In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Apart from John Paul II, who are the main people who defined and executed this global policy of the absolute rejection of condoms during the global pandemic of AIDS? They are a group of 12 loyal, devoted, orthodox men whose vow of chastity forbids them to have sexual relations. According to the results of my investigation, and on the basis of the hundreds of interviews conducted for this book, I can state that the great majority of these prelates are homophiles or practising homosexuals. (I have met eight out of the twelve.) What do all these men know about condoms and heterosexuality, to have been appointed judge and jury?

  These 12 men, all created cardinals, were the private secretary Stanisław Dziwisz; the secretaries of state Agostino Casaroli and Angelo Sodano; the future pope Joseph Ratzinger; the directors of the Secretariat of State: Giovanni Battista Re, Achille Silvestrini, Leonardo Sandri, Jean-Louis Tauran, Dominique Mamberti and the nuncios Renato Raffaele Martino and Roger Etchegaray. Not forgetting the last cardinal who was very influential at the time: His Eminence Alfonso López Trujillo.

  14

  The pope’s diplomacy

  ‘Ah, you’re a journalist?’ Mgr Battista Ricca looks at me with unease and a hint of envy. ‘I have problems with journalists,’ he adds, staring me in the eye.

  ‘He’s a French journalist,’ insists Archbishop François Bacqué, who has just introduced us.

  ‘Ah,’ Ricca sighs, with obvious relief. ‘My problem,’ he continues, ‘is with Italian journalists. They have nothing in their heads. Nothing! They have zero intelligence. But if you’re French, there might be a chance that you’re different! It bodes well!’

  It was only in the middle of my investigation, when I had already started writing this book, that I was invited to stay at the Domus Internationalis Paulus VI. Prior to that, I had been living in Rome in apartments rented on Airbnb, most of them around Roma Termini.

  Archbishop François Bacqué, a retired French apostolic nuncio, suggested one day that he should book me a room at the Domus Internationalis Paulus VI, and that was how things started. His recommendation was enough for me to end up living in the holy of holies of Vatican diplomacy.

  The Domus is at 70 Via della Scrofa in Rome. This official residence of the holy see is an ‘extraterritorial’ place, outside of Italy: the police are not permitted to enter it, and if a theft, a rape or some other crime is committed there, it is the tiny Vatican police force, and the highly incompetent legal system of the holy see, that would be in charge.

  Also known as Casa del Clero (house of the clergy), the diplomatic residence is ideally located between the Piazza Navona and the Pantheon: one of the most beautiful places in Rome; a pagan temple, if not a secular one; an extraordinary symbol of ‘civil’ religion dedicated to all faiths and all the gods, and one that was reimagined by the LGBT emperor Hadrian, before being made the object of aggressive ‘cultural appropriation’ by Italian Catholicism.

  Domus Internationalis Paulus VI is a place of great importance in the holy see: to stay at the heart of the Vatican machinery was therefore a great opportunity for me. Here I’m treated as a friend, no longer as someone from outside. First of all, it’s a hotel for Vatican diplomats – the famous apostolic nuncios – when they stay in Rome. Sometimes foreign cardinals and bishops reside there too, rather than at Santa Marta. Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio stayed there when he passed through Rome: the pictures showing him in his white cassock, paying his own hotel bills, while travelling around the world.

  Apart from cardinals and passing diplomats, the Casa del Clero is a permanent dwelling for several retired nuncios, unemployed bishops, or monsignori holding prestigious positions in the holy see. Many of them are on full board or half board. Over breakfast in the drawing rooms on the first floor or lunches taken communally in the huge restaurant, not to mention exchanges by coffee machines and long evenings in front of the television, I will get to know these nuncios, these apostolic diplomats, these assistants of the Secretariat of State or this secretary of the Congregation of Bishops. The waiters in the Casa del Clero – one of whom is a playboy worthy of a cover of The Advocate – have to stand their ground: the meaningful looks of nuncios and monsignori in the prime of life would be enough to make anyone panic!

  The bedrooms in the Casa del Claro are on the spartan side: a weary lightbulb casts a harsh light on a single bed, generally flanked by a crucifix. The narrow beds of the priests, which I have seen so often in the Vatican apartments, display their conservatism by virtue of their size. In the drawer of the ancient and rickety bedside table lies a Bible (which I immediately replace with A Season in Hell). In the bathroom, a neon light dating back to the days of Pius XI gives off, roughly, the light of a microwave oven. The soap is lent by the gram (and you have to give it back). Who said that Catholicism had a horror of life?

  During one of my stays there, my neighbour on the fourth floor was luckier. It’s an advantage to live at the Casa all year round. By dint of bumping into this eminent assistant of the Secretariat of State, one day, when he was in his boxer shorts (preparing to go to a Cher concert?), I had the chance to peer into his large corner apartment. Imagine my surprise at seeing a fabulous bright-red double bed that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Fellini film. A place for a secret rendezvous? Not far from there was another famous bedroom, room 424, which was once that of Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII.

  Breakfast is meagre too. I go along to please the priests who invite me so insistently. Everything is hostile: the bread that is crucified, not toasted; the plain yoghurts bought by the dozen; the very un-Italian filter coffee on refill; the un-Catholic cornflakes. The only exception are the kiwi fruits, available in a large quantity every morning: but why kiwis? And do you peel them like a peach or cut them in two like an avocado? The question is the cause of much debate at the Casa, François Bacqué tells me. I eat four of them. Breakfasts at the Casa del Clero are like breakfasts in a retirement home where the residents are politely told to hurry up and die to make room for slightly less senile prelates – and there is no shortage in the enormous hospice that is the Vatican.

  In the reading rooms of the Domus Internationalis Paulus VI, on the first floor, I made the acquaintance of Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya, an eminent Congolese cardinal from Kinshasa, a member of Francis’s council of cardinals, who tells me that he likes coming to the Casa del Clero ‘because one has greater freedom’ than in the Vatican, before meeting with the pope.

  The director of the Casa and all the Vatican residences, Mgr Battista Ricca, also lives there: his hermetic and, it seems to me, immense apartment on the left-hand side of the mezzanine is number 100. Ricca regularly lunches at the ‘Casa’, humbly, with two of his close friends at a table slightly away from the rest, a kind of family. And at one of our meetings, one evening, in the drawing rooms on the first floor, in front of the television, I will give Ricca the famous ‘white book’, for which he thanks me from the bottom of his heart.

  Here you also bump into Fabián Pedacchio, private secretary to Pope Francis, who has lived in the Domus for a long time, and who is said to keep a room where he is able to work calmly with the Brazilian bishop Ilson de Jesus Montanari, secretary to the Congregation for Bishops, or with Mgr Fabio Fabene, one of the architects of the synod. Mgr Mauro Sobrino, prelate of his holiness, also lives there, and we have swapped a number of secrets. A mysterious couple of boys, dinkies and bio-queens, who listen to Born this Way by Lady Gaga on a loop, live here too, and I have had some lovely night-time conversations with them. A Basque priest also enjoys some delightful associations within this ‘magic circle’, to use his phrase.

  Archbishop François Bacqué has lived here as well, since completing his diplomatic career: this fallen aristocrat is still waiting to be created cardinal. He is supposed to have asked Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, another Frenchman, likewise hailing from Bordeaux and very much a man of the people: ‘How come you’re a cardinal when you aren’t an aristocrat? And why am I not, when I am from the nobilit
y?’ (This was reported to me by an assistant of Tauran’s.)

  Some specimens of this kind can be found in groups at the Casa del Clero, a place where ambitious young men have high hopes, and where retired clerics who have fallen from grace nurse their bruised egos. With these last offshoots of declining Catholicism, the ‘Casa’ mysteriously brings together this rising spiritual aristocracy with the same aristocracy in decline.

  Three chapels, on the second and third floors of the Casa del Clero, mean that one can attend mass at a time of one’s choice; sometimes, holy offices have been celebrated by gay groups (as I am told by a priest, in a written statement). A laundry service in the room means that the nuncios don’t have to do their own washing. Everything is cheap, but paid for in cash. When I come to pay my bill, the Domus Internationalis Paulus VI card machine is ‘unusually’ out of order. And exactly the same thing will happen during each of my stays; in the end a resident will point out to me that this machine ‘is out of order all the time and has been for years’ (and the same unfortunate technical malfunction would occur several times while I was staying at the Domus Romana Sacerdotalis) – perhaps a way of ensuring a circulation of cash?

  At the Casa del Clero people tend not to stay up late, since they get up early – but there are exceptions. On the day when I tried to sleep in, I understood from the agitation and impatience of the cleaning women that I was close to committing a sin. Furthermore, the doors of the Casa del Clero are closed at midnight, and all the night-owl nuncios and other jet-lagged diplomats meet up to chat in the reading room until the small hours. It’s the paradoxical advantage of old-fashioned curfews.

  I’m fascinated by the double coach gate. There’s something evocative of Gide about it; that author wrote in If It Die that this kind of door, the sign of an elevated social status, was a necessity for any good middle-class family. In former times, such a portal allowed you to bring a coach and horses to a door at ground level, and therefore to ‘keep an equipage’. And today, at the Casa del Clero, what an equipage that would be!

  At no. 19 Via di Sant’Agostino, the coach gate to the back of Domus Internationalis Paulus VI is a discreet and anonymous side door. Tan-coloured, it consists of two panels, but no steps and no threshold. In the middle: a wicket, a little panel cut from the larger panel to allow pedestrians to enter discreetly at night. The pavement is lowered, and the frame is carved from white ashlar. On the coach gate: visible nails and a plain iron handle, worn down now by so many daily entrances and so many nocturnal visitors. Oh ancient portal, such tales you could tell!

  I have spent a lot of time studying this double door, spotting comings and goings, taking photographs of the beautiful porch. The door has depth. There is a kind of voyeurism in looking at closed doors, genuine urban portals, and that attraction probably explains why the art of photographing doors has become a very popular phenomenon on Instagram, where such portraits can be found under the hashtag #doortraits.

  After a corridor, a grille, then an internal courtyard – another vanishing line. Via an internal staircase, which I have often taken, one reaches lift C, and from there the bedrooms of the residence, without having to pass by the concierge’s lodge or reception. And if one has good keys, one can go in and out via the grille and then the coach gate, thus escaping the midnight curfew. What a blessing! It’s enough to make one yearn for the days of the coach and four!

  I suspect the double door of keeping a number of Vatican secrets. Will it tell them one day? Very conveniently, there is no porter on that side of the building. Another blessing! One Sunday in August 2018, I saw a monsignore of the Secretariat of State waiting there for his handsome escort in red shorts and a blue top, hugging him sweetly in the street and in a café, before bringing him back to the Casa! I imagine that there are some nights when a monk, called by some pressing need, has to take part in the office of matins at the Church of Sant’Agostino, just opposite the coach gate, or that some travelling nuncio, feeling a sudden urge to see Caravaggio’s splendid Madonna of the Pilgrims, improvises a nocturnal excursion. The Arcadia, which lives up to its name, also faces the coach gate, as does the Biblioteca Angelica, one of the most beautiful libraries in Rome, where a cleric might suddenly need to consult some incunabula or the illuminated pages of the famous Codex Angelicus. And then, adjacent to the Casa del Clero, to the north-west, there is the Università della Santa Croce, better known as the university of Opus Dei; once upon a time one could go there directly from the clergy’s residence via an overhead passage, now condemned. A shame: today you have to leave by the coach gate at night if you want to go there for a Latin class or an ultramontane meeting with a young and hard-line seminarian of Opus Dei.

  The anomaly of the Casa del Clero is to the west of the huge building, on Piazza delle Cinque Lune: McDonald’s. The Vatican, as we know, is too poor to maintain its properties; it has had to make sacrifices and agree to accept in return this symbol of American junk food. And according to my information, Mgr Ricca signed the new lease agreement without having a knife to his throat.

  There have been great controversies about a McDonald’s taking up residence near the Vatican in a building which didn’t belong to the holy see, but no one batted an eyelid at this fast-food restaurant being permitted by the Vatican inside one of its own Roman residences.

  ‘They moved a little altar dedicated to the holy virgin, which was by the entrance used today by McDonald’s, and simply brought it close to the portal of the Casa del Clero on Via della Scrofa,’ one of the tenants of the residence tells me.

  In fact I can see a kind of blue, red and yellow altar-table, to which a poor virgin has been nailed against her will, casually shifted under the porch of the official entrance. Did McDonald’s exert pressure to ensure that the holy virgin was moved away from its McNuggets?

  The contrast is remarkable. The strait gate of constraint, with curfew and Ave Maria, at the front; a marvellous double-panelled coach gate with lots of keys to the rear: this is the raw reality of Catholicism. The pope knows all the nooks and crannies of the Casa del Clero: he has lived there for too long not to know.

  On fine days, this haven of mystery moves outside; and it becomes even more intriguing. Then, the Domus Internationalis Paulus VI becomes a holiday resort. You can see young secretaries of nunciatures, having taken off their dog-collars, talking by the grille, before curfew, in tight beige t-shirts and red shorts, as well as nuncios from developing countries leaving that ‘YMCA’ just before midnight, for DYMK (‘Does Your Mother Know’) parties. They will come back in the early hours having lost their voices signing ‘I will survive’ or ‘I am what I am’, dancing with the index fingers of their left hands pointing towards the sky like St John the Baptist, in the Gay Village Fantasia festival in the EUR district of Rome, where I bumped into them.

  ‘In my day, a priest would never have appeared in red shorts like that,’ a horrified Archbishop François Bacqué tells me as we walk by those colourful specimens, who look as if they’ve organized some sort of Happy Hour outside the Casa del Clero.

  ‘To travel alone is to travel with the devil!’ wrote the great Catholic (and homosexual) writer Julien Green. That might be one of the rules of life of the apostolic nuncios, whose secrets I have gradually discovered.

  At the start of my investigation, an ambassador to the holy see warned me: ‘At the Vatican, as you will see, there are lots of gays: 50 per cent, 60 per cent, 70 per cent? No one knows. But you will see that among the nuncios the rate reaches dizzying heights! In the already gay-majority universe of the Vatican, they are the gayest of all!’

  And, seeing my surprise at this revelation, the diplomat laughed in my face: ‘You know, the expression “homosexual nuncio” is a kind of tautology!’

  To understand this paradox, let’s think of the opportunities that arise from being alone on the other side of the world. Opportunities are so lovely when one is far from home: so plentiful in Morocco and Tunisia; as easy in Bangkok as they are in Taipei. Asi
a and the Middle East are missionary lands and, for nuncios of a nomadic bent, they are truly promised lands. In all these countries, I have seen them in action, surrounded by their favourites, mannered or over-excited, discovering real life far from the Vatican and ceaselessly repeating: Oh, that sheepdog! Oh, that bearer! Oh, that camel-driver! Oh, that rickshaw-walla!

  ‘Fired by a masculine rage for travel’, in the eloquent phrase of the poet Paul Verlaine, nuncios also draw upon their natural reserves: seminarians, first-year students, young monks, who are even more accessible in the Third World than in Rome.

  ‘When I travel abroad, they lend me Legionnaires of Christ,’ another archbishop tells me. (He isn’t insinuating anything with the phrase, but it gives an idea of the status in which he holds the legionnaires when he goes to a ‘former colony’.)

  ‘The words “bar” and “holiday camp” sound good to the ears of European travellers. They set lots of priests on fire!’ I was told with unusual frankness by a priest with the Foreign Missions, himself a Frenchman whom I interviewed several times in Paris. (During this investigation I met many missionary priests on the ground in Asia, in Africa, in the Maghreb and in Latin America; for this part of the discussion I am using the statements of about twenty nuncios and diplomats who have told me about the habits of their friends and co-religionists.)

  In fact, this is another open secret. Priests leave traces everywhere. The managers of gay bars whom I interviewed in Taiwan, Hanoi or Hue are full of praise for this faithful and serious clientele. The waiters in the bars in the Shinjuku Ni-chōme area of Tokyo pointed out their regulars to me. Specialist gay journalists in Bangkok investigated several incidents involving ‘morals’ or visa questions when a prelate wanted to take an undocumented young Asian man back to Italy. Everywhere, the presence of European priests, monks and clerics is attested.