For reasons of political differences within the CEI and revelations of call-girl scandals involving the president of the Council, Silvio Berlusconi, Dino Boffo began to attack him just before 2009. Was he acting on his own, or to order? Was he still dependent on Ruini, or was he now a man of the new president of the CEI, Bagnasco, who was the head of the editorial board of Avvenire? Did they also want to compromise, through Boffo, Cardinals Ruini and Bagnasco, to whom he was close? We know that Boffo associated every day with Stanisław Dziwisz, private secretary to Pope John Paul II, from whom he took his orders, and with whom he was close friends. Did his protector incite him to write this article?
Either way, Boffo published, perhaps naively, a series of highly charged articles accusing Berlusconi of sexual misdeeds. Obviously the attack did not go unnoticed, coming as it did from the official journal of the Italian bishops. It could even be interpreted as a declaration of war against Berlusconi; what diplomats call a reversal of allegiances.
The response from the ‘president of the council’ was not long in coming. At the end of the summer of 2009, the daily newspaper Il Giornale, which belongs to the Berlusconi family, published an article in which Boffo was violently attacked for delivering a moral lecture to Berlusconi, when he himself had been ‘sentenced for harassment’, and for being homosexual (a copy of his police record was made public).
The Boffo affair would last several years, and be the subject of a number of trials. In the meantime, Boffo would be fired from Avvenire by the CEI, on the orders of the entourage of Pope Benedict XVI, before being partly re-employed by the Italian episcopate when it was proven that the published police record was a forgery, and that he had not been sentenced for harassment. Dino Boffo was compensated for false dismissal, and he is now supposed to be an employee of the CEI or one of its departments. Finally, several people were sentenced in this case: the article in Il Giornale was found to be defamatory.
According to those familiar with the dizzying Boffo case, it is said to be a succession of political scores being settled among homosexual factions in the Vatican and the CEI over the Berlusconi issue, with an uneasy role being played by the Communion and Liberation movement, which had become the interface between the party of the prime minister and the Italian Church. Pope John Paul II’s personal secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz, and Cardinal Ruini, were at the heart of this battle, as were Cardinals Angelo Sodano and Leonardo Sandri and secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone, but not necessarily on the same side – the misalliances ran so deep.
‘In the Vatican they wanted to put an end to Ruini’s influence, or at least weaken it, and decided to do so specifically over the gay question,’ the ex-CEI priest, Ménalque, observes. (According to the revelations in the book Sua Santità, by Gianluigi Nuzzi, Boffo accused Bertone by name of having been behind the attack on him, in secret letters to Georg Gänswein, which have now been published. But because it does not clearly address the homosexual question, the book remains opaque for those who do not understand these networks.)
In the end, Boffo is said to have been caught up in a tangle of contrary Machiavellian allegiances and serial denunciations. His supposed homosexuality is said to have been leaked to the Berlusconi press by the Vatican, perhaps by the teams of secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican police, or the director of l’Osservatore romano, Giovanni Maria Vian. All suggestions that were, of course, firmly denied in a communiqué from the holy see in February 2010, joined on this occasion by the CEI. (When I interviewed him five times, recording our conversations with his agreement, Giovanni Maria Vian, who was close to Bertone and an enemy of both Ruini and Boffo, firmly denied having been the ‘mole’ in this case, but he gave me clues that proved to be very enlightening. As for Cardinal Ruini, whom I also interviewed, he defended Boffo and Dziwisz.)
‘The Boffo affair was a settling of scores among gays, among several gay factions of the CEI and the Vatican,’ confirms an expert in Roman Catholicism who was an adviser to the Italian prime minister, at the Palazzo Chigi.
And here we find another rule of The Closet – the twelfth: Rumours peddled about the homosexuality of a cardinal or a prelate are often leaked by homosexuals, themselves closeted, attacking their liberal opponents. They are essential weapons used in the Vatican against gays by gays.
Ten years after the failure of the first proposed law, Act II of the battle of civil unions was played out in parliament at the end of 2015. Some people predicted the same circus as in 2007 – but in fact times had changed.
The new prime minister, Matteo Renzi, who had opposed the proposition of the law ten years previously, even taking to the street against the project, had also changed his mind. He even promised a law on civil unions in his investiture speech in 2014. Conviction? Calculation? Opportunism? Probably for all those reasons at once and, first and foremost, to satisfy the left wing of the Democratic Party and his majority, a hybrid catch-all that brought together former communists, the traditional left and moderates from the old Christian Democratic Party. One of Matteo Renzi’s centre-right ministers, Maurizio Lupi, was himself close to the conservative Catholic Communion and Liberation movement. (To tell the story of his new battle, I am drawing on interviews that I had with several Italian deputies and senators, and with five of the main advisers to Prime Minister Matteo Renzi – Filippo Sensi, Benedetto Zacchiroli, Francesco Nicodemo, Roberta Maggio and Alessio De Giorgi.)
The question of civil unions was taken seriously by Matteo Renzi, and it deserved to be. It was the hot topic of the moment, which troubled the fine running of his government. He could even have lost his majority over this proposed law, which the prime minister himself did not initiate, but which, he said in essence, he would be prepared to defend if parliament could agree on a text.
In 2014, Italy was still one of the few Western countries without a law protecting ‘coppie di fatto’, couples living out of wedlock, whether they were heterosexual or not. The country was lagging behind in Western Europe, universally mocked and regularly condemned by the European Court of Human Rights. In Italy itself, the constitutional court asked parliament to produce a law. Matteo Renzi put the question in his three-year diary, promising a text for September 2014; before forgetting his promise.
On the ground, however, pressure was mounting. The mayor of Rome, Ignazio Marino, soon acknowledged that 16 homosexual marriages had been contracted abroad, and he had them transcribed into Italian civil law, causing a lively debate among the majority. The mayors of Milan, Turin, Bologna, Florence, Naples and about fifteen other cities did the same. Hoping to put an end to the movement, Angelino Alfano, Renzi’s interior minister (belonging to the new centre right), decreed that these ‘documents’ were illegal and of no legal effect: the mayors had given gay couples, he joked, an ‘autograph’.
In Bologna, where I went at the end of 2014, the atmosphere was electric. The mayor of Bologna, Virginio Merola, had just told the minister of the interior: ‘Io non obbedisco’ (I will not obey). And in a tweet, he even announced: ‘Bologna in pole position to support civil rights!’ The gay community, particularly well organized, stood behind their mayor.
In Palermo, where I met Mirko Antonino Pace, the president of the Arcigay Association, at around the same time, he described to me an unprecedented mobilization in Sicily, a region that was considered highly conservative in terms of morals.
‘During the primaries,’ he told me, ‘Matteo Renzi was the most timid of candidates on LGBT rights; he opposed a firm “no” to gay marriage. But unlike previous prime ministers, he seemed to want to do something.’
During meetings with gay Italian militants in the spring of 2015, when I went to Naples, Florence and Rome this time, I had a sense that the LGBT movement was a real pressure cooker on the brink of exploding. Everywhere, militants were meeting, demonstrating and mobilizing.
‘Italy is gradually changing. Something happened after the referendum in Ireland. Italy isn’t moving on its own: it is being forced, incited to c
hange. How can we justify the fact that there is no law in favour of homosexual couples in Italy? Everyone realizes that we can’t justify it any longer. We have to believe in change if we want it to happen!’ I am told by Gianluca Grimaldi, a journalist I met in Naples in March 2015.
What still worried the prime minister was the calendar, and he confided in his team around this time: ‘We risk losing the Catholic vote.’ Then he prevaricated and tried to gain some time. The pope, in fact, called a second Synod on the Family, at the Vatican, for October 2015: it was impossible to launch a debate on civil unions before that date. So they told the impatient parliamentarians, beginning with Monica Cirinnà, that they would have to wait a little longer.
When I interviewed senator Cirinnà, the first mover behind the text in favour of civil unions, she subtly summed up the internal tensions provoked by the proposed law: ‘I knew it would be a difficult law, and that it would divide the country. A law that would cause a problem within the Democratic Party, that would profoundly divide conservatives and progressives in Italy. But the debate was never between laypeople and Catholics; that would be an incorrect analysis. The conflict divided both conservatives and progressives, whether they were on the right or the left.’
The Church, which had not said its final word, continued to influence the elected politicians, even those on the left. Still at the head of the CEI, Cardinal Bagnasco promised to send the bishops and politicians into the street and bring down the government again.
‘We knew that the Italian bishops, mobilized by Cardinal Bagnasco, well known for his ultra-conservative ideas, were preparing to use all their representatives inside and outside parliament to derail the law,’ Monica Cirinnà confirms.
Matteo Renzi, a former Catholic scout, was well informed of the situation within the Church and of the personal issues that concerned certain prelates. At the Palazzo Chigi, the seat of the Italian prime minister, his head of cabinet, Benedetto Zacchiroli, a former seminarian and deacon, is openly homosexual: he was unofficially in charge of relations with the CEI, and had been following the case very closely. Several times, the conservative right had attacked Matteo Renzi over the fact that the person in charge of relations with the Catholics was gay!
The left-wing politicians fought back, for example in Bologna and Naples. According to two first-hand witnesses, both of whom took part in the ‘negotiation’, Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, Archbishop of Bologna, was said to have been ‘approached’ because of his legendary homophobia: he was told, at a tense meeting, that rumours were circulating about his double life and his gay entourage, and that if he mobilized against civil unions, it was likely that gay activists would spread their information this time … The cardinal listened, flabbergasted. Over the weeks that followed, he seemed to lower his guard for the first time, and softened his homophobic ardour. (Now that Carlo Caffarra is dead, I have talked about him to local MPs, a senior police officer, the prime minister’s cabinet and his successor in Bologna, Archbishop Matteo Zuppi.)
A pact of a different kind had been made in Naples with Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe. This former prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples was known for the cleverness of his gossip, the gaiety of his heart and his love of lace. A man close to John Paul II, he distinguished himself by violent attacks on Gay Pride in Naples, where he was appointed archbishop in 2006. When the debate on civil unions arose, homosexual militants discreetly contacted him, asking him to moderate his words. Since rumours concerning his financial management and the goings-on in his entourage could have injured his reputation and cost him his post in Rome, Sepe proved to be less rigid. Having been very anti-gay in 2007, he became almost gay-friendly in 2016. Perhaps fearing a scandal, the cardinal even offered invitations to gay activists to let them meet the pope! (Mgr Sepe did not want to see me, even though I sent several requests; two gay militants, a Neapolitan journalist and a diplomat based in Naples, confirmed this information.)
At this stage of the debate, Matteo Renzi had no intention of abandoning his proposed law to satisfy bishops who were also a bit too fond of lace; or to oppose the Church. So, late in 2015, he decided to make a pact with the moderate wing of the CEI, which now has its ‘hawks’ and its ‘doves’. Yesterday, under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the CEI was a Brezhnevian monolith; now, under Francis, a Gorbachevian pope, it is a place of debate. An agreement is possible.
High-level dialogues were conducted with Mgr Nunzio Galantino, the new secretary of the CEI, friendly and close to Francis. According to my information, there was never any question of blackmail, although it is possible that the bishop might have panicked at the idea of a rosary of cardinals being outed in the Italian press. The parliamentarians mobilized and, supported by the Palazzo Chigi, presented the ‘doves’ of the CEI, in a classic dialectic within the left, with a simple alternative. It is the usual language of the left, which raises the threat and spectre of the extreme left to have its reforms passed. The deal was clear: it would be civil unions with the government in place, without right of adoption; or else, soon, gay marriage, and adoption, with the hard left, gay activists and the supreme court. Your choice.
As well as these meetings between the senior representatives of the majority party and the CEI, there were – as I am able to reveal here – secret meetings between Matteo Renzi and the pope himself, in which the question of civil unions is supposed to have been discussed frankly and at length. Traditionally, Italian prime ministers have always engaged in dialogue ‘on the other side of the Tiber’, according to a famous expression which means that they informally seek the advice of the Vatican. But this time, Matteo Renzi met the pope in person to resolve the problem at first hand. Several ultra-confidential meetings were held, always at night, between Francis and the prime minister, tête-à-têtes without the presence of the two men’s advisers (these secret meetings, of which there were at least two, have been confirmed to me by one of Matteo Renzi’s chief advisers).
It is impossible to know the exact tenor of these confidential exchanges. But three things remain certain: the pope proved favourable to civil unions in the early 2000s, in Argentina, and was then opposed to marriage: so a possible agreement with Matteo Renzi along the same lines appears coherent. Then, Francis did not speak out against civil unions in 2015–16 and did not get involved in the Italian political debate: he remained silent. And we know that with Jesuits, silence is also the adoption of a position! Most importantly: the CEI did not really mobilize against civil unions in 2016, as it had done in 2007. According to my information, the pope asked the loyal Mgr Nunzio, whom he put in charge of the CEI, to keep a low profile.
In fact, they had worked out, at the Palazzo Chigi, that the Church could be ‘nominalist’, using a term employed by the popes in Avignon and the Franciscan friars and their novices in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
‘The CEI became nominalist. I mean that it was prepared to let us get on with it, without saying anything, as long as we didn’t mention the word “marriage” or the sacraments,’ another adviser to Renzi tells me.
At the Palazzo Chigi they were carefully following the internal battle within the CEI that followed on from this secret agreement, and were amused by the harsh confrontation between hetero, crypto-gay, unstraight and closeted factions. The pope’s instructions, which seem to have been to let civil unions go ahead, immediately passed on by Nunzio Galantino, provoked a fierce reaction in the conservative wing of the CEI. Galantino had been imposed as secretary general by Francis as soon as he was elected, but he did not have full powers. Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco was still president from 2014 to 2016, even though his days were numbered (the pope would remove him in 2017).
‘We mobilized against the proposed law in 2016 in exactly the same way as we had in 2007,’ Bagnasco insisted over and over again during my conversation with him.
The supporter of a fighting form of Catholicism, Cardinal Bagnasco mobilized all his contacts in the press and in parliament, and of course among th
e Italian bishops. So the journal Avvenire, bellicose on the subject, issued multiple statements against civil unions. Similarly, in July 2015 a long article was addressed to all members of parliament to ‘make them see reason’. Bagnasco was active on all fronts, as he had been in the heady days of 2007.
And yet the spirit of the age had changed. ‘Family Day’ did not enjoy the same success in June 2015 as it had done in February 2007, when more than five hundred associations, encouraged by the CEI, had mobilized against the first proposed law on civil unions.
‘This time it was a universal flop,’ Senator Monica Cirinnà tells me.
The movement was running out of steam. In fact, Francis’s line had come out on top: the argument for civil unions as a bulwark against gay marriage was crucial. Not to mention the fact that since the pope appointed cardinals and bishops, standing up to him meant compromising one’s future. Homophobia was a condition of consecration under John Paul II and Benedict XVI; under Francis, the ‘rigid’ clerics who led a double life no longer had the odour of sanctity.
‘Bagnasco was already in decline. He was seriously weakened, and he was no longer supported by either the pope or the Curia. He himself had understood that if he raised his voice too loudly against the proposed law, he would hasten his fall,’ an adviser to Matteo Renzi confided in me.
‘The parishes aren’t mobilized,’ a conservative cardinal observed with regret.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 48
