In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  The cornerstone of Rouco’s power comes from a combination of four networks: Opus Dei, the Legion of Christ, the Kikos, and finally the organization Communion and Liberation.

  Opus Dei has always played an important part in Spain, where this secret fraternity was created in 1928. According to several corroborative testimonies, Rouco is probably not himself a member of Opus Dei, even though he has manipulated ‘the Work’. Where the Legion are concerned, more easily influenced because less literate, they formed Rouco’s inner circle (the cardinal was a supporter of Marcial Maciel, even after the first revelations of his rapes and paedophilia).

  Rouco’s third network is known in Spain under the name of ‘Los Kikos’ (and also under the name of the movement The Neocatechumenate). This is a Catholic youth movement that seeks to return to the sources of ancient Christianity and contests the secularization that is spreading around the world. Finally, the important conservative Catholic movement Communion and Liberation, which was created in Italy, has a strong presence in Spain (its president has been Spanish since 2005).

  ‘These four right-wing movements form the social base of Rouco’s power: they constitute his army. Whenever he wanted, “General” Rouco could send them into the street, and the four of them could fill the big squares in Madrid. That was his modus operandi. We worked that out when he launched his battle against gay marriage,’ Vidal explains to me.

  After the gay marriage debate, Rouco demonstrated his gifts as an organizer during the World Youth Days in 1989, which were held, in fact, in the city of Santiago de Compostela. There, the archbishop went out of his way, and his efficiency impressed Pope John Paul II, who congratulated him publicly in his first address. At the age of 52, Rouco enjoyed his hour of glory and a privilege for which others have waited a lifetime. (Rouco would repeat this charm offensive with Benedict XVI in 2011, for the World Youth Days in Madrid.)

  Intellectually, Rouco’s way of thinking was based on that of Pope John Paul II, who went on to create him cardinal. Catholicism is besieged by enemies; it must be defended. According to several witnesses, this rock-hard vision of a fortress Church explains the cardinal’s rigidity, his authoritarian streak, the mobilization of the troops that involved themselves in street battles on his orders, his liking for extravagant power and control.

  On the question of homosexuality, his genuine obsession, Rouco was in the same line as the Polish pope: homosexuals are not condemned if they choose continence; and if they don’t, they should be offered ‘reparative therapies’ to allow them to attain absolute chastity.

  Elected and then re-elected four times to the head of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Rouco would stay there for 12 years, not counting those when he would continue to pull strings, as a ‘titiritero’, without officially having any power (which remains the case today). Still flanked by his secretary, from whom he is inseparable, and his hairdresser, who doesn’t leave him alone for a second – ‘una bellíssima persona’, as Rouco acknowledged – the archbishop developed a big head. Rouco became a Sodano!

  The power of Rouco Varela is Spanish, but it is also Roman. For reasons of ideological inclinations and inclinations pure and simple, Rouco has always held an odour of sanctity at the Vatican. Close to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who defended him in all circumstances, he was also very close to the cardinals Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone. Since power attracts power, Rouco had tight control over all the Spanish appointments, and in return the priests and bishops owed their careers to him. The nuncios attended to his every need. And since, as in Spain, the Church measured its power entirely in terms of the relationship between Rome and Madrid, he was now called the ‘vice-pope’.

  ‘Rouco governed through fear and the trade in influences. He was always spoken of as a “traficante de influencias”,’ a priest in Madrid tells me.

  Rouco set out his pieces and deployed his power. He had his ‘hombres de placer’, as the jesters who made the king laugh were known at the court of Spain. His sister’s brother, Alfonso Carrasco Rouco, was appointed bishop, prompting controversy about nepotism. People started talking about this Rouco as the ‘cardinal nephew’, which brought back unhappy memories.

  And oh, so much money! Like Cardinal López Trujillo, like the secretaries of state Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone, Rouco was, in his way, a plutocrat. Thanks to the wealth of the Church (and perhaps that of the Spanish Episcopal Conference), he was able to cultivate his power in Rome.

  In Spain itself, the Archbishop of Madrid lived like a prince in an ‘ático’ restored in 2004 for several million euros. This penthouse flat, with its old master paintings, is on the upper storey of the somewhat inappropriately named Palacio de San Justo, an eighteenth-century town house, magnificent admittedly, and beguiling with its late-baroque, rococo style (I saw this palace when I visited Cardinal Osoro, Rouco’s successor).

  ‘It’s impossible to gauge from abroad what a shock Francis’s election has been for the Spanish episcopate,’ Vidal explains to me. ‘The bishops lived here like princes, beyond good and evil. All dioceses here are grandiose palaces, and the Spanish Church has an unimaginable property portfolio everywhere, in Madrid, Toledo, Seville, Segovia, Granada, Santiago de Compostela … And there was Francis asking them to become poor, to leave their palaces, to return to pastoral values and to humility. What matters to them here, with this new Latino pope, isn’t so much doctrine, because they’ve always been very accommodating in that respect; no, what matters to them is having to remove themselves from luxury, to stop being princes, to leave their palaces, and, horror of horrors, having to start to serve the poor!’

  If the election of Francis was a shock for the Spanish Church; for Rouco it was a tragedy. A friend of Ratzinger’s, he was startled by his renunciation of the papacy, which he had never imagined in his worst nightmares. And from the election of the new pope, the Cardinal Archbishop of Madrid is said to have uttered this dramatic line, as reported by the press: ‘The conclave escaped us.’

  He probably knew what to expect! Within a few months Pope Francis had ordered Rouco’s retirement. He began by removing him from the Congregation of Bishops, a choice position that allowed him to decide on the appointment of all the Spanish prelates. Marginalized in the Vatican, he was also asked to leave his post as Archbishop of Madrid, which he had been clinging on to in spite of the age limit. Then, furiously accusing all those who had betrayed him, he imperiously demanded to be able to choose his successor and suggested three names sine qua non to the nuncio in Spain. The list came back from Rome with four names, none of which Rouco had suggested!

  But the hardest thing was still to come. The most unthinkable punishment for this prince of the Church was to follow from the highest echelons, from Rome itself: he was asked to leave his Madrid penthouse. Like Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone in Rome, in similar circumstances, he refused categorically, and let things drift. Pressed by the nuncio, Rouco suggested that his successor should live on the floor below his, which would allow him to stay where he lived, in his palace. Once again the holy see refused: Rouco had to get out and leave his luxury apartment in the Palacio de San Justo to the new Archbishop of Madrid, Carlos Osoro.

  Was Cardinal Rouco an exception, an extreme case, as some people in Spain claim today, to clear him, and try and make people forget about his escapades and his fashionable lifestyle? It would be nice to think so. And yet this evil genius is rather the product of a system produced by the pontificate of John Paul II, where men were intoxicated by power and bad habits, without any opposing force to halt their deviations. In this, Rouco was not very different from a López Trujillo or an Angelo Sodano. Opportunism and Machiavellianism, of which he was a master, were tolerated, if not encouraged, by Rome.

  The frame of reference here is threefold once again: ideological, financial and homophilic. For a long time, Rouco had been in step with the Vatican of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He adhered without hesitation to the war on communism and the struggle against libera
tion theology as decreed by Wojtyła; he espoused the anti-gay ideas of Ratzinger’s pontificate; he associated with Stanisław Dziwisz and Georg Gänswein, the famous private secretaries to the popes. Rouco was the essential chain of their policies in Spain, their ally, their servant and their host at a luxury chalet in Tortosa, south of Barcelona (according to three first-hand testimonies).

  His entourage was homophilic. Here, again, we see a template also seen in Italy and many countries in the world. In the 1950s and 1960s, Spanish homosexuals frequently chose the seminary to escape their condition or persecution. Around Rouco, there were many crypto-gays who had found refuge in the Church.

  ‘Under Franco, who was an apparently very pious, very Catholic dictator, homosexuality was a crime, There were arrests, prison sentences, homosexuals sent to labour camps. So for many young homosexuals, the priesthood seemed like the only solution against persecution. Many became priests. That was the key, the rule, the model,’ Vidal explains.

  Another Jesuit priest I interviewed in Barcelona said to me: ‘Everyone who had been called a “maricón” in the streets of their village ended up in the seminary.’

  Is this a case of the Stations of the Cross being taken along the road of Santiago de Compostela, by Rouco himself? The way of sublimated homophilia in the style of Maritain or internalized homophobia in the style of Alfonso López Trujillo (a close friend of Rouco, who came to see him often in Madrid)? We don’t know.

  ‘I investigated the subject at length,’ Vidal goes on. ‘Rouco was never interested in girls: women were always invisible to him. His misogyny was disturbing. So the vow of chastity with women wasn’t a problem for him. As regards boys, there were a lot of troubling things, a lot of gay people around him, but no traces of real inclinations. My hypothesis is that Rouco was completely asexual.’

  It was in this context, between 2004 and 2005, at the end of John Paul II’s pontificate, that Rouco launched himself into the Spanish battle against gay marriage.

  ‘We would have to see that for Sodano, and then for Ratzinger and Bertone, the proposed law in favour of marriage in Spain immediately appeared as a nameless peril,’ Vidal observes. ‘They feared a snowball effect on the whole of Latin America. For them, gay marriage had to be stopped here, in Spain, before the contagion spread everywhere. They were terrified by the risk of a domino effect. The man of the moment, as far as they were concerned, was Rouco. He was the only man capable of stopping gay marriage once and for all.’

  Rouco wouldn’t disappoint them. No sooner had Prime Minister Zapatero spoken up in favour of gay marriage in 2004 (he put it in his election programme without imagining that he could be elected, and didn’t really believe in same-sex marriage himself) than he found Rouco Varela in his way. And he made his first demonstration of strength, without a word of warning. With his ‘Kikos’, his Legion of Christ and the help of Opus Dei, the cardinal incited the common people to stage protests. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards turned up in the streets of Madrid in the name of ‘la familia sí importa’. Twenty bishops would march with the crowds against gay marriage during this time.

  With his first successes, Rouco felt that his strategy had been vindicated. Rome applauded loudly. There were more demonstrations in 2004, and doubts began to take hold in public opinion. Pope Ratzinger congratulated Rouco via his personal secretary Georg Gänswein. Rouco had won his bet: the Zapatero government was in a cul-de-sac.

  ‘Rouco really became our bête noire at that moment. He had brought the bishops into the street; this was something unthinkable for us,’ I am told by Jesús Generelo, the president of the main federation of LGBT associations in Spain, a man close to the political left.

  But in spring 2005, the situation changed. Did the bishops go too far in speaking out? Were the banners in the street too over the top? Did the religious mobilization remind them of the Francoism that had also claimed to fight in favour of the family and Catholic values?

  ‘Rouco’s main mistake was to bring the bishops into the street. Franco had done that too. The Spaniards immediately interpreted the message: it was the return of fascism. The image was devastating, and public opinion turned,’ according to José Manuel Vidal.

  After a phoney war lasting several months, the media opted in favour of gay marriage. The newspapers, some of which were connected to the episcopate, began to criticize the demonstrations and caricature their leaders.

  Cardinal Rouco himself became the favoured target. His vehemence on the issue won him the unlikely nickname of ‘Rouco Siffredi’ (after the Italian pornographic actor Rocco Siffredi), even among priests (according to the testimony of one of them). On the internet, the cardinal was endlessly caricatured: he became ‘Rouco Clavel’, queen of the day, an allusion to the actor Paco Clavel, queen of the night, a famous singer of La Movida, a sometime transvestite and always extravagantly dressed. ‘He’s Rouco Varela by day and Paco Clavel by night’ became a fashionable slogan. The Church was losing the support of the young and the big cities; the elite of the country and the business classes were also switching, to avoid seeming uncool. Soon, polls showed that two-thirds of Spaniards supported the proposed law (the figure is now about 80 per cent).

  Rome, following the debates day by day, was starting to become alarmed by the turn that things were taking. Rouco was accused of going too far, and of letting the furious bishops overstep the mark. The new secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone, who travelled to Madrid as a matter of urgency, met Zapatero and asked Rouco to ‘calm down’. That the new strong man in the Vatican, the closest collaborator of Pope Benedict XVI, himself very homophobic, wanted to moderate Rouco was a highly unusual situation.

  It has to be said that behind the bellicose slogans and violently anti-gay-marriage banners, the Spanish episcopate was in fact more divided than it admitted. Rouco lost the support of his own Church. So the new cardinal, Carlos Amigo, and the Bishop of Bilbao, Ricardo Blázquez (who would be created cardinal by Francis in 2015), disputed his line. Fernando Sebastián, the Archbishop of Pamplona – a left-wing prelate and serious theologian, and a former scribe to Cardinal Tarancón (whom Francis would also make a cardinal in 2014) – even attacked Rouco’s strategy head-on, comparing it to a return to the old regime – meaning Francoism.

  Of course Sebastián, Amigo and Blázquez disapproved of same-sex marriage, which Zapatero supported, but they also contested the mobilization of bishops in the street. They thought that the Church should stay out of politics, even if it could give its ethical point of view on social issues.

  Cardinal Rouco engaged in a power struggle within the Spanish Episcopal Conference, supported by two of his lieutenants. Let’s linger for a moment on the case of these two men, major figures in the Spanish Church who would both be removed from their posts by Francis. Because nowhere but in Spain could the battle be so fierce between the Ratzingerians and the pro-Francis faction, and nowhere else would it be so dependent on the ‘rigid men who lead a double life’.

  The first is Antonio Cañizares, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain. This friend of Rouco’s was also close to Cardinal Ratzinger, so much so that in Spain he was known as ‘little Ratzinger’ (Benedict XVI would create him cardinal in 2006). Like the American Cardinal Burke, Cañizares liked to wear the cappa magna, the cardinals’ bridal dress which, worn with veils flying, could measure up to several metres long and on major occasions is supported by choirboys and handsome seminarians.

  ‘Since Cañizares is very small, seeing him in his long dress makes him look even more ridiculous. It makes him look like Mari Bárbola!’ a renowned journalist tells me (referring to the dwarf in Las Meninas; a bad joke that several others repeated to me).

  There were many statements critical of Cañizares and rumours about the make-up of his entourage. Several complaints were made against him by MPs and LGBT associations for his homophobic remarks and ‘incitement to hatred’. One struggles to understand whether such a cardinal served the Christian cause or caricatured it. In an
y case, shortly after his election, Francis chose to remove him from Rome, where he was prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and sent him back to Spain. He loudly demanded that he be appointed to the archbishopric of Madrid; Francis crossed him off the list and appointed him to Valencia.

  The cardinal’s right-hand man was even more of a caricature, and more extremist if that’s possible. Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Pla waged the anti-gay-marriage battle in his own way: with the subtlety of a drag queen barging into the changing room at Barça.

  Outraged by gay marriage and ‘gender ideology’, Reig Pla denounced homosexuals with apocalyptic violence. He published testimonies from people who had been ‘cured’ thanks to ‘reparative therapies’. He compared homosexuality to paedophilia. Later, he would even claim, on prime-time television, prompting a national scandal, that ‘homosexuals will go to hell’.

  ‘Bishop Reig Pla is his own caricature. He was the best ally of the gay movement during the battle for gay marriage. Every time he opened his mouth he won us supporters. We were luckily to have adversaries like him!’ one of the directors of a Madrid gay association tells me.

  The spiritual battle and the battle of men that was fought in the country between these six cardinals and prelates, Rouco-Cañizares-Reig versus Amigo-Blázquez-Sebastián, profoundly marked Catholic Spain in the 2000s. It also exposed the fault line between Benedict XVI and Francis, and even today it remains so powerful that it explains most of the tensions that exist within the Spanish episcopate. (During the last election of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, when I was back in Madrid, Blázquez was once again re-elected president and Cañizares vice-president, a way of preserving the balance between the pro- and anti-Francis forces.)

  Despite the exceptional mobilization conducted by Cardinal Rouco Varela, on 2 July 2005 Spain became the third country in the world, after the Netherlands and Belgium, to open marriage up to all same-sex couples. On 11 July, the first marriage was celebrated, and almost five thousand couples would marry over the next year. It was a shattering defeat for the conservative wing of the Spanish episcopate. (A constitutional submission originating in the Partido Popular and supported by the Church would be subsequently presented: the decision of the supreme court judges, by eight votes to three, was incontrovertible, and a definitive victory for the supporters of gay marriage.)