincere faith, of admirable depth, set an example that impressed Rome. The political spirit of his work did the rest: in post-fascist Italy, Maritain defended the idea that democracy was the only legitimate political form. By doing so, he pointed the way towards the necessary rupture between Catholics and anti-Semitism and far-right extremism. This contributed to the reconciliation of Christians with democracy: in Italy it ushered in the way for a long companionship between the Vatican and Christian Democracy.

  The former Curia priest Francesco Lepore confirms Maritain’s influence on the Vatican: ‘Maritain’s work is sufficiently important to be studied even today in the pontifical universities. There are still “Maritain circles” in Italy. And a Maritain chair has even been recently inaugurated by the president of the Italian Republic.’

  Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, John Paul II’s ‘minister’ of the interior, tells me of his passion for Maritain in the course of two meetings at the Vatican, echoing many other prelates who experienced something very similar: ‘I have had little time in my life to read. But I have read Maritain, Daniélou, Congar, Mauriac’s Life of Christ. When I was very young, I read all those authors. French was a second language for us. And Maritain was the point of reference.’

  The same admiration is voiced by Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, ‘minister’ of foreign affairs under John Paul II, whom I interviewed four times in his office in Rome: ‘Jacques Maritain and Jean Guitton had a very big influence here, at the Vatican. They were very close to Paul VI. And Maritain was quoted even more under John Paul II.’

  However, an influential foreign diplomat at the holy see puts this attraction into perspective: ‘Italian Catholics like the mystical side of Maritain, and appreciate his piety, but in the end they find him a bit fiery. The holy see has always been afraid of this fanatical layman!’

  The Vice-Dean of the College of Cardinals, the Frenchman Roger Etchegaray, whom I will meet twice in his big apartment on Piazza di San Calisto in Rome, opens his eyes wide when I utter the code name.

  ‘I knew Maritain well.’

  The cardinal, who was for a long time John Paul II’s ‘flying’ ambassador, pauses, offers me a chocolate and then adds, regaining his composure: ‘Knowing. It’s something that’s impossible. You can’t know someone. Only God truly knows us.’

  Cardinal Etchegaray tells me he is going to take the Maritains with him to the house in the South of France to which he expects to retire, having put it off for 20 years: the Maritains, but also the books by Julien Green, François Mauriac, André Gide, Henry de Montherlant, and the works of Jean Guitton, of whom he too was a close friend. All of these authors are, without exception, homophilic or homosexual.

  Suddenly Roger Etchegaray takes my hand with the pious affection of figures in a Caravaggio. ‘Do you know how old I am?’ the cardinal asks me.

  ‘I think I do, yes …’

  ‘I’m 94. You wouldn’t believe it, would you? Ninety-four years old. At my age, my reading, my ambitions, my plans are rather limited.’

  The enduring influence of Maritain took root with his theological and political thought, but it also fed on the example of his life. At the heart of the Maritain mystery is his marriage to Raïssa, his wife, and the secret pact that united them. The meeting between Jacques and Raïssa was built initially on a spectacular double conversion to Catholicism: he was Protestant; she was Jewish. United by a passionate love, their marriage was neither loveless nor one of convenience. It wasn’t a bourgeois marriage, nor a substitute marriage, even though Maritain perhaps wanted to use it to escape loneliness, and what is sometimes called ‘the sadness of men without women’.

  From this point of view, the marriage recalls that of writers like Paul Verlaine, Louis Aragon or, later, Jean Guitton. It also echoes the famous marriage of André Gide to his cousin Madeleine, which he seems never to have consummated: ‘Gide’s wife replaced his mother as a symbol of the pole of restraint to which he always had to be able to return, and without which his other pole of joy, liberation, perversion, would have lost all meaning’, wrote George Painter, Gide’s biographer. The author of The Vatican Cellars therefore balanced freedom with constraint.

  For Maritain there were also two poles: that of his wife Raïssa, and a second world, not of perversion, but of friendly ‘inclinations’. Not having yielded to ‘Evil’, the devil would tempt him through the virtue of friendship.

  Jacques and Raïssa formed an ideal couple – but one without sex for most of their lives. That trompe-l’oeil heterosexuality wasn’t only a religious choice, as was believed for a long time. In 1912, the Maritains decided to take a vow of chastity together, one which remained secret for a long time. Is the sacrifice of bodily d
esire a gift to God? The price of salvation? It’s possible. The Maritains talked about ‘spiritual companionship’. They said they ‘wanted to help one another to go towards God’. Behind this almost Cathar version of relations between the sexes one might also see a popular choice of the times: the one favoured by many homophiles. Because Maritain’s entourage included an incredible number of homosexuals.

  Throughout his life, Maritain was a man of great ‘loving friendships’ with the biggest homosexual figures of his century: he was the friend or confidant of Jean Cocteau, Julien Green, Max Jacob, René Crevel and Maurice Sachs, but also of François Mauriac, a ‘closeted’ writer whose true amorous inclinations, not merely sublimated, were left in no doubt after the publication of the important biography by Jean-Luc Barré.

  In their house in Meudon, Maritain and Raïssa constantly received celibate Catholics, homosexual intellectuals and handsome young men with the most effusive hospitality. With the sort of air of wisdom that his effeminate entourage loved so much, the philosopher discoursed endlessly about homosexual sin, exclaiming ‘I love you’ to his young friends, whom he called his ‘godsons’ – having chosen not to have a sex life with his wife, and hence to be childless.

  Homosexuality was an obsession of Maritain’s. The friend of Paul VI kept returning to the subject, as is revealed by his now-published correspondence. Certainly, he did so in a detached and, we might say, ‘Ratzingerian’ way. Maritain wished to save the gays he invited into his coterie in Meudon to protect them from ‘Evil’. Self-hatred, probably; but concern for others too, sincere and honest. Autres temps.

  Counter-intuitive, this fanatical Catholic was barely interested in more orthodox Catholics, the ones who were more heterosexual: he certainly corresponded regularly with the Jesuit priest Henri de Lubac, a future cardinal, and less regularly with the writer Paul Claudel; he also knew Georges Bernanos professionally, but his passionate friendships with such kinds of people were rare.