In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Accusations brushed away with the back of the hand by Mgr Angelo Acerbi, who was nuncio in Bogotá between 1979 and 1990, when I interview him in Santa Marta, inside the Vatican, where he has retired.

  ‘López Trujillo was a great cardinal. I can assure you that in Medellín he never had the slightest collusion either with the paramilitaries or with the guerrillas. You know, he was very threatened by the guerrillas. He was even arrested and imprisoned. He was very brave.’

  Today, López Trujillo is held to be directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of dozens of priests and bishops who were eliminated for their progressive convictions.

  ‘It’s important to tell the story of these victims, because the legitimacy of the peace process has to pass through that acknowledgement,’ I am told during several conversations in Bogotá by José Antequera, the spokesman of the victims’ association ‘Hijos e Hijas’, whose father was assassinated.

  Neither must we forget the incredible wealth accumulated by the archbishop during that period. According to several witness statements, he abused his position so as to requisition all valuable objects held by the churches he visited – the jewels, the silver cups, the paintings – which he recovered for his own advantage.

  ‘He confiscated all the valuable objects from the parishes and sold them or gave them to the cardinals or bishops of the Roman Curia, to win their favour. A minutely detailed inventory of all these thefts has since been drawn up by a priest,’ Alvaro Léon tells me.

  Over the last few years, testimonies have been published in Colombia by penitent mafia members or their lawyers, confirming the connections that existed between the cardinal and the drug cartels connected to the paramilitaries. These rumours were old, but according to the inquiries of several major Colombian reporters, the cardinal was financed by certain drug traffickers, which helped – along with his personal family fortune – to explain his way of life and his collection of luxury cars.

  ‘And then one fine day, López Trujillo disappeared,’ Morgain tells me. ‘He evaporated. He left and never set foot in Colombia again.’

  A new life began in Rome for the Archbishop of Medellín. After efficiently supporting the Colombian far right, he now set about embodying John Paul II’s conservative hard line on the question of morals and the family.

  Having been a cardinal since 1983, he exiled himself definitively to the Vatican on the occasion of his appointment as president of the Pontifical Council for the Family in 1990. This new ‘ministry’, set up by the pope shortly after his election, was one of the priorities of the pontificate.

  Beginning with this period, and with the ever greater trust placed in him by Pope John Paul II – as well as his close friends Angelo Sodano, Stanisław Dziwisz and Joseph Ratzinger – the vanity of López Trujillo, already spectacular, became uncontrollable. Now he was starting to look like a figure from the Old Testament, with his rages, his excommunications and his ravings. Continuing to enjoy a way of life unimaginable for a priest, he was now a cardinal. Rumours circulated and priests sometimes told curious histories about him.

  At the head of his ‘ministry’ of the family, which became a ‘war room’, López Trujillo deployed unparalleled energy to condemn abortion, defend marriage and denounce homosexuality. This man – who was frighteningly misogynistic, according to all witnesses – also devised a war against gender theory. A ‘workaholic’ according to several observers, he intervened on various platforms around the world to denounce sex before marriage and gay rights. In these forums he made a name for himself with one-upmanship and verbal excesses against scientific ‘interruptors of pregnancy’, whom he accused of committing crimes with their test tubes or of being odious doctors who advocated the use of condoms rather than abstinence before marriage.

  AIDS, now a global scourge, became López Trujillo’s new obsession, and he deployed his prejudices with impunity. ‘The condom is not a solution,’ he repeated in Africa, exercising his authority as cardinal: it would only encourage ‘sexual promiscuity’, while chastity and marriage were the only proper responses to the pandemic.

  Everywhere he went – in Africa, Asia and of course in Latin America – he begged governments and UN agencies not to yield to ‘lies’, and he urged their people to abstain from the use of condoms. In the early 2000s, in an interview with the BBC, he even declared that condoms were full of ‘microscopic holes’ that let through the AIDS virus, which, he claimed, were ‘450 times smaller than a spermatozoon’!

  In 1995, López Trujillo wrote a Dictionary of Ambiguous Terms about the Family, in which he sought to ban the expressions ‘safe sex’, ‘gender theory’ and ‘family planning’. He also invented several phrases of his own, such as ‘contraceptive colonialism’ and the remarkable ‘pan-sexualism’.

  His anti-gay obsession, because it went beyond the average and the norm (which were already outrageous in the Vatican), quickly aroused suspicion. From inside, his crusade was astonishing: what was the cardinal trying to hide behind such a belligerent stance, so outrageous and so personal? Why was he so keen on provocation, on being in the spotlight? Why was he so ‘manichean’?

  Inside the Vatican some people began to mock his excesses, giving this carping cardinal the nickname ‘coitus interruptus’. Outside, the Act Up association made him one of its bêtes noires: as soon as he was due to speak somewhere, militants disguised as giant condoms, or wearing explicit tee-shirts, a pink triangle on a black background, had fun at his expense. He condemned these blaspheming sodomites who kept him from speaking; and they in turn condemned this Old Testament prophet who wanted to crucify gays.

  History will judge Alfonso López Trujillo harshly But in Rome, this heroic fighter served as an example to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and he was hailed to the point of caricature by secretaries of state Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone.

  He was said to be ‘papabile’ – in the running for the papacy – when Pope John Paul II died. And the same pope was even said to have put him on the list of potential successors just before his death in 2005 – although this has not been proven. This tacky apostle cursed and raged against many left-wing Catholics, and even more against divorced couples, unnatural sexual practices and Evil. But suddenly, between the outgoing pontificate of John Paul II and the incoming pontificate of Benedict XIV, he found a platform, an echo and perhaps enthusiasts (based on a gigantic misunderstanding), and that is the poisoned gift of circumstance.

  In Rome, López Trujillo remains a complex and, for many, an enigmatic figure.

  ‘López Trujillo was opposed to Marxism and liberation theology; that was what inspired him,’ Giovanni Battista Re, John Paul II’s former ‘minister’ of the interior, tells me in the course of our interviews in his Vatican apartment.

  Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who succeeded him as president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, is more reserved. The cardinal’s rigid line on the family was no longer in vogue under Francis’s pontificate, Paglia tells me, choosing his words carefully, when we speak at the Vatican. ‘The dialectic between progressivism and conservatism on social questions is no longer the subject today. We must be missionaries in a radical way. I think we have to stop being self-referential. Talking about the family doesn’t mean fixing rules; on the contrary, it means helping families.’ (During this interview, Paglia, whose artistic leanings have often been mocked, shows me his installation representing a pop-art version of Mother Teresa: the saint of Calcutta is in striped blue plastic, perhaps latex, and Paglia switches her on. Mother Teresa lights up all of a sudden, and, in lapis-lazuli blue, starts flashing …)

  According to several sources, the influence of López Trujillo in Rome also came from his fortune. He was said to have ‘rewarded’ several cardinals and prelates, on the model of the Mexican Marcial Maciel.

  ‘López Trujillo was a man of networks and money. He was violent, choleric, hard. He was one of the people who “made” Benedict XVI, on whose election he spent abundantly, with a campaign that
was very well organized and financed,’ the Vaticanologist Robert Carl Mickens confirms.

  This story would not be complete without its ‘happy ending’. To reveal that apotheosis now, I return to Medellín: to the very district of the archbishopric where Alvaro Léon, López Trujillo’s former master of ceremonies, guides me and Emmanuel Neisa around the alleyways surrounding the cathedral. This central district of Medellín is called Villa Nueva.

  It’s a strange area, where, between the Parque Bolivar and Carrera 50, around the streets called Calle 55, 56 and 57, dozens of religious shops are lined up selling Catholic articles and priestly habits, and the gay bars are decorated with pictures of gaudy transsexuals on high heels. The two worlds, sacred and profane, the plastic crucifixes and the cheap saunas, priests and prostitutes, mingle in that incredible festive spirit that is so typical of Colombia. A transsexual who looks like a sculpture by Fernando Botero accosts me enterprisingly. Around her are male prostitutes and transvestites who are clearly more fragile, more frail, far from the arty images familiar from folklore and Fellini; they are symbols of poverty and exploitation.

  A little further on we visit Medellín Diversa como Vos, an LGBT centre founded by priests and seminarians. Gloria Londoño, one of the directors, welcomes us. ‘We are in a strategic place, because the whole of Medellín’s gay life is organized here, around the cathedral. The prostitutes, the transsexuals and transvestites are very vulnerable populations, and they are helped here by being informed of their rights. Condoms are also distributed here,’ Londoño explains.

  Leaving the centre, on Calle 57 we bump into a priest accompanied by his boyfriend, and Alvaro Léon, who has recognized them, points them out discreetly. We are continuing with our visit to the gay-Catholic quarter when, all of a sudden, we stop in front of a handsome building on Rue Bolivia, also known as Calle 55. Alvaro Léon points up at an apartment: ‘That’s where it all happened. López Trujillo had a secret apartment there, where he took seminarians, young men and prostitutes.’

  The homosexuality of Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo is an open secret that dozens of witnesses have talked to me about, and that has even been confirmed by several cardinals. His ‘pan-sexualism’, to quote one of the entries in his dictionary, was well known in Medellín, Bogotá, Madrid and Rome.

  The man was an expert on the great gap between theory and practice, between mind and body, an absolute master of hypocrisy – which is notorious in Colombia. A man close to the cardinal, Gustavo Álvarez Gardeazábal, even went so far as to write a roman-à-clef, La Misa ha terminado, in which he denounced the double life of López Trujillo, who was, under a pseudonym, its main character. As for the many gay militants who I questioned in Bogotá during my four trips to Colombia – particularly those of the association Colombia Diversa, which includes several lawyers – they have collected a large number of witness statements, which they shared with me.

  The Venezuelan academic Rafael Luciani tells me that Alfonso López Trujillo’s obsessive homosexuality is now ‘well known to the Latin American ecclesiastical authorities and some of the senior representatives of CELAM’. Furthermore, a book is reportedly in preparation concerning the double life and sexual violence of Cardinal López Trujillo, co-signed by several priests. As for the seminarian Morgain, one of López Trujillo’s assistants, he tells me the names of several of his touts and lovers, many of whom were obliged to satisfy the archbishop’s desires so as not to sabotage their careers.

  ‘At first I didn’t understand what he wanted,’ Morgain tells me when we have dinner in Bogotá. ‘I was innocent, and his technique of making passes escaped me completely. And then gradually I came to understand his system. He went out into the parishes, into the seminaries, the religious communities, to spot boys, whom he would then very violently waylay. He thought he was desirable. He forced the seminarians to yield to his advances. His speciality was novices. The most fragile, the youngest, the most vulnerable. But in fact he slept with anybody. He also had lots of prostitutes.’

  Morgain gives me to understand that his ordination by López Trujillo was blocked because he refused to sleep with him.

  López Trujillo was one of those men who seek power in order to have sex and sex in order to have power. Alvaro Léon, his former master of ceremonies, himself took a while to understand what was happening.

  ‘Priests said to me, knowingly: “You’re the kind of boy that the archbishop likes”, but I didn’t understand what they were insinuating. López Trujillo explained to the young seminarians that they had to be totally subject to them, and to the priests, that they had to be subject to the bishops. They had to be close-shaven, we had to dress perfectly to “please him”. There were plenty of innuendos that I didn’t understand at first. I was in charge of his travels and he often asked me to go with him on his outings; he used me in some way, to make contact with other seminarians. His targets were young men, white with blue eyes, particularly blonds; not the overly indigenous “Latinos”, Mexican types, for example – and certainly not blacks! He hated blacks.’

  The López Trujillo system was well established. Alvaro Léon goes on: ‘Most of the time, the archbishop had “touts”, ‘M.’, ‘R.’, ‘L.’ and even a bishop nicknamed “la gallina”; priests who found boys for him, cruised for them in the street and brought them back to his secret apartment. It wasn’t ad hoc, it was properly organized.’ (I am concealing the identity and duties of these ‘tout’ priests, which were confirmed to me by at least one other source. My Colombian researcher, Emmanuel Neisa, investigated each of them.)

  As well as testifying to this unbridled life, these witnesses also speak of the violence of López Trujillo, who abused seminarians verbally and physically. ‘He insulted them, humiliated them,’ says Alvaro Léon.

  All the evidence indicates that the cardinal did not live out his homosexuality quietly, like most of his colleagues in Rome. For him it was a perversion rooted in sin, which he exorcized through physical violence. Was it his vicious way of freeing himself from his ‘nexuses of hysteria’? The archbishop had an assembly line of prostitutes: his propensity for buying bodies was notorious in Medellín.

  ‘López Trujillo beat prostitutes; that was his relationship with sexuality. He paid them, but they had to accept his blows in return. It always happened at the end, not during the physical act. He finished his sexual relations by beating them, out of pure sadism,’ Alvaro Léon goes on.

  At this level of perversion, there is something strange about the violence of desire. These sexual excesses, this sadism towards prostitutes, are far from ordinary. López Trujillo had no concern for the bodies he rented out. He even had a reputation for paying his gigolos badly, negotiating hard, his eyes blank, to get the lowest price. If there is one pathetic character in this book, it’s López Trujillo.

  The deviations of this ‘louche soul’ did not stop, of course, at the borders of Colombia. The system was perpetuated in Rome, where he went cruising at Roma Termini, (according to a witness), and soon everywhere in the world, where he had a brilliant career as an anti-gay orator.

  Travelling ceaselessly on behalf of the Curia, wearing his hat as anti-condom propagandist-in-chief, López Trujillo took advantage of these trips to find boys (according to the statements of at least two nuncios). The cardinal is said to have visited over a hundred countries, several favourites of his being in Asia, a continent that he visited frequently after discovering the sexual charms of Bangkok and Manila in particular. During those countless journeys to the other side of the world, where he was less well known than in Colombia or Italy, the peripatetic cardinal regularly disappeared from seminaries and masses to devote himself to his trade: his ‘taxi boys’ and ‘money boys’.

  Rome, Open City. Why did you say nothing? Is it not revealing that, once again, this cosmetic life of a perverted narcissist passed itself off as holy? Like the monster Marcial Maciel, López Trujillo is said to have faked his life to an incredible degree – as everyone, or nearly everyone, in
the Vatican knew.

  Talking to lots of cardinals about the López Trujillo case, I never heard one of them give me an ideal portrait of him. No one said, startled by my information: ‘I would have given him a clean slate in confession!’ All those I met preferred instead to be silent, to frown, pull faces, raise their arms into the air or reply in coded words.

  Today, tongues are looser, but the ‘cover-up’ in this case has worked well. Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, for a long time a nuncio in Latin America before becoming one of Pope Francis’s most trusted men, shared his information with me during two interviews in Rome: ‘I knew López Trujillo when he was vicar general in Colombia. He was a very controversial figure. He had a split personality.’

  Equally prudent, the theologian Juan Carlos Scannone, one of the men closest to Pope Francis, whom I interviewed in Argentina, wasn’t surprised when I mentioned López Trujillo’s double life. ‘He was a plotter. Cardinal Bergoglio never liked him much. I don’t even think he was ever in touch with him.’ (According to my information, the future Pope Francis met López Trujillo at CELAM.)

  Claudio Maria Celli, an archbishop who was one of Pope Francis’s envoys to Latin America, after being one of Benedict XVI’s directors of communication, knew López Trujillo well. In a carefully weighed phrase, he gives me his judgement of the man, during a discussion in Rome: ‘López Trujillo was not a saint by any means.’

  The nuncios knew too. Does their job not consist in making sure that a gay priest doesn’t end up as a bishop, or that a bishop who likes rent boys isn’t created a cardinal? And yet is it possible that those who have succeeded to the position of bishop in Bogotá since 1975 – notably Eduardo Martínez Somalo, Angelo Acerbi, Paolo Romeo, Beniamino Stella, Aldo Cavalli and Ettore Balestrero – each of them close to Angelo Sodano – could all have been unaware of this double life?