In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  For ‘coming out’ too noisily or too late, Krzysztof Charamsa is now under twofold attack from the Curia and from the Italian gay movement. Having moved in a flash from internalized homophobia to drama queen, the prelate is found to be unsettling. I am told, for example, that at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith his dismissal was linked to the fact that he didn’t get the promotion he was hoping for. His homosexuality was identified, I was told by an official source, because he had lived with his boyfriend for several years.

  A Curia prelate, very familiar with the case, and homosexual himself, explained: ‘Charamsa was at the heart of the Vatican homophobic machine. He led a double life: he attacked gays in public, and at the same time he lived with his lover in private. For a long time he reached an accommodation with this system that he went on to condemn – just before the synod, putting the liberal wing of the Curia in difficulty. What is problematic is that he could, like myself and others, have lined up with progressive Cardinals Walter Kasper or the very friendly Schönborn. Instead of which he denounced and attacked them for years. To me, Charamsa remains a mystery.’ (These severe judgements, typical of the counter-campaign waged by the Vatican, do not contradict Charamsa’s story; he acknowledged that he ‘dreamed of becoming a prefect of the Inquisition’, and that he was involved in a real ‘police department of souls’).

  On the other hand, Charamsa found little support among the gay Italian community, which criticized his ‘pink-washing’, as another activist confirms: ‘In his interviews and his book, he didn’t explain the system at all. He only spoke about himself, about his own little person. His confession is of no interest: when he came out in 2015 it was 50 years too late! What would really have been of interest would have been if he had told us about the system from inside, described everything, like Solzhenitsyn.’

  A harsh judgement, perhaps, even though it is clear that Charamsa wasn’t the gay Solzhenitsyn of the Vatican that some might have hoped for.

  The crusade against gays was waged under John Paul II by another prelate, more influential, in a different way, than the former priest Charamsa. He was a cardinal, one of the most influential under John Paul II. His name: Alfonso López Trujillo. His title: President of the Pontifical Council for the Family.

  Here we are entering one of the darkest pages in the recent history of the Vatican, and I don’t want to get carried away by my story too quickly: I will need as much time as it takes to tell this absolutely extraordinary case.

  Who was Alfonso López Trujillo? The specimen was born in 1946 in Villahermosa, in the region of Tolima, in Colombia. He was ordained priest in Bogotá at the age of 25, and 10 years later he became auxiliary priest of the same city, before returning to Medellín where, at the age of 43, he was made archbishop. A classical trajectory, for a priest who was born into a good family and never short of money.

  The remarkable career of Alfonso López Trujillo owes a lot to Pope Paul VI, who spotted him early on during his official visit to Colombia in August 1968, and even more to John Paul II, who made him his right-hand man in Latin America at the start of his pontificate. The reason for this great friendship was simple, and identical to the one that the Polish pope formed at the same time with the nuncio Angelo Sodano or Father Marcial Maciel: anti-communism.

  Alvaro Léon, now retired, was for a long time a Benedictine monk and, when he was a young seminarian, ‘master of ceremonies’ to Alfonso López Trujillo in Medellín. It’s there that I meet this old man with a handsome, weary face, with my main Colombian ‘researcher’, Emmanuel Neisa. Alvaro Léon wanted to appear in my book under his real name, ‘because I’ve waited too many years to talk,’ he tells me, ‘so I want to do it completely now, with courage and precision’.

  We lunch together in a restaurant near Medellín cathedral, and Alvaro Léon takes his time to tell me of his life beside the archbishop, spinning out the suspense for a long while. We will stay together until the evening, exploring the city and its cafés.

  ‘López Trujillo doesn’t come from here. He studied in Medellín and his vocation came late. First of all he studied psychology, and it was only later that he became a seminarian in the city.’

  Aspiring to the priesthood, the young López Trujillo was sent to Rome to complete his studies in philosophy and theology at the Angelicum. Thanks to a doctorate and a solid acquaintance with Marxism, he was able to fight on equal terms with left-wing theologians, and attack them from the right – if not the far right – as several of his books testify.

  Back in Bogotá, López Trujillo was ordained a priest in 1960. For ten years he exercised his ministry in the shadows, already with great orthodoxy and not without several incidents.

  ‘Rumours about him began circulating very quickly. When he was appointed auxiliary bishop to Bogotá in 1971, a group of laymen and priests even published a petition denouncing his extremism and demonstrated against his appointment in front of the city cathedral! It was from that moment that López Trujillo became completely paranoid,’ Alvaro Léon tells me.

  According to all the witnesses I questioned in Colombia, the unexpected acceleration of López Trujillo’s career began with the Latin American Bishops’ Council (CELAM), which regularly assembles all the Latin American bishops to define the direction of the Catholic Church in South America.

  One of the founding conferences was in fact held in Medellín in 1968 (the first took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1955). That year, when campuses were erupting in Europe and the United States, the Catholic Church was in a state of great excitement following on from Vatican II. Pope Paul VI stopped off in Colombia to launch the CELAM conference.

  This grand gathering proved to be decisive: it saw the emergence of a progressive current, which would soon be christened ‘liberation theology’, by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez. It was a new direction in Latin America, where large parts of the Church began to voice the need for a ‘preferential option for the poor’. Many bishops defended the ‘liberation of oppressed peoples’ and decolonization, and denounced far-right military dictatorships. Soon a minority slipped into leftism, with pro-Guevara or pro-Castro priests, and more rare ones, like the Colombian Camilo Torres Restrepo or the Spaniard Manuel Pérez put their money where their mouth was and took up arms alongside the guerrillas.

  According to the Venezuelan Rafael Luciani, a specialist in liberation theology and himself a member of CELAM and professor of theology at Boston College, ‘López Trujillo genuinely emerged in reaction to the bishops’ conference in Medellín’. During several meetings and dinners, Luciani brought me a great deal of information about CELAM and the part played in it by the future cardinal.

  The Medellín conference, whose debates and declarations López Trujillo followed as a simple priest, was a turning point for him. He understood that the Cold War had just reached the Latin American Church. His reading was binary, and he just had to follow his nose to choose his camp.

  Made a part of the administrative authorities of CELAM, the young bishop, recently elected, began – discreetly at first – lobbying internally for a militant right-wing political option against liberation theology and its preferential option for the poor. His project: to see to it that CELAM renewed its connection with conservative Catholicism. He would stay in the post for seven years.

  Did he have connections with Rome, to carry out this undermining work? That much is certain, because he was appointed to CELAM thanks to the support of the Vatican and the influential Italian cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, a former nuncio to Brazil, who became director of the Congregation of Bishops. The Colombian would only become the spearhead of John Paul II’s anti-liberation theology measures after the Puebla conference in Mexico in 1979.

  ‘In Puebla, López Trujillo was very influential, very strong. I remember very clearly,’ I am told by the Brazilian cardinal Odilo Scherer during an interview in São Paulo. ‘Liberation theology was a kind of consequence of Vatican II of the 1960s … and also of May 1968 in France [he la
ughs]. It was sometimes too politicized, and had abandoned the true work of the Church.’

  That year, in Puebla, López Trujillo, by now an archbishop, went into direct action. ‘Prepare the bombers,’ he wrote to a colleague before the conference. He organized it in great detail, apparently making 39 trips between Bogotá and Rome to prepare for the meeting. It was he who ensured that theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez were removed from the conference hall on the grounds that they weren’t bishops.

  When the CELAM conference opened in Mexico with an inaugural speech by John Paul II, who had travelled there especially for the occasion, López Trujillo had a precise battle plan: his intention was to take power back from the progressive camp and make the organization turn to the right. Trained ‘like a boxer before a fight’, in his own words, he was ready to exchange fire with the ‘leftist’ priests.

  This was confirmed to me by the famous Brazilian Dominican Frei Betto during an interview in Rio de Janeiro: ‘At the time, most bishops were conservative. But López Trujillo wasn’t just conservative: he was on the far right. He was openly on the side of big capital and the exploitation of the poor: he defended capitalism more than the doctrine of the Church. He was inclined towards cynicism. At the CELAM conference in Puebla he even slapped a cardinal.’

  Alvaro Léon, López Trujillo’s former colleague, continues: ‘The result of Puebla was a mixed one for López Trujillo. He managed to regain power and have himself elected president of CELAM, but at the same time he didn’t get rid of the liberation theology that still fascinated a large number of bishops.’

  Now that he was in power, Alfonso López Trujillo was able to refine his political strategy and use iconoclastic methods to consolidate his influence. He ran CELAM with an iron fist between 1979 and 1983, and Rome was all the more appreciative of his combative attitude since it belonged, like Marcial Maciel’s, to a ‘local’. There was no longer any need to parachute in Italian cardinals or use apostolic nuncios to wage war against communism in Latin America: all they had to do was recruit good Latinos to ‘get the job done’.

  And Alfonso López Trujillo was so devoted, so passionate, that he performed his task of eradicating liberation theology with great zeal, in Medellín, in Bogotá and soon throughout the whole of Latin America. In an ironic portrait in The Economist, he would even be portrayed with his red cardinal’s cap, like a reverse Che Guevara!

  The new pope, John Paul II, and his ultra-conservative entourage of cardinals, now led by their warrior López Trujillo, would make the total defeat of the current of liberation theology their priority. This was also the line taken by the US administration: the report of the Rockefeller Commission, produced at the request of President Nixon, calculated that since 1969 Liberation Theology had become more of a threat than communism: in the 1980s under Reagan, the CIA and the Department of the Secretary of State continued to investigate the subversive ideas of these ‘red’ Latin American priests. To achieve this, the pontiff would appoint an impressive number of right-wing and far-right bishops in Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s.

  ‘Most of the bishops appointed in Latin America during the pontificate of John Paul II were close to Opus Dei,’ the academic Rafael Luciani, a member of CELAM, confirms.

  At the same time, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led the ideological battle against the thinkers of liberation theology, whom he accused of using ‘Marxist concepts’, and harshly punished several of them (López Trujillo was one of the authors of the two anti-liberation theology documents published by Ratzinger in 1984 and 1986).

  In less than ten years most CELAM bishops moved to the right. Liberation theology became a minority current in the council in the 1990s, and it would only be when the fifth CELAM conference was held in Aparecida in Brazil that a new moderate current would reappear, embodied in the Argentinian cardinal Jorge Bergoglio. An anti-López Trujillo line.

  One evening in October 2017 I am in Bogotá with a former seminarian, Morgain, who worked and associated with López Trujillo for a long time in Medellín. The man is reliable; his testimony indisputable. He still works for the Colombian episcopate, which makes it difficult for him to speak out publicly (his first name has been altered). But reassured by the fact that I will quote him under a false name, he starts to tell me the scandals, first in a whisper and then in a loud voice. He too has been keeping this information secret for so long that he’s eager to get it all out into the open, with countless details, over the course of a long dinner, at which my Colombian researcher is also present.

  ‘I was working with Archbishop López Trujillo in Medellín at the time. He lived in opulent conditions and moved around like a prince, or rather like a real “señora”. When he arrived in one of his luxury cars for an episcopal visit, he asked us to put out a red carpet. Then he would get out of the car, extending his leg, of which all that could be seen at first was his ankle, and then setting a foot on the carpet, as if he was the Queen of England! We all had to kiss his rings, and he had to have clouds of incense all around him. For us, this luxury, this show, the incense, the carpet, were very shocking.’

  This way of life from another era went hand in hand with a real hunt for progressive priests. According to Morgain – and his testimony has been confirmed by that of other priests – in the course of his diva tours Alfonso López Trujillo would spot priests close to liberation theology and then organize their ‘removal’. Some of those priests disappeared, or were murdered by paramilitaries just after the archbishop’s visit.

  In the 1980s, Medellín became the world’s crime capital. Drug traffickers, particularly the famous Medellín cartel of Pablo Escobar – who was believed to have been in charge of 80 per cent of the cocaine market into the United States – waged a reign of terror. In the face of the explosion of violence – the drug war, the rise in power of the guerrillas and the confrontations between rival cartels – the Colombian government declared a state of emergency (estatuto de seguridad). But its impotence was obvious: in 1991 alone, more than six thousand murders were recorded in Medellín.

  Given this infernal spiral, paramilitary groups formed in the city to organize the defence of the populace, although it was not always possible to know if these militias – sometimes public, sometimes private – worked for the government, for the cartels or on their own account. These notorious ‘paramilitaries’ in turn sowed terror in the city, before themselves becoming involved in drug-trafficking to finance their own activities. For his part, Pablo Escobar reinforced his own Departamento de Orden Ciudadano (DOC), his own paramilitary militia. In the end, the boundary between the drug traffickers, the guerrillas, the military and the paramilitaries became completely blurred, throwing Medellín and the whole of Colombia into a real civil war.

  We must assess López Trujillo’s career in this context. According to the journalists who have investigated the Archbishop of Medellín (in particular, Hernando Salazar Palacio in his book La Guerra secreta del cardenal López Trujillo, and Gustavo Salazar Pineda in El Confidente de la Mafia se Confesia) and the research carried out for me by Emmanuel Neisa in the country, the prelate was close to certain paramilitary groups linked to the drug traffickers. He is said to have been generously financed by these groups – perhaps directly by Pablo Escobar, who presented himself as a practising Catholic – and kept them regularly informed about leftist activities within the churches of Medellín. The lawyer Gustavo Salazar Pineda, in particular, states in his book that López Trujillo received suitcases of money from Pablo Escobar, but the archbishop denied ever meeting him. (We know from a detailed investigation by Jon Lee Anderson for the New Yorker that Pablo Escobar was in the habit of paying the priests who supported him, many leaving with suitcases full of money.)

  At that time the paramilitaries were persecuting progressive priests all the more fiercely since they believed, not without reason, that these priests close to liberation theology were allied to the three main Colo
mbian guerrilla groups (FARC, E.L.N. and M-19).

  ‘López Trujillo travelled with members of the paramilitary groups,’ I am also told by Alvaro Léon (who accompanied him on several of his trips as master of ceremonies). ‘He pointed out the priests who were carrying out social actions in the barrios and the poorer districts. The paramilitaries identified them and sometimes went back to murder them. Often they had to leave the region or the country.’ (This apparently unlikely story is in fact confirmed by the information and testimonies quoted by the journalists Hernando Salazar Palacio and Gustavo Salazar Pineda in their respective books.)

  One of the places where the corrupt López Trujillo was supposed to have denounced several left-wing priests is the parish known as Parroquia Santo Domingo Savio, in Santo Domingo, one of the most dangerous parts of Medellín. When I visited this church with Alvaro Léon and Emmanuel Neisa, we were given precise information about his abuses. Missionaries who worked with the poor there were murdered, and a priest of the same theological current, Carlos Caldéron, was himself persecuted by López Trujillo and then by the paramilitaries, before having to flee the country for Africa.

  ‘I took care of the trips of López Trujillo here in Santo Domingo,’ Alvaro Léon tells me on the steps of the church of the Parroquia Santo Domingo Savio. ‘He would usually arrive with an escort of three or four cars, with bodyguards and paramilitaries all over the place. His entourage was very impressive! Everyone was very well dressed. The church bells had to ring when he got out of his limousine, and of course he had to have a red carpet. People had to kiss his hand. He also had to have music, a choir, but we had to cut the children’s hair in advance so that it was perfect, and we couldn’t have any blacks. It was during these visits that the progressive priests were identified and denounced to the paramilitaries.’