‘Like all priests, I’m a big fan of Pasolini. And I would say that the CEI resembles, in some respects, Salò or the 120 days of Sodom, the Pasolini film based on the Marquis de Sade in terms of the instrumentalization of power. The higher you get up the hierarchy, the more struck you are by the fact that the violence of power has no limits,’ Ménalque explains.
Apart from a brief attempt by Cardinal Bertone, Benedict XVI’s secretary of state, to regain control of it in the late 2000s, the CEI has always jealously protected its autonomy. It seeks to manage itself without the mediation of the Vatican, and deals directly with relations between the Catholic Church and the Italian political milieu. This ‘interpenetration’, to borrow ex-abbot Ménalque’s word, gave rise to the near-‘agreements’ of the government, the many compromises, high levels of tension and numerous intrigues.
‘We have always been very autonomous. Cardinal Bertone tried to get the CEI back, but it was a disaster. The conflict between Bertone and Bagnasco was very painful. It caused extremely serious damage. But Bagnasco resisted,’ Cardinal Camillo Ruini explains. (He does not mention to me the fact that the disaster in question was the Boffo affair, which revolved around the gay question.)
For a long time, the CEI was close to the Christian Democrats, the centre-right Italian political party based around a kind of social Christianity and a powerful level of anti-communism. But out of opportunism, it always managed to be close to the powers that be. When Silvio Berlusconi became, for the first time in 1994, the president of the Italian Council, an important part of the CEI began flirting with his party Forza Italia, to anchor itself more strongly to the right.
Officially, of course, the CEI would not lower itself to make ‘political’ politics, and places itself above the fray. But as over sixty interviews carried out in Rome and in about fifteen Italian towns and cities make clear, the CEI’s flirtation with Berlusconi was an open secret. These unnatural relations, which lasted at least from 1994 until 2011, under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, during Berlusconi’s three terms of office, were accompanied by frequent discussions, including about the appointment of cardinals.
The Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, Giuseppe Betori, who received me in his huge palace on Piazza del Duomo, was at the time close to Cardinal Ruini, as secretary general of the CEI. During that conversation, recorded with his permission, and in the presence of my researcher Daniele, this pleasant cardinal, with his round face, gave me a detailed account of the story of the CEI.
‘We might say that the CEI was created with Paul VI; before him, it didn’t exist. The first informal meeting took place here, in Florence, in 1952, in this very office, where the Italian cardinals at the head of a diocese were meeting. It was still quite modest.’
Betori insists on the ‘Maritainian’ nature of the CEI, after the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, which might be interpreted as a democratic choice of the Church, and a desire to break with Mussolini’s fascism and anti-Semitism. It may, however, be to do with a desire to organize the separation of the political and religious spheres, a kind of Italian version of French laïcité (which was, it is true, never the idea of the CEI). It can also be subjected to another reading: that of a Catholic freemasonry with codes and co-options.
‘Since the beginning, the CEI has considered that everything to do with Italy, and relations with the Italian government, must go through it and not through the Vatican,’ the cardinal adds.
As secretary general of the CEI, Betori was in a position to gauge the power of Italian Catholicism: he was one of the main driving forces behind the demonstrations against civil unions in 2007, and incited the bishops to take to the streets.
Two structures were essential at the time to facilitate this anti-gay mobilization. The first was intellectual; the second more political. The president of the CEI, Camillo Ruini, who was close, as I have said, to Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Sodano, anticipated the battles to come about sexual morality. With a sure political sense, Ruini imagined the famous Progetto Culturale of the CEI. This ideological laboratory defined the CEI’s line on the family, AIDS and, shortly afterwards, homosexual unions. To prepare for it, confidential meetings were held around Cardinal Ruini, his secretary general Giuseppe Betori, the editor of the CEI’s journal, Dino Boffo, and a lay director, one Vittorio Sozzi.
‘We were a group of bishops and priests, with laymen, literary men, scientists and philosophers. We wanted to rethink the whole presence of Catholicism in Italian culture. My idea was to win back the elites, to get culture back. We did this with the bishops [Giuseppe] Betori, Fisichella, Scola, and the journalist Boffo too’, Camillo Ruini explains to me. (I have had exchanges with Boffo on Facebook and Sozzi on the telephone, but they refused formal interviews, unlike Mgr Betori, Fisichella and, therefore, Ruini. Finally, the entourage of Mauro Parmeggiani, the former private secretary to Cardinal Ruini, now Bishop of Tivoli, was crucial to this story about the CEI).
‘It was there, in this curious circle, that the anti-gay-marriage strategy of the CEI was dreamed up. Ruini came up with it, influenced by Boffo, with a deeply Gramscian logic: to win back the Catholic masses through culture,’ I am told by a source who was present at several of these meetings.
The template of this veritable ‘culture war’ recalls the one put in place by the American ‘new right’ in the 1980s, with the addition of political Gramscianism. According to Ruini, the Church, if it is to assert its influence, must recreate a ‘cultural hegemony’, relying on civil society, its intellectuals and its cultural representatives. This ‘Gramscianism for dummies’ can be summed up in one phrase: it’s through the battle of ideas that the political battle will be won. But what a strange source of ideas! The conservative wing of the Italian Church laying claim to the ideas of a Marxist thinker, and caricaturing it in this way, always had something suspicious about it. (During two interviews, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, a central figure in the CEI, confirmed to me the neo-Gramscian nature of the ‘cultural project’, but felt that it shouldn’t be over-estimated.)
Cardinal Ruini, flanked by Betori, Boffo, Parmeggiani and Sozzi, therefore imagined, with cynicism and hypocrisy, that it was possible to give faith back to the Italians by waging the battle of ideas. Sincerity is a different matter.
‘The Progetto Culturale of the CEI was not a cultural project, contrary to what its name might suggest, but an ideological project. It was Ruini’s idea and it finished with him, leading nowhere, when he left,’ I am told by Father Pasquale Iacobone, an Italian priest who is now one of the directors of the ‘ministry’ of culture at the holy see.
So not very cultural, and not very intellectual either, judging by the testimony of Ménalque: ‘Cultural? Intellectual? It was all mostly ideological, and all about jobs. The president of the CEI – first of all Ruini, who had three mandates, then Bagnasco, who had two – decided which priests were to become bishops, and which bishops would be made cardinals. They transmitted their list to the secretary of state at the Vatican, they talked about it, and it was done.’
The second body that played a part in this anti-gay mobilization was the movement Communion and Liberation. Unlike the CEI or its Progetto Culturale, which are elitist and religious structures, ‘CL’, as it is known, is a lay organization that has tens of thousands of members. Founded in Italy in 1954, this conservative movement now has branches in Spain, Latin America and many other countries. During the 1970s and 1980s, CL became close to Giulio Andreotti’s Christian Democratic Party, and then formed links with the Italian Socialist Party out of pure anti-communism. In the 1990s, after the Socialist Party and the Christian Democratic Party ran out of steam, the directors of the movement started making pacts with Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing party. It was an opportunistic choice for which Communion and Liberation would pay dearly, and which would begin its decline. At the same time, CL approached Italian employers’ associations and the most conservative fringes of society, cutting itself off from its base and its original ideas.
The man behind this hardening of attitudes was Angelo Scola, the future Cardinal of Milan, who therefore also became one of the organizers of the battle against civil unions in 2007.
After the left came to power, the new head of government, Romano Prodi, announced his intention to create a legal status for same-sex couples, a kind of civil union. In order to Italianize it, and not to take the American term ‘civil union’, the project was given a strange new name: DICO (for DIritti e doveri delle persone stabilmente COnviventi).
With the announcement of Romano Prodi’s official commitment, and the adoption of the planned law by the Italian government, in 2007 the CEI and Communion and Liberation mobilized. Cardinal Ruini first of all (even though he was a friend of Prodi), followed by his successor Bagnasco, set the Italian Church in motion. Cardinal Scola, a cynical ally of Berlusconi, did the same. Lacking their versatility, Berlusconi shared the anti-gay sentiment of the Italian cardinals: had he not said ‘it’s better to be excited by beautiful women than gay’? It was a good omen. And he made a reliable ally.
‘Prodi was my friend, that’s true. But not on civil unions! The project was called off. I brought down his government! I brought down Prodi! Civil unions: that was my battlefield,’ Cardinal Camillo Ruini tells me enthusiastically.
A multitude of texts, of pastoral notes and interviews with prelates, would therefore rain down on the Prodi government. Catholic associations were created, sometimes artificially; pro-Berlusconi groups became agitated. The Church, in fact, barely needed to be pressured: it mobilized itself on its own, conscientiously, but also for internal reasons.
‘The bishops and cardinals most active against DICO were homosexual prelates who were all the noisier in that they hoped to prove that they were no longer suspect. It’s very classic,’ comments another priest with the CEI whom I interviewed in Rome.
This explanation is obviously partial. An unfortunate chain of events explains the unprecedented mobilization of bishops and their misdemeanours. In fact, just as the first discussions were being held about the DICO project, the process for the appointment of the new president of the CEI was under way. So there was furious competition among several potential candidates. Ruini, the outgoing representative, and two archbishops, Carlo Caffarra in Bologna and Angelo Bagnasco in Genoa, fought for the post.
There was also an additional Italian incongruity. Unlike other episcopal conferences, the president of the CEI is traditionally appointed by the pope from a list of names put forward by the Italian bishops. Ruini was appointed by John Paul II, but in 2007 Benedict XVI was the king-maker. This partly explains the incredible barrage of homophobia to which Prodi’s legal project would be subjected.
At around this time, Cardinal Ruini wrote such a violent text against gay couples that the Vatican asked him to moderate the tone (according to two internal circles within the CEI). The very ‘closeted’ Caffarra spoke out in the media against gays, denouncing their lobby in parliament, because ‘it is impossible to consider [an MP] as Catholic if he accepts homosexual marriage’ (Caffarra would moderate his tone when he was definitively barred from the presidency of the CEI). As for Bagnasco, more intransigent than ever, he cranked up the pressure and became the head of the anti-DICO crusade to please Benedict XVI, who finally appointed him, in March 2007, in the middle of this controversy, to the presidency of the CEI.
A fourth man became active on the Roman scene: he too imagined that he was on the short list of Pope Benedict XVI and his secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone, who was eagerly following the case. Was he making a gesture? Had someone incited him to wage a campaign? Did he launch himself into the fray out of vanity? Rino Fisichella, a well-known Italian bishop, close to Angelo Sodano, was the rector of the Pontifical Lateran University (he would later be appointed president of the Academy for life by Benedict XVI before becoming president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization).
‘You can’t be a believer and live as a pagan. Above all, you have to put your lifestyle first. If the lifestyle of believers is not coherent with their profession of faith, there is a problem,’ Rino Fisichella told me without stammering or blushing when I interviewed him, in the presence of Daniele, in his office. (He too was recorded with his agreement.)
Then, to align his faith and his lifestyle, Fisichella launched his own campaign. One of the ideologues of the CEI, at the head of its commission for the ‘doctrine of faith’, he doubled-down on his rigid approach to the homosexual issue, as displayed by his presence at the head of the marches against civil unions.
‘For 15 years I was chaplain to the Italian parliament, so I know the MPs,’ Fisichella confirmed to me.
This guerrilla fighter of the Italian Church would have an important political impact. The Prodi government, technocratic and politically weak, would soon be divided on the issue of gay marriage, and on several others, rapidly weakening into disunity and finally falling, less than two years after it formed. Berlusconi would be back for a third time, in 2008.
The CEI had won the battle. DICO was dead and buried. But mightn’t the Church have gone too far? Voices began to wonder, particularly after a homily, now famous, by Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco – who had in the meantime been created cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI in return for his mobilization. That day, Bagnasco even compared the recognition of homosexual couples to the legitimization of incest and paedophilia. His words sparked fury among laypeople and in Italian political ranks. It also brought him death threats; and even though the police in Genoa did not take these very seriously, he would ask for, and be given, after applying a certain amount of pressure, a beefy bodyguard.
The ‘left’ wing of the episcopate had been embodied during this period, in Italy, by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who would break silence to express his disagreement with the Ruini, Scola, Fisichella and Bagnasco line. A former Archbishop of Milan, Martini may be considered one of the most ‘gay-friendly’ figures in the Italian Church; one of the most marginalized too, under John Paul II. A liberal Jesuit, born in Turin, he had written several open works about social questions, and given a much-noticed interview with the former mayor of Rome in which he showed himself to be favourable to homosexuals. In other texts, he defended the idea of a ‘Vatican III’ which would undertake deep reform of the Church with regard to questions of sexual morality, and he was open to a debate around homosexual unions, but without encouraging them. He defended the use of condoms under certain circumstances, in explicit disagreement with the thoughts of Benedict XVI, whom he opposed head-on. Finally, he wrote a regular column in the newspaper Corriere della Sera in which he was quite forthright about opening up the debate concerning women priests or the ordination of married men: the famous viri probati.
‘The Italian Church has a debt towards Martini. His intuitions, his way of being a bishop, the depth of his choices, his willingness to engage in dialogue with everybody, his courage, quite simply, were the sign of a modern approach towards Catholicism,’ I am told by Archbishop Matteo Zuppi, a man close to Pope Francis, during an interview in his office in Bologna.
On the margins of the Council of European Episcopal Conferences, of which he was president from 1986 until 1993, Carlo Maria Martini was part of the ‘St Gallen Group’, named after the Swiss city where several moderate cardinals met privately for a few years, between 1995 and 2006, around the Germans Walter Kasper and Karl Lehmann, the Italian Achille Silvestrini, the Belgian Godfried Danneels and the British cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, with the deliberate desire to suggest a progressive successor to John Paul II: Carlo Maria Martini, in fact.
‘The group’s initiative was down to Martini. The first meeting was held in Germany, in my diocese, then all the meetings took place in St Gallen,’ Cardinal Walter Kasper tells me during several conversations. ‘Silvestrini came every time, and he was one of its main figures. But it wasn’t a “mafia”, as Cardinal Danneels suggested. That was never the case! We never revealed names at the time. We never acted with
a view to a conclave. We were a group of pastors and friends, not a group of plotters.’
After the election of Joseph Ratzinger and the illness of Martini, the group lost its raison d’être and gradually dissolved. We might imagine, however, that its members anticipated, if they didn’t prepare for, the election of Francis. The Bishop of St Gallen, Ivo Fürer, who was also secretary general of the Council of European Episcopal Conferences, based in fact in St Gallen, was its kingpin. (The story of this informal group is beyond the scope of this book, but it is interesting to note that the gay question was regularly discussed there. Mgr Ivo Fürer, 88 and Cardinal Danneels, 85, are both very ill these days; but I managed to interview their colleagues in St Gallen and Brussels: they confirmed that the network was clearly an anti-Ratzinger group, some of the members of which were homophilic.)
Opposed to the conservative line of John Paul II and the repressive policies of Benedict XVI, Carlo Martini embodied, until his death in 2012 at the age of 85, an open and moderate face of the Church that would, a few months later, find its best spokesman with the election of Francis. (The votes of Martini’s supporters had already gone, in vain, to Bergoglio during the 2005 conclave to block the election of Benedict XVI.)
While the CEI attempted to block civil unions and to neutralize the heretic Martini, another farcical battle, to which it had the key, was being played out. Would this episcopal organization, which was tilting resolutely to the right, be revealed in fact to have a number of gay members?
A militant with Catholic Action and the Communion and Liberation movement, the layman Dino Boffo had been a close colleague of Camillo Ruini, future cardinal and president of the CEI since the early 1980s. Confidant, intimate colleague, ghost-writer and mentor to Ruini, he became a journalist on the CEI’s newspaper, Avvenire, before being promoted to deputy director in the early 1990s, then director, in 1994. After the election of Bagnasco to the head of the CEI, Boffo became close to the new cardinal, according to several sources. (For this investigation I engaged in dialogue with Boffo on Facebook, where he was immediately talkative, concluding his messages with an unforgettable ‘ciaoooo’, but he refused to talk to me on the record; on the other hand, a journalist with whom I worked in Rome met him in a park and was able to have a conversation with him in which Boffo rather imprudently confirmed some of the information in this book.)
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 47
