The cardinal lowers his eyes and measures his words: ‘Cardinal Bertone wanted to deal with relations between the Church and the Italian government. But I continued on my way. The Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) is in charge of the questions related to the Italian government and it is not the business of the Vatican!.’ (This point has been confirmed to me by Cardinal Giuseppe Betori, former secretary general of the CEI, whom I interviewed in Florence.)
And after a pause, the cardinal who dreamed of being ‘papabile’, but had to lower his ambitions, specifically targeting Bertone, adds: ‘When you’re in the Curia, when you’re in the Vatican, you’re no longer in the CEI. And when you’ve been in the Curia, and when you’ve finished your mission, you can’t go back to the CEI. It’s over.’
Now we talk about homosexual civil unions, of which I know Cardinal Bagnasco was the chief opponent in Italy. And, playing at being daring, I ask if the Church’s position has evolved with Pope Francis.
‘Our position on civil unions was the same ten years ago as it is today,’ the cardinal cuts in.
Now Bagnasco is trying to convince me of the sound foundation of his position. He launches into a long exposition to justify the discrimination against homosexuality encouraged by the Italian Church, as if the CEI were independent of the Vatican. A passable theologian but a poor philosopher, he quotes the Gospels and the Catholic Catechism to support his thesis (with some pertinence) and relies on the thought of the philosophers Habermas and John Rawls (whom he paraphrases shamelessly). As with most cardinals – Kasper being an exception – I am struck by the philosophical mediocrity of his thought: he instrumentalizes authors, has read the texts at a slant and, for ideological reasons, retains only a few arguments from a complex and anachronistic reasoning; so much so that I feel as if Bagnasco is about to quote from The Origin of Species, a book that I saw in the library of his waiting room, in a bid to prohibit gay marriage on the basis of the animal world!
Slightly hunched, cunning in my own way, I now question Cardinal Bagnasco, leading him gently away from the topic at hand, to talk about Francis’s appointments and his personal situation. What does he think of the fact that in order to be created cardinal under Benedict XVI you had to be anti-gay, while under Francis you have to be gay-friendly?
The great paymaster of anti-gay demonstrations in Italy looks at me: he smiles through gritted teeth. Bagnasco seems startled by my question but doesn’t give himself away. His body language speaks for him. We leave on good terms with a promise to see each other again. Always a man in a hurry, he takes our email addresses and, twice, Daniele’s mobile number.
The Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) is an empire in an empire. For a long time, it was supposed to be the kingdom itself. Despite the election of the Pole Wojtyła, followed by that of the German Ratzinger and then the Argentinian Bergoglio, after the Italians ran out of popes, the CEI remained the antechamber of power of the outdated theocracy that is the Vatican. A matter of geopolitics and global balance.
Unless, that is, the cardinals of the CEI have been chased from power after exercising it too imprudently, as did Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone? Or are they being paid today for their hypocritical lifestyles and their murderous settling of scores, which perverted Italian Catholicism and perhaps cost John Paul I his life and Benedict XVI his crown?
It remains the case that the CEI is no longer producing popes, and is yielding fewer and fewer cardinals. That may change one day, but for now the Italian episcopate is restricted to the country itself. Almost inconsolable, these cardinals and bishops nevertheless draw consolation from the amount of work that remains to be accomplished at home. There is so much to do. To begin with: fighting against gay marriage.
Since Bagnasco was elected to the presidency of the CEI, shortly after the election of Benedict XVI, civil unions have become one of the main concerns of the Italian episcopate. Like Rouco in Spain, like Barbarin in France, Bagnasco chose power relations: he wanted to go into the street and mobilize the crowd. He is cleverer than Rouco and more rigid than Barbarin, but he has steered a steady course.
It has to be said that the CEI, with its properties, its media, its soft power, its moral ascendancy, and its thousands of bishops and priests installed in even the tiniest villages, enjoys an extraordinary amount of power in Italy. It also carries a crucial amount of political weight, which often goes hand in hand with all the abuse and insider influence in that country.
‘The CEI has always intervened in Italian political life. It is rich, it is powerful. The priest and the politician walk together in Italy, where we’re still stuck in Don Camillo!’ Pierre Morel, former French ambassador to the holy see, says ironically.
All the witnesses I have interviewed – in the episcopate, the Italian parliament or the cabinet of the prime minister – confirm this crucial influence in Italian public life. This was notably the case, under John Paul II, when Cardinal Camillo Ruini, Bagnasco’s predecessor, was president of the episcopal conference: the golden age of the CEI.
‘Cardinal Ruini was the Italian voice of John Paul II and he held the Italian parliament in his hands. They were the great years of the CEI. Since Bagnasco, under Benedict XVI, that power has diminished. Under Francis, it has vanished completely,’ I am told by a prelate who lives in the Vatican and knows the two former presidents of the CEI.
Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who was also one of the directors of the CEI, confirms this point to me in the course of two interviews: ‘Cardinal Ruini was a pastor. He had a profound intelligence and a clear political vision. John Paul II trusted him. Ruini was the chief collaborator with John Paul II when it came to Italian affairs.’
A diplomat in office in Rome, who is well acquainted with the Vatican machine, confirms in turn: ‘At the start of the pontificate, Cardinal Ruini broadly said to John Paul II: “I’ll relieve you of Italian affairs, but I want all of them, the lot.” Having got what he wanted, he did the job. And he even did it very well.’
From Cardinal Camillo Ruini’s dining room, the view of the Vatican gardens is as spectacular as it is strategic. We are on the first floor of the Pontificio Seminario Romano Minore, a luxury penthouse on the edge of the Vatican.
‘It’s a fabulous place for me. You can look down on the Vatican, but you’re not inside it. You’re right next to it, you’re very close, but you’re outside it,’ Ruini says, straight-faced.
To meet the 88-year-old cardinal, I had to send countless letters and make numerous phone-calls – all in vain. Somewhat disconcerted by the constant lack of response, which is rather unusual in the Church, in the end I left the ‘white book’ as a present for the retired cardinal with the porter, and added a short note. Eventually, his assistant arranged a meeting for me, adding that ‘his eminence has agreed to receive you because of the beauty of your writing in blue fountain pen’. So the cardinal was an aesthete!
‘I was at the head of the CEI for 21 years,’ Ruini tells me in excellent French. ‘It’s true that, thanks to me, and thanks to favourable circumstances, I was able to turn the CEI into an important organization. John Paul II trusted me. He always trusted me. He was a father to me, a grandfather. He was an example of strength, wisdom and love of God.’
Visibly happy to engage in conversation with a French writer, the old cardinal takes his time (and when I leave at the end of our interview he will write down his private telephone number on a little piece of paper, encouraging me to come back and see him).
In the meantime, Ruini tells me the story of his career: how he was a young theologian; his passion for Jacques Maritain and the French thinkers; the importance of John Paul II, whose death, as cardinal vicar of Rome, as tradition decrees, he was the first to announce by a ‘special declaration’ (before the substitute Leonardo Sandri made the official announcement in St Peter’s); the history of the CEI and his ‘cultural project’; but also the deconfessionalization and the secularization that considerably weakened the influence of the Italian Church. Witho
ut acrimony, but with a certain melancholy, he talked about the glorious past and the decline of Catholicism today. ‘The times have changed,’ he adds, not without some sadness.
I question the cardinal on the influence of the CEI and on his own role.
‘I think my ability lay in the art of government. I was always capable of making decisions, or taking a direction and going ahead. That was my strength.’
We talked often about the money of the CEI, the key to its influence.
‘The CEI is money,’ a senior figure in the Vatican confirms to me.
Which Ruini acknowledges without hesitation: ‘The Concordat between the Italian state and the Church gave a lot of money to the CEI.’
We also talk about politics, and the cardinal insists on his connections with Christian Democracy, as well as with Romano Prodi and Silvio Berlusconi. For several decades he has known all the heads of the Italian parliament!
‘There was a real interpenetration between the Italian Church and Italian politics; that’s the problem, that’s what perverted everything,’ one of the Italian priests, Ménalque (his name has been changed), who was at the heart of the CEI, explains to me.
Ménalque was one of the most interesting people I met whilst preparing this book. This priest was at the centre of the CEI machine during the years when Cardinal Camillo Ruini, then Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, were presidents. He had a front-row seat. Today, Ménalque is a priest who has become bitter, if not anti-clerical, a complex and unexpected figure of the kind that the Vatican produces with disconcerting regularity. He chose to talk to me and describe in detail, from the inside, at first hand, the working of the CEI. Why did he talk? For several reasons, as with several of those who speak in this book: first of all, because of his homosexuality, now accepted, post-coming out, which makes ‘the homophobia of the CEI’ intolerable to him; then, to denounce the hypocrisy of many prelates and cardinals in the CEI, whom he knows better than anyone, anti-gay in public and homosexual in private. Lots of them have made passes at him, and he knows the opaque codes and rules concerning droits de seigneur within the CEI. Ménalque is speaking like this for the first time because he has lost his faith, and because, having paid a heavy price for that loss – unemployment, friends who turn their back on you, isolation – he felt betrayed. I interviewed him for over ten hours, three times, at an interval of several months, far from Rome, and became attached to this unhappy priest. He was the first to reveal to me a secret that I would never have imagined. And here is the secret: in his view, the CEI is intrinsically an organization that is predominantly gay.
‘Like many Italian priests, like the majority of them, I entered the seminary because I had a problem with my sexuality,’ Ménalque tells me during one of our lunches. ‘I didn’t know what it was, and it took me a long time to find out. Of course it was repressed homosexuality, an internal repression so powerful that it wasn’t just inexpressible, it was incomprehensible, even to me. And like most priests, not having to chat up girls, not having to get married, was a real relief to me. Homosexuality was one of the springboards of my vocation. Priestly celibacy is a problem for a heterosexual priest; for the young gay that I was, it was a blessing. It was a liberation.’
The priest has hardly ever told the story of this part of his life, its dark side, and he tells me that the dialogue has brought him relief.
‘It was about a year after I was ordained a priest that the problem really arose. I was 25. I tried to forget. I said to myself that I wasn’t effeminate, that I didn’t correspond to the stereotype, that I couldn’t be homosexual. Then I struggled.’
It was an unequal struggle. Painful, unjust, stormy. It could have led to suicide, but crystallized instead into self-hatred, the classic template for the internalized homophobia of the Catholic clergy.
The young priest then had two solutions, like most of his co-religionists: accepting his homosexuality and leaving the Church (but all he had then was his theology degrees, which aren’t much use in the workplace); or to start a hidden double life. It’s basically the door or the closet.
The rigidity of the Catechism on celibacy and heterosexual chastity has always had as a corollary in Italy a great tolerance towards the ‘inclination’. All witnesses questioned confirmed that homosexuality was for a long time a real rite of passage in Italian seminaries, in churches and in the CEI, as long as it remained discreet and confined to the private sphere. The sexual act with a person of the same sex does not jeopardize the sacrosanct rule of heterosexual celibacy – in letter, at least, if not spirit. And long before Bill Clinton invented the phrase, the rule of Italian Catholicism on homosexuality, the template of the Vatican closet, was: ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’
Following a long tradition, and one that applies to most of the directors of the CEI, Ménalque became a priest and gay. A hybrid.
‘The great strength of the Church is that it deals with everything. You feel safe and protected; it’s difficult to leave. So I stayed. I started living a double life. I chose to cruise outside and not inside the Church, to avoid rumours. It’s a choice that I made prematurely, while lots of people favour the opposite option and cruise only within the Church. My life as a gay priest hasn’t been simple. It was a battle against myself. When I see myself today in the middle of this battle, isolated and lonely, I feel desperate. I cried in front of my bishop, who made me believe that he couldn’t understand why. I was afraid. I was terrified. I was trapped.’
It was then that the priest discovered the main secret of the Italian Church: homosexuality was so general, so omnipresent, that most careers depend on it. If you choose your bishop, if you move along the right lines, if you form good friendships, if you play the ‘closet game’, you rise rapidly through the echelons of the hierarchy.
Ménalque gave me the name of bishops who have ‘helped’ him, cardinals who wooed him shamelessly. We talk about the elections to the CEI, ‘a worldly battle’, he says; about the power of the empires that Cardinals Camillo Ruini and Angelo Bagnasco have constructed; about the sly part played in the Vatican by the secretaries of state Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone; about the equally extravagant role of the apostolic nuncio in charge of Italy, Paolo Romeo, an intimate colleague of Sodano, future Archbishop of Palermo and created cardinal by Benedict XVI. We also talk about the appointments of Cardinals Crescenzo Sepe in Naples, Agostino Vallini in Rome or Giuseppe Betori in Florence, said to correspond to the clan logics of the CEI.
In contrast, Ménalque decodes for me the ‘negative’ appointments of Pope Francis, those influential bishops in the CEI who didn’t become cardinals, the ‘non-nominations’ that are equally revealing as far as he is concerned. So, whether out of punishment or penitence, some major figures in the CEI are still waiting to be ‘raised to the purple’: neither Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia of Turin, nor Archbishop Rino Fisichella, have been created cardinals. On the other hand, Corrado Lorefice and Matteo Zuppi (known affectionately as ‘Don Matteo’ in the heart of the community of Sant’Egidio, which he comes from) were respectively appointed Archbishop of Palermo and of Bologna, and seem to embody Francis’s line by being close to the poor, the excluded, prostitutes and migrants.
‘People here call me “Your Eminence”, even though I’m not a cardinal! It’s out of habit, because all the archbishops of Bologna have always been cardinals,’ Matteo Zuppi says when he receives me in his office in Bologna. Gay-friendly, relaxed, warm and voluble, he hugs his visitors, avoids double-talk and agrees to engage in regular dialogue with LGBT associations. Whether it’s sincere or strategic, he appears as the opposite of his predecessor, the hypocritical cardinal Carlo Caffarra, a control freak, a virulent homophobe and, of course, closeted.
Ménalque is calm and precise. He talks to me about the anti-gay tendencies of the Italian cardinal Salvatore de Giorgi, whom he knows well, of the deep secrets of Communion and Liberation, and of the famous Progetto Culturale of the CEI. One scandal emerges in the course of the discussion: the Boff
o affair, which I will discuss shortly.
Ménalque left the CEI without causing a scandal and without coming out. He felt the need to leave and find his freedom. ‘I left one day, and that was it. My friends liked me a lot when I was a priest, but when I stopped being one they abandoned me without any regrets. They never called me. I never got a single telephone call.’
In fact, the directors of the CEI did everything they could to keep Ménalque inside the system; to let him go when he knew so many things was too risky. They made him offers that some would find difficult to refuse, but the priest held his ground and didn’t go back on his decision.
Leaving the Church is a one-way journey. When you make that choice, you burn your bridges. You leave once and for all. For this former abbot, the cost was extremely high.
‘I had no more friends, no more money. They all abandoned me. Is that what the Church teaches? I’m sad for them. If I could go back in time, I would definitely choose to become something other than a priest.’
‘Why do they stay?’
‘Why do they stay? Because they’re afraid. Because they have nowhere else to go. The more time passes, the harder it is to leave. Today I feel sorry for my friends who stayed.’
‘Are you still a Catholic?’
‘Please, don’t ask me that question. The way the Church treated me, the way those people treated me, you can’t call that “Catholic”. I am so happy to have left and to be “out”! “Out” of the Church and also publicly gay. Now I can breathe. It’s a daily battle to earn my living, to live, to reconstruct myself, but I’m free. I AM FREE.’
An organization that is predominantly gay by virtue of its membership, the CEI is a power structure. It spasmodically cultivates power relations. The homosexual issue is crucial to that, because it is at the heart of the networks confronting one another, the careers that are being made and unmade, and because it can be used as a weapon of pressure, but the key to its structural working remains power first and foremost.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 46
