Apart from the nuncios, for whom travel is the very basis of their trade, Curia priests also use their holidays to engage in innovative sexual explorations far from the Vatican. But, of course, these monsignori rarely flaunt their professional status when they are out and about in Manila or Jakarta. They don’t dress as clergymen.
‘Because they have embraced principles that are stronger than their character, and because they have sublimated their desires for so long, they explode abroad,’ the priest from Foreign Missions tells me.
Vietnam is particularly prized these days. The communist regime and press censorship protect ecclesiastic escapades in case of scandal, whereas in Thailand everything ends up in the press.
‘Sexual tourism is migrating,’ Mr Dong, the manager of two gay bars in Hue, tells me. ‘It is moving from countries in the spotlight, like Thailand or Manila, towards countries with less media coverage, like Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Burma or Vietnam.’ (I’m amused by the name of one of the establishments owned by Mr Dong, which I visit in Hue: it’s called Ruby, like Berlusconi’s former escort girl at his bunga bunga parties.)
Asia isn’t the only destination for these priests; but it is one of the most prized for everyone excluded from standard sexuality: the anonymity and discretion that it offers are unequalled. Africa, South America (for example, the Dominican Republic, where an important network of gay priests has been described in a Polish book) and Eastern Europe also have their devotees, not to mention the United States, the template for all one-man Stonewalls. You can see them tanning themselves on the beaches of Provincetown, renting a bungalow in the ‘Pines’ or an Airbnb in the gaybourhoods of Hell’s Kitchen, Boystown or Fort Lauderdale. One French curé tells me that after methodically visiting these bohemian and post-gay American districts, he regretted their ‘excessively mixed quality’ and their lack of ‘gayitude’.
He’s right: today the percentage of homosexuals is probably higher in the closeted Vatican than in the post-gay Castro.
Some prefer in the end to stay in Europe to do the circuit of the gay clubs in Berlin, to participate in the SM nights at The Church in Amsterdam or not to miss the Closing Party in Ibiza, then celebrate their birthday, which becomes a ‘birthweek’ in Barcelona. (Here I am using actual examples concerning nuncios or priests whose sexual tourism was described to me on the ground.)
So a new rule of The Closet emerges, the eleventh: Most nuncios are homosexual, but their diplomacy is essentially homophobic. They are denouncing what they are themselves. As for cardinals, bishops and priests, the more they travel, the more suspect they are!
The nuncio La Païva, whom I have already mentioned, is no exception to this rule. He too is a handsome specimen. And of such a species! An archbishop, he is eternally on display. And he evangelizes. He is one of those people who, in the compartment of an almost deserted train, or the rows of seats of an empty bus, would go and sit down next to a handsome young man travelling on his own, to try to bring him over to the faith. He is also happy to trot along the street, as I have seen him do, even though he resembles the famous nuncio by the sculptor Fernando Botero – fat, round and very red – if it enables him to engage in conversation with a seminarian for whom he has suddenly developed a craving.
At the same time, La Païva is a winning character, in spite of his reactionary temperament. When we go out to a restaurant in Rome, he wants me to wear a shirt and jacket, even though it’s 30 degrees outside. One evening, he even makes a scene: he doesn’t like my grunge look at all, and I need to shave! La Païva tells me off. ‘I don’t understand why young people grow their beards these days.’ (I’m happy for La Païva to refer to me as if I’m a young man.)
‘I’m not growing a beard, Your Excellency. And I haven’t shaved badly either. It’s what you call a three-day beard.’
‘Is it just laziness? Is that it?’
‘I just think it’s nicer. I shave every three or four days.’
‘I prefer you clean-shaven, you know.’
‘The Lord had a beard, didn’t he?’
I’m thinking of Rembrandt’s portrait of Christ (Christuskopf, a little painting that I saw at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin), perhaps the loveliest one: his face is fine and fragile; he has long, untidy hair and a long straggly beard. He is, in fact, a grunge Christ, and could almost have torn jeans! Rembrandt painted him from an anonymous living model – an idea that was new in the religious painting of the time – probably a young man from Amsterdam’s Jewish community. Hence his humanity and his simplicity. Christ’s vulnerability touches me, as it touched François Mauriac, who loved this portrait so much that, like the rest of us, he fell in love with it.
The nuncios, diplomats and bishops with whom I rubbed shoulders at Domus Internationalis Paulus VI are the pope’s soldiers around the world. Since the election of John Paul II their international engagement has been innovative, in parallel with the policy of the major countries, and particularly favourable to human rights, the abolition of the death penalty, nuclear disarmament and peace processes. More recently, Francis has made his priority the defence of the environment, attempts to bring the United States and Cuba closer together, and the pacification of FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).
‘It’s a diplomacy of patience. The Vatican never lets go, even when other powers do. And when everyone leaves a country, because of war for example, the nuncios stay on beneath the bombs. We’ve seen that in Iraq, and more recently in Syria,’ stresses Pierre Morel, former French ambassador to the holy see.
Morel explains to me in detail, in the course of several interviews in Paris, the workings of this Vatican diplomacy, with the respective roles of the nuncios, the Secretariat of State, the Congregation of the Oriental Churches, the role of the ‘red’ pope (the cardinal in charge of the ‘evangelization of the peoples’, meaning the Third World), the ‘black’ pope (the superior general of the Jesuits), and, last of all, the ‘parallel diplomacies’. The Secretariat of State coordinates the overall network and sets the general direction.
This efficient and misunderstood diplomatic apparatus has also been put at the service, under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, of an ultra-conservative and homophobic crusade. It is possible to tell this story through the careers of two emblematic nuncios who were both Vatican permanent observers at the United Nations: Archbishop Renato Martino, now a cardinal, and the nuncio Silvano Tomasi.
When I reach the home of Renato Raffaele Martino on Via Pfeiffer in Rome, a short distance from the Vatican, a Filipino – perhaps in his twenties, perhaps thirty, the quintessence of Asian beauty – opens the door to me with a broad smile. He leads me in silence to the drawing room of the cardinal, where the prelate joins me.
All of a sudden I’m not facing one Renato Martino, but about ten of them. I’m literally surrounded by portraits of the cardinal, in real size, painted in all kinds of styles, sometimes occupying entire panels, which the nuncio has arranged on every wall and in every corner of his apartment.
I can understand that, at the age of 86, the cardinal is proud of his career since his episcopal ordination by the great Agostino Casaroli, and that he should hold himself in a certain esteem. After all, he fought like the very devil to impede the battle against AIDS on five continents, with a certain degree of success, and not everybody can say that. But I can’t help feeling that having so many portraits of oneself all at once, so prominent, so eye-catching, almost like so many statues, borders on the ridiculous.
The rest of our meeting is in the same vein. The old man doesn’t really answer my questions, even though like most nuncios he expresses himself in impeccable French, but he takes me on a tour of the house. Martino says he has visited 195 countries during his long career as a nuncio: he has brought back countless objects from those travels, which he now shows me in his dining room, his private chapel, his interminable corridor, his ten or so rooms, and even a panoramic terrace with a wonderful view over Catholic Rome. His apartment is at least te
n times as big as Pope Francis’s.
It is a museum, a real cabinet of curiosities – a cabinet of trinkets, perhaps. The cardinal shows me, one after another, his 38 decorations, the 200 medals engraved with his name, the 14 doctorates honoris causa and 16 portraits of himself. I also see handkerchiefs bearing coats of arms, knick-knacks, chipped miniature elephants, a fine colonialist panama hat and, on the walls, certificates made out to ‘his most reverend eminence’, in the image of I don’t know what weird order of chivalry (the order of St January, perhaps). And while we are wandering around these relics and jujus, I notice that the Filipino is watching us from a distance, with an expression of disappointment and restrained apathy; he must have seen processions like this so many times.
In the grand caravanserai of the apartment, a shambles, I now discover photographs of the cardinal on the back of an elephant with a handsome young man; here he is posing insouciantly with a Thai companion, there with young Laotians, Malaysians, Filipinos, Singaporeans or Thais – all fine representations of countries where he has been vice-nuncio, pro-nuncio or nuncio. Clearly Martino likes Asia. And his passion for elephants is openly on display, in every corner of his apartment.
According to two diplomatic sources, the ‘creation’ of Martino as a cardinal by John Paul II was long and scattered with pitfalls. Did he have enemies? A lack of ‘straightness’? Was his spending too extravagant? Were there too many rumours about his conduct? Whatever the case, he was kept waiting during several consistories. Each time that the smoke didn’t turn white, Martino had a burn-out. All the more so because he had bought at great expense the biretta, the calotte, the red mozzettas and the sapphire ring, even before he was made cardinal. This human comedy went on for several years, and the moiré and damask silk scarf run through with gold thread was starting to look sadly worn when the nuncio, at the age of nearly 71, was finally created cardinal. (In his ‘Testimonianza’, Mgr Viganò ‘outs’ Martino, suspecting of him of belonging to a ‘homosexual current in favour of subverting Catholic doctrine on homosexuality’ in the Curia, which his friends swiftly denied in a communiqué.)
In his chapel, this time, in the middle of the portrait medallions of Martino and the amulets, carefully shielded from the sun by curtains with embroidered fringes, I discover the holy trinity of LGBT artists: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Caravaggio. Each of these notorious homosexuals is represented by a copy of one of his works. We spend a few moments talking about his Filipino houseboy, and Martino, who doesn’t seem to grasp what I’m getting at, drifts off in his imagination as he gives me an idyllic portrait of the boy, specifying that in fact he has ‘two Filipinos’ at his service, greatly preferring them to the more traditional nun. We understand.
The Old Testament, as everybody knows, is populated by characters more colourful, more adventurous and also more monstrous than the New. Cardinal Renato Martino is, in his way, a figure from the old scriptures. Even today he is honorary president of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, one of the far-right Catholic associations and an ultra-conservative political lobby run by the Englishman Benjamin Harnwell. If there is a structurally homophobic organization in this book, this is it – and Renato Martino embodies its values.
In the 195 countries that he has visited, in the embassies where he has been nuncio, and as ‘permanent observer’ for the holy see in the United Nations for 16 years, from 1986 until 2002, Renato Martino was a great defender of human rights, a militant anti-abortionist and a violent opponent of gay rights and the wearing of condoms.
At the UN, Renato Martino was John Paul II’s chief spokesman, so he had to apply the pope’s line. His margin of manoeuvre was admittedly limited, as it is for all diplomats. But according to over twenty statements collected in New York, Washington and Geneva, including from three former ambassadors to the UN, Martino addressed his mission with such an anti-gay bias, such personal animosity against homosexuals, that his hatred became suspect.
‘Mr Martino was not a normal diplomat,’ an ambassador who was his counterpart in New York tells me. ‘I’ve never seen anyone so binary. As a permanent observer of the holy see at the UN, he had two faces, and his political line clearly employed double standards. He had a humanist approach to human rights, which was typical of the holy see, and was always very moderate. He was a great defender of justice, of peace and, I particularly remember, the rights of Palestinians. And then, all of a sudden, when the question of the battle against AIDS, abortion or the depenalization of homosexuality arose, he became Manichean, obsessive and vindictive, as if it touched him personally. On human rights, he expressed himself a little like Switzerland or Canada; and all of a sudden, on the gay question or AIDS, he was talking like Uganda or Saudi Arabia! And what’s more, the Vatican then went on to forge an unnatural alliance, in our view, with Syria and Saudi Arabia on the question of the rights of homosexuals. Martino was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde!’
A second diplomat at the Vatican, Silvano Tomasi, would play a similar role in Switzerland. If the prestigious permanent representation of the United Nations and its Security Council was in New York, most of the United Nations agencies intervening on the question of human rights and the fight against AIDS are in Geneva: the Human Rights Commission, the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS and, of course, the United Nations Human Rights Council. The Vatican is represented in all of these agencies by only one ‘permanent observer’ without voting rights.
When I meet Silvano Tomasi at the Vatican, where he receives me on the eve of an international meeting held in the Paul VI Audience Hall, the prelate apologizes for not having very much time to devote to me. In the end, we will speak for over an hour, and he will miss the rest of the conference – which he was supposed to be taking part in – to stay with me.
‘Recently Pope Francis told us, speaking of the apostolic nuncios, that our lives should be the lives of “gypsies”,’ Tomasi tells me, in English.
So it was as an entertainer, a nomad and perhaps a bohemian that Tomasi travelled the world, as all diplomats do. He was Vatican ambassador in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, before being in charge of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People.
‘Refugees, migrants, are Pope Francis’s priority. He is interested in the peripheries, in the margins of society, in displaced people. He wants to be a voice for those who have no voice,’ Tomasi tells me.
Strangely, the nuncio has triple nationality: he is Italian, born north of Venice in 1940; a citizen of the Vatican State in his capacity as nuncio; and American.
‘I reached New York at the age of 18. I was a Catholic student in the United States, I did my thesis at the New School in New York, and for a long time I was a priest in Greenwich Village.’
The young Silvano Tomasi was ordained as a priest in the mission of Saint Charles Borromeo, which was set up at the end of the nineteenth century, whose chief goal was to evangelize the New World. In the 1960s, he exercised his ministry in a parish dedicated to Italian immigrants living in New York: Our Lady of Pompeii, a church in the Village, at Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue.
It’s an area that I know well, having lived in Manhattan for several years. You’re a five-minute walk away from the Stonewall Inn. It was there, in June 1969, when the young Silvano Tomasi moved to the area, that the American homosexual movement was born during a night of rioting. Every year, all around the world, the event is commemorated under the name of Gay Pride. During the 1970s, Greenwich Village would become the symbolic place of homosexual liberation, and it was here that the young prelate exercised his evangelical mission, among the hippies, transvestites and gay activists who took the district by storm.
During our interview we talk about the ‘Village’ and its LGBT fauna. Cute as a button, Silvano Tomasi expresses himself with great self-control, topped up by self-restraint. He couldn’t help pulling faces as he did so.
‘You see: we’re having a friendly conversation – you will make me say t
hings, and then you’ll only keep in the things I’ve said against the Church, like all journalists,’ Tomasi says to me with a laugh, but he goes on talking quite happily. (The interview was organized officially via the Vatican press service, and the prelate knew that he was being recorded, because I was using a very visible Nagra.)
After travelling a lot, Tomasi finished his career by becoming a ‘permanent observer’ for the holy see at the UN in Geneva. It was there, between 2003 and 2016, that he implemented the diplomacy of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
So for over ten years, the Vatican’s diplomat in chief, even though he was very familiar with Greenwich Village, conducted a policy that was just as obsessively anti-gay as the one represented in New York by his colleague Renato Martino. Together, the two nuncios expended considerable energy in trying to block initiatives aimed at the international depenalization of homosexuality and the use of condoms. They intervened on numerous occasions to impede such projects by OMS, UNAIDS or the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, as several directors of those UN agencies in Geneva confirm to me, including the director general of ONUSIDA, Michel Sidibé.
At the same time, these two nuncios always remained very discreet about cases of sexual abuse by priests, which amounted to thousands of cases during those years. Flexible morals, in short.
‘A good diplomat is a diplomat who represents his government well. And as it happens, for the Vatican a good apostolic nuncio is one who remains loyal to the pope and the priorities he defends,’ Tomasi tells me simply, to justify his actions in Geneva and his strict obedience to the line imposed by John Paul II.
In 1989, for the first time, the pope delivered a speech on the issue of AIDS to an assembly of doctors and scientists at the Vatican. He had already been seen in 1987, in Los Angeles, kissing a child sentenced to death by the virus or, during his 1988 Christmas message, calling for compassion for the victims of the epidemic, but he hadn’t previously expressed himself in public on the subject. ‘It seems wounding to human dignity and therefore morally illicit,’ John Paul II declared this time, ‘to develop AIDS prevention based on means and remedies that violate the authentically human sense of sexuality, and that are a palliative for those deep anxieties in which the responsibilities of individuals and societies are at issue.’
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 39
