In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  The Colombian cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, prefect of the Congregation of the Clergy, shared too many secrets with López Trujillo, and probably his morals as well, so to speak! He was one of those who constantly helped him, even when he was perfectly well informed of his moral debauchery. In the end, an Italian cardinal was equally crucial when it came to protecting López Trujillo in Rome: Sebastiano Baggio. This former national chaplain to the Italian scouts was a specialist in Latin America: he worked in nunciatures in El Salvador, Bolivia, Venezuela and Colombia. In 1964 he was appointed nuncio to Brazil, just after the coup d’état: he proved more than accommodating towards the army and the dictatorship (according to statements that I have collected in Brasilia, Rio and São Paulo; on the other hand, the Cardinal Archbishop of São Paulo, Odilo Scherer, whom I interviewed on this very subject, referred to him as a ‘great nuncio who has done a lot for Brazil’). On his return to Rome, the aesthete and art collector Sebastiano Baggio was created cardinal by Paul VI and promoted to the head of the Congregation of Bishops and of the pontifical commission for Latin America – posts renewed by John Paul II, who made him one of his emissaries for the American sub-continent. The historian David Yallop describes Baggio as a ‘reactionary’ of the ‘ultra-conservative right’: this man, close to Opus Dei, supervised CELAM from Rome, and was particularly influential in the controversial conference held in Puebla in 1979, which he accompanied Pope John Paul II in attending. Witnesses describe him, along with López Trujillo, raging against the left wing of the Church, and being ‘viscerally’ and ‘violently’ anti-communist. Appointed ‘camerlengo’ by John Paul II, Baggio would go on wielding an extraordinary amount of power in the Vatican and protecting his ‘great friend’ López Trujillo, in spite of the countless rumours concerning his double life. He himself was said to have been very ‘practising’. According to over ten statements collected in Brazil and Rome, Baggio was known for his special Latino friendships, and for being very hands-on with seminarians, who he liked to receive in his underpants or a jockstrap!

  ‘López Trujillo’s extravagances were much better known than is generally accepted. Everyone knew about them – so why’, Alvaro Léon wonders, ‘was he appointed a bishop? Why was he put at the head of CELAM? Why was he created cardinal? Why was he appointed president of the Pontifical Council for the Family?’

  A prelate in the Curia, who associated with López Trujillo, comments: ‘López Trujillo was a friend of John Paul II; he was protected by Cardinal Sodano and by the pope’s personal assistant, Stanisław Dziwisz. He was also very well regarded by Cardinal Ratzinger, who appointed him to the presidency of the Pontifical Council for the Family for a new mandate, after his election in 2005. And yet everyone knew that he was homosexual. He lived with us, here, on the fourth floor of the Palazzo di San Calisto, in a 900-square-metre apartment, and he had several cars! Ferraris! He led a highly unusual life.’ (López Trujillo’s splendid apartment is occupied today by the African cardinal Peter Turkson, who lives in pleasant company on the same floor as the apartments of Cardinals Poupard, Etchegaray and Stafford, whom I also visited.)

  Another Latin American specialist, the journalist José Manuel Vidal, who runs one of the main websites on Catholicism, in Spanish, recalls: ‘López Trujillo used to come here, to Spain, very often. He was a friend of the Cardinal of Madrid, Rouco Varela. He would also come with one of his lovers; I particularly remember a handsome Pole, then a handsome Filipino. He was seen here as the “pope of Latin America”, so they let him get on with it.’

  Finally, I have a frank exchange with Federico Lombardi, who was spokesman to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, about the Cardinal of Medellín. Caught off guard, his response was instantaneous, almost a reflex: he raised his hands to the sky in a sign of consternation and terror.

  But they were supping with the devil. When López Trujillo died unexpectedly in April 2008, of the consequences of a ‘pulmonary infection’ (according to the official communiqué), the Vatican doubled its praise of him. Pope Benedict XVI, still seconded by Cardinal Sodano, celebrated a papal mass in honour of the memory of this caricature of a cardinal.

  On his death, however, rumours began to circulate. The first was that he had died of the effects of AIDS; the second that he was buried in Rome because he couldn’t be buried in his homeland.

  ‘When López Trujillo died, the decision was made to bury him here in Rome because he couldn’t be buried in Colombia,’ Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri tells me. ‘He couldn’t go back to his country, even in death!’

  The reason? According to the statements I have collected in Medellín, there was a price on his head because of his proximity to the paramilitaries. That was why it was not until 2017, or almost ten years after his death, that Pope Francis ordered the repatriation of the body to Colombia. Did the holy father prefer, as suggested to me by a priest involved in this sudden repatriation, that if a scandal emerged about the cardinal’s double life, the remains of López Trujillo should not be located in Rome? At any rate, I was able to see his tomb in a chapel in the west wing of the transept of the huge cathedral in Medellín. The cardinal lies in this crypt, beneath immaculately white stone, surrounded by permanently flickering candles. Behind the cross: the devil.

  ‘As a general rule, the funeral chapel is closed by a grille. The archbishop is too afraid of vandalism. He is afraid that the tomb might be vandalized by the family of one of the victims of López Trujillo or by a prostitute with an axe to grind,’ Alvaro Léon tells me.

  And yet, strange as it may seem, in this very cathedral, situated mysteriously in the heart of the gay area of Medellín, I see several men, young and not so young, cruising one another. They stand there quite openly, among the parishioners, clutching their Bibles among tourists who have come to see the cathedral. I see them moving slowly on their quest, between the pews of the church, or sitting against the east wall of the cathedral – it’s as if the gay street passed literally through the huge church. And when I walk by them with Alvaro Léon and Emmanuel Neisa, they give us sympathetic little winks – as if in final tribute to this great transvestite in the old style, this great queen of the sacristy, this diva of late Catholicism, this satanic doctor and antichrist: his Eminence Alfonso López Trujillo.

  To conclude, there is one last question that I’m not in a position to answer, and which seems to trouble a lot of people. Did López Trujillo, who thought that everything could be bought, even acts of violence, even sadomasochistic acts, buy penetration without condoms?

  ‘Officially, the death of López Trujillo was connected with diabetes, but powerful and recurring rumours exist suggesting that he died of AIDS,’ I am told by one of the best specialists in the Catholic Church in Latin America.

  The former seminarians Alvaro Léon and Morgain had also heard the rumour, and consider it likely. Did the anti-condom cardinal die of complications related to AIDS, for which he had been treated for several years? I have often heard that rumour, but I can neither confirm nor deny it. What is certain is that his death in 2008 took place at a moment when the illness was properly treated in Rome at the Gemelli Polyclinic, the unofficial hospital of the Vatican – such treatment would surely have been made available to a cardinal who had considerable financial means, as he had. The date of his death contrasts with the state of the AIDS epidemic. Might the cardinal, perhaps, have denied his illness and refused to be treated, or, at least, only have accepted treatment when it was too late? It’s possible, but unlikely. At this stage I incline towards the idea that it was a false rumour that emerged owing to the genuinely irregular life of the cardinal. Nothing I have learned allows me to say definitively that López Trujillo died of the effects of AIDS.

  If he had died of that illness, however there would have been nothing exceptional about the death of Cardinal López Trujillo within Roman Catholicism. According to about ten testimonies that I collected in the Vatican and within the Italian Episcopal Conference, AIDS ravaged the holy see and the Italian
episcopate during the 1980s and 1990s. A secret that was kept quiet for a long time.

  A number of priests, monsignori and cardinals died of the effects of AIDS. Some patients ‘admitted’ their infection in confession (as one of the confessors of St Peter’s confirmed to me without mentioning names). Other priests were diagnosed through their annual blood test, compulsory for Vatican staff (but this obligation does not apply to monsignori, nuncios, bishops or cardinals): this includes an AIDS test; according to my information, some priests were removed after being diagnosed positive.

  The significant proportion of people with AIDS within the Catholic hierarchy is corroborated by a statistical study carried out in the United States, based on the death certificates of Catholic priests, which concluded that they had a mortality rate connected to the AIDS virus four times higher than that of the general population. Another study, based on the anonymized examination of 65 Roman seminarians in the early 1990s, showed that 38 per cent of them were seropositive. Blood transfusions, drug addiction or heterosexual relations could theoretically explain the high number of cases in these two studies – but in reality no one is falling for that.

  At the Vatican, silence and denial prevail. Francesco Lepore, the former Curia priest, tells me of the death from the consequences of AIDS of a member of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. This man, close to the Italian cardinal Giuseppe Siri, was said to have died of AIDS ‘to the indifference of his superiors’, and was ‘buried with great discretion at dawn to avoid a scandal’. A Dutch-speaking cardinal, close to John Paul II, also died of the same virus. But, of course, never has the cause of death of a cardinal or bishop officially been given as AIDS.

  ‘According to my internal discussions, many people in the Vatican are HIV positive or suffering from AIDS,’ another monsignore confirms to me. ‘At the same time, HIV-positive priests are not stupid: they don’t seek treatment at the Vatican pharmacy! They go to hospitals in Rome.’

  I have visited the Farmacia Vaticana several times – that unlikely institution in the east wing of the Vatican: a Dante-esque enterprise with ten tills – and, among the feeding bottles, dummies and luxury perfumes, it’s hard to imagine a priest going there in search of his Truvada.

  So, along with Daniele, my Roman researcher, several social workers, and members of Italian AIDS-prevention associations (particularly Progetto COROH and the old programme ‘Io faccio activo’), I carried out a study in the Italian capital. We went several times to the San Gallicano Dermatological Institute (ISG), the Gemelli Polyclinic, which is connected to the Vatican, as well as the free and anonymous AIDS screening centre ASL Roma, which is on Via Catone, near St Peter’s.

  Professor Massimo Giuliani is one of the specialists in sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS at the San Gallicano Dermatological Institute. Daniele and I meet him for two interviews.

  ‘Because we had been studying sexually transmitted diseases at San Gallicano for a long time, and particularly syphilis, we were immediately mobilized when the first cases of AIDS appeared in the 1980s. Here in Rome we became one of the first hospitals to treat patients of this kind. At the time, and until 1997, the Institute was in Trastevere, an area of Rome not very far from the Vatican. Now we’re here, in this complex to the south of Rome.’

  According to several sources, the San Gallicano Dermatological Institute was favoured in the 1970s by priests when they had contracted sexually transmitted diseases. For reasons of anonymity it was preferred to the Gemelli Polyclinic, which was linked to the Vatican.

  When AIDS appeared, San Gallicano quite naturally became the hospital for priests, monsignori and bishops infected with the AIDS virus.

  ‘We saw a lot of HIV-positive priests and seminarians coming here,’ Professor Massimo Giuliani tells me. ‘We think there is a very large AIDS problem in the Church. Here, we don’t judge. The only important thing is that they come to a hospital for examination and have themselves treated. But we fear that the situation in the Church is more serious than we have seen already, because of denial.’

  The question of denial among priests is well documented: more often than the average, they refuse to be screened because they don’t feel concerned; and even when they have unprotected sexual relations with men, they refuse to have themselves tested for fear of a lack of confidentiality.

  ‘We think,’ Professor Massimo Giuliani tells me, ‘that the risk of being infected with AIDS when one belongs to the male Catholic community is high at present, because of denial and because of the low rate of condom use. In our terminology, priests are one of the social categories at highest risk and the most difficult to reach in terms of AIDS prevention. We have made attempts at dialogue and education, particularly in the seminaries, on the transmission and treatment of STDs and AIDS. But it’s still very difficult. To talk about the risk of AIDS would mean acknowledging that priests have homosexual practices. And obviously the Church refuses to engage in that debate.’

  My conversations with the male prostitutes of Roma Termini (and with the high-class escort Francesco Mangiacapra in Naples) confirm the fact that priests are among the least prudent clients where their sexual acts are concerned.

  ‘As a rule, priests are not afraid of STDs. They feel untouchable. They are so sure of their position, of their power, that they don’t take these risks into account, unlike other clients. They have no sense of reality. They live in a world without AIDS,’ Francesco Mangiacapra explains.

  Alberto Borghetti is a medic in the infectious diseases department of the Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome. This junior doctor and researcher receives me and Daniele at the request of the head of the service, the epidemiologist Simona Di Giambenedetto, who wanted to help us in our inquiry.

  The Gemelli Polyclinic is the most Catholic of the Catholic hospitals in the world. In medical terms, it is the holy of holies! Cardinals, bishops, Vatican staff and many Roman priests go there for treatment, and they also have a priority route of access. And, of course, it is the hospital of popes. John Paul II was the most famous patient at the Gemelli, and television cameras cynically scrutinized the developments of his illness with a sepulchral buzz. Light-heartedly, the pope is said to have given a name to the Gemelli Clinic, where he was hospitalized so often: ‘Vatican III’.

  Visiting the hospital and its various departments, meeting various other doctors and medics, I discover a modern establishment a long way away from the image reported by gossip in Rome. Since it is a hospital attached to the Vatican, a dim view is taken of people with STDS or AIDS, I have been told.

  With his professionalism and detailed knowledge of the AIDS epidemic, the junior doctor Alberto Borghetti rebuts these suspicions.

  ‘We are one of the five most state-of-the-art Roman hospitals where AIDS is concerned. We treat all patients, and here in the scientific wing attached to the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, is one of the main Italian centres of research into the illness. The undesirable and collateral effects of different anti-retroviral therapies are studied here; we carry out research into medical interactions and the effects of vaccinations on the HIV-positive population.’

  In the infectious illnesses department that I visit, I can tell from posters and panels that patients with STDs are treated here. Borghetti confirms as much: ‘We treat all STDs here, whether they are due to bacteria, like gonococci, syphilis and chlamydia, or viruses like herpes, the papilloma virus and of course hepatitis.’

  According to another professor of medicine specializing in the treatment of AIDS whom I spoke to in Rome, the Gemelli Polyclinic has experienced tensions surrounding STDs and patient anonymity.

  Alberto Borghetti disputes this information. ‘Generally speaking, the results of examinations relating to the AIDS virus are only known to the doctor responsible for the treatment, and cannot be accessed by other health professionals at the polyclinic. At Gemelli, patients can also request anonymization of their files, which further reinforces the anonymity of HIV-positive individuals.’r />
  According to a priest who knows the Gemelli well, this anonymization is not enough to win the trust of infected ecclesiastical patients. ‘They do everything they can to guarantee anonymity, but given the bishops and priests who are treated there, it’s easy to bump into people you know. The “infectious diseases department” is a clear enough title!’

  A dermatologist I speak to in Rome tells me: ‘Some priests tell us that they were infected by coming into contact with a syringe or an old blood transfusion: we pretend to believe them.’

  Alberto Borghetti confirms that fears and denial can exist, particularly for priests: ‘It’s true that we sometimes receive seminarians or priests here who arrive at a very advanced stage of AIDS. Along with immigrants and homosexuals, they are probably among those who don’t want to take a screening test: they are afraid, or else they are in denial. That’s really a shame, because if they come into the treatment system with a late diagnosis, sometimes with aggressive illnesses, and are treated belatedly, they risk not recovering an efficient immune system.’

  John Paul II was pope from 1978 until 2005. AIDS, which appeared in 1981, at the start of his pontificate, was responsible during the years that followed for over 35 million deaths. Around the world, 37 million people are still living, even today, with HIV.

  The condom, which John Paul II’s Vatican energetically rejected, using all his resources and the power of his diplomatic network to oppose it, remains the most efficient way of combatting the epidemic, even within an asymptomatic married couple. Every year, thanks to condoms and anti-retroviral treatments, tens of millions of lives are saved.

  Since the publication of the encyclical Humanae vitae, the Church has condemned all prophylactic or chemical means, such as the pill or condom, that prevent the transmission of life. But, as the French Vaticanologist Henri Tincq stresses, ‘must the means of preventing the transmission of death be confused with the one that prevents the transmission of life?’