The final option chosen by the CEI can be summed up in a single phrase: ‘make a sacrifice for the greater good’. The CEI confirmed its opposition to the planned law, but in contrast to 2017 it moderated its troops. The hawks of 2007 became the doves of 2016. It didn’t, though, yield on adoption. It even engaged in a secret lobbying campaign for this right offered to homosexual couples to be withdrawn from the planned law (a line that might also be that of the pope).
The CEI would find an unexpected ally in this umpteenth battle: the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo. According to the Italian press and my own sources, the populist party, which includes several closeted homosexuals among its leaders, was said to have negotiated a Machiavellian pact with the Vatican and the CEI: abstention on adoption by its members of parliament in return for support from the Church for its candidate in Rome’s council elections (Virginia Raggi did indeed become mayor in June 2016). Several meetings were held on this subject, including one at the Vatican, with three senior figures from the Five Star Movement, in the presence of Mgr Becciu, the pope’s ‘minister’ of the interior, and perhaps of Mgr Fisichella, a bishop who had long been very influential within the CEI. (These meetings were made public in a report in La Stampa, and have also been confirmed by an internal source in the CEI; they might indicate a certain duplicity on the part of Pope Francis. When asked about it, Mgr Fisichella denied having taken part in any such meeting.)
The pusillanimity of Matteo Renzi and the secret pact of the Five Star movement translated into a new compromise: the right to adoption was withdrawn from the proposed law. Thanks to this considerable concession, the debate calmed down. The 5,000 opposition amendments were reduced to a few hundred, and the ‘Cirinnà’ law, named after the senator who put it forward, was adopted this time.
‘This law really changed Italian society. The first unions were celebrated with parties, sometimes organized by the mayors of the big cities themselves, inviting the population to come and congratulate the couples. In the first eight months after the adoption of the law, over three thousand civil unions have been celebrated in Italy,’ I am told by Monica Cirinnà, the senator of the Democratic Party who has become, for fighting for the law, one of the icons of Italian gays.
So Pope Francis performed a big clear-out in the CEI. At first, with a certain Jesuit perversity, he asked Cardinal Bagnasco in person to do the cleaning-up work on the financial misdemeanours and abuses of power of the Italian Episcopal Conference. The holy father no longer wanted a ‘self-referential’ (one of the secret codes to talk about practising homosexuals) Italian Church consisting of local potentates and careerist corporatism. Wherever the pope carried out surveys, in the large Italian cities, he often discovered homophiles and ‘closeted homosexuals’ at the head of the main archbishoprics. There are now more ‘practising’ homosexuals in the CEI than there are at San Francisco City Hall. Most importantly, the pope asked Bagnasco to take radical measures with regard to sexual abuse, whereas the CEI had often refused in principle to denounce suspect priests to the police and the courts. In fact, on this point, Pope Francis was removed from reality: we know from the revelation of an internal document of 2014 that the CEI of Cardinals Ruini and Bagnasco organized a genuine protection system, exonerating bishops of any obligation to pass their information to the law and even refusing to listen to the victims. There were many cases of paedophilia in Italy during the 1990s and 2000s, and they were always played down by the CEI. (The case of Alessandro Maggiolini, former Bishop of Como, is symptomatic: this prelate, both ultra-homophobic and ‘closeted’, was supported by the CEI when he was suspected of protecting a paedophile priest.)
After asking Bagnasco to do this unpleasant job, and imposing a deputy on him that he didn’t want (Bishop Nunzio Galantino), the pope finally removed the cardinal.
‘It’s a classic Jesuit technique. Francis appoints a deputy, Galantino, who starts making all the decisions in place of the boss, Bagnasco, and then one day he replaces the boss for never making any decisions and becoming useless,’ a French Vatican expert tells me. And she adds: ‘The pope applied the same Machiavellian technique to Cardinal Sarah, to Cardinal Müller, to Burke, and with Pell!’
Relations became a bit tenser when Bagnasco, perhaps understanding the trap he had fallen into, sparred with the pope when he suggested that Italian churches should be sold to help the poor: ‘It’s a joke,’ Bagnasco carped.
Francis punished him initially by excluding him from the plenary session of the important Congregation of Bishops, which plays a central role in the appointment of all prelates; in his place, contrary to all traditions, he appointed the number 2 in the CEI. As the cardinal continued to put off making reforms, playing down the importance of paedophilia and denigrating him in private, Francis bided his time. And, at the normal term of the end of his mandate, the pope imposed Bagnasco’s successor, without even giving him the hope of being a candidate for his own succession. So in 2014, Gualtiero Bassetti, a Bergoglian bishop who was rather in favour of homosexual civil unions, was created cardinal by Francis (one of the few Italians to have been made a cardinal in this pontificate) before being appointed, in 2017, president of the CEI.
Other heads would fall. The Curia bishop Rino Fisichella, an influential operator within the CEI who was expecting to be created cardinal, was removed from the list of potential candidates. Angelo Scola, the powerful Cardinal Archbishop of Milan and a tutelary figure within the conservative Communion and Liberation movement, was in turn given early retirement by Francis, who made this representative of the Ratzingerian wing pay for his political manoeuvres, his cynical alliance with Berlusconi and his silences on sexual abuse by priests.
At the same time, Francis put a stop to the Progetto Culturale of the CEI, a homophobic structure within the organization, specifically removed Vittorio Sozzi and marginalized Dino Boffo.
Francis’s line was clear. He wanted to normalize and re-Italianize the CEI; as he would have said to his bishops: ‘After all, you only represent Italy.’
For a long time in the Vatican, the rule of evictions bore the decorous euphemism ‘promoveatur ut amoveatur’: promoted in order to be removed. A prelate was appointed to a new mission to remove him from the one where he was no longer wanted. Now Francis took his gloves off. He fired people without warning, and without anywhere for them to go.
‘Francis really does have a cunning perversity. He appointed to an Italian city a bishop known for fighting against prostitution, in replacement of one known for his use of male prostitutes!’ one archbishop tells me.
A priest in the Curia, one of the best informed, gives me this analysis shared by several prelates or close collaborators of the pope: ‘I think that Francis, who is not naïve and who knew what to expect, was flabbergasted by the homosexualization of the Italian episcopate. Also, if he perhaps initially imagined that he would be able to “cleanse” the Vatican and the CEI of their homophilic cardinals, bishops and prelates, now he is obliged to make do with them. For want of heterosexual candidates, he has been forced to surround himself with cardinals that he knows to be gay. He no longer has the illusion that he can change the existing state of affairs. He can only “contain” the phenomenon. What he is trying to do is a policy of “containment”.’
Still progress, of a kind.
18
Seminarians
For several months, Daniele had been investigating the seminaries and universities of Rome. Together we managed over the years to identify ‘informers’ who were capable of helping us with each of the ‘major’ Roman seminaries. We now had contacts in about twelve of these pontifical establishments: in the Dominican University of St Thomas Aquinas (called the Angelicum), at the University Urbaniana, the Lateran University, the PNAC (the American college), the Gregorian University (Jesuit), the Ethiopian College, the French seminary and the Germanicum, the Pontifical University of St Anselm (Benedictine), the University of the Holy Cross (Opus Dei), and even at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina
Apostolorum of the Legionaries of Christ.
Thanks to these ‘representatives’, we were able to approach over fifty gay seminarians in Rome and, by osmosis, dozens more in several other countries, particularly France, Spain, Switzerland and Latin America. This way, I was able to investigate the homosexual ‘problem’ at the heart of the Church: in the alma mater of the priests.
My first two seminarians were introduced to me in Rome by Mauro Angelozzi, one of the directors of the LGBT Mario Mieli association. We met confidentially, at the headquarters of this cultural centre. I then saw the seminarians again and, thanks to them, was able to extend my initial network. And when I was spending an evening with Mauro, who organizes the famous gay parties known as the Muccassassina (‘The Murderous Cow’) every Friday evening in Rome, he introduced me to one of his colleagues, who worked with him in organizing the Muccassassina. It was then that Mauro told me, while finishing the introductions, ‘He’s a seminarian too!’
‘I’ve changed, haven’t I?’
The boy saying this to me is the waiter in one of my favourite restaurants in Rome, the Trattoria Monti, near the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore.
‘You see, I’m not as young as I used to be!’ adds the waiter, who posed in a famous calendar of handsome seminarians.
For a few months, in fact, I’d been intrigued by this calendar, on sale in the streets of Rome and even at the gates of the Vatican. Price: 10 euros. Every year, 12 seminarians and young priests have their photographs taken. The black-and-white pictures, of handsome young men in dog-collars, are, of course, enticing, and several of these young clerics are so sexy that one might suggest the Church had assembled a line-up worthy of the cast of Glee. Some cardinals, it is said, never fail to buy the calendar every year; but for my part I’ve never seen it hanging in a single office in the Vatican.
It was then that I discovered the truth. The waiter in front of me had indeed posed in the famous Calendario Romano. He is undoubtedly gay. But he has never been a seminarian!
A dream shattered. Robert Mickens, a Vaticanologist who has already looked into this mysterious calendar and with whom I have dinner at the Trattoria Monti, confirms this mean trick. In fact, the calendar is a fake. However hot they might be, the young men posing in front of the lens of the Venetian photographer Piero Pazzi are neither seminarians nor young priests, but models selected by a gay-friendly company that came up with this little business idea. And it works! A new edition has been published every year since 2003, often with the same photos. It allegedly sells 100,000 copies annually (according to the publisher; the figures are impossible to check).
One of the models is the manager of a gay bar; another is the waiter I’m talking to, who adds: ‘No, I’m not a seminarian. I never have been. I posed a long time ago. I got paid for it.’
He, at least, has never dreamed of becoming a priest. The Church, he confirms, laughing ‘is much too homophobic for me’.
False trail. To investigate the gay seminarians of Rome, we had to find another way in.
In 2005, Pope Benedict XVI approved an important instruction, published by the Congregation for Catholic Education, asking that no more candidates with ‘deep homosexual tendencies’ be ordained. The text was confirmed in 2016 by the Congregation of the Clergy: to be ordained as a priest one first had to put one’s emotional life in order!
The Church was thus re-emphasizing the obligation of sexual abstinence, and stipulating that access to the priesthood is forbidden to ‘those who practise homosexuality, show deep-seated homosexual tendencies or maintain what is called gay culture’. Out of prudence, the document adds an ‘exception’ for people with ‘homosexual tendencies which are the expression of a transitory problem such as, for example, that of an unfinished adolescence’. Finally, the document reminds us that it would be ‘seriously imprudent’ to admit to the seminary someone ‘who had not attained a mature, settled and free emotional state, chaste and faithful in celibacy’.
Inspired and approved by Benedict XVI, this text from 2005 was written by the Polish cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education. He further insisted in a note to the bishops all over the world (which I have managed to get hold of) that the rule was limited to future priests: ‘The instruction does not call into question the validity of the ordination and situation of priests who are already ordained and who have homosexual tendencies.’
Grocholewski knows the subject very well – and not only because he bears the first name of the bisexual hero of The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar. His friends warned him that calling into question the ordination of homosexual priests would lead to such a bloodbath that the Church would probably never recover: there would hardly be any cardinals left in Rome, none in the Curia and perhaps not even a pope! The former Italian member of parliament and gay activist Franco Grillini often repeated: ‘If all the gays in the Catholic Church were to leave at once – something which we would like very much – they would cause it serious operational problems.’
In the Vatican, this Polish cardinal had taken a great interest in the sex lives of priests and bishops, out of personal inclination and professional obsession. According to two sources, including a priest who worked with him, Grocholewski is even supposed to have assembled files on the inclinations of several cardinals and bishops. One of them, a bishop from the famous ring of corruption around John Paul II, where the misappropriation of funds, and prostitution went together like a coach and horses, is still waiting for the cardinal’s hat!
Aside from the precise guidelines issued by Cardinal Ratzinger, as the situation deteriorated Grocholewski was led to formulate instructions designed to banish the evil. Homosexuality had literally run ‘out of control’ in the seminaries. All over the world, scandal followed hard upon scandal, abuse upon abuse. But these outrages were as nothing compared to another, still more pressing reality: the files emerging from the nunciatures and archbishoprics testified to a de facto normalisation of homosexuality. Seminarians lived almost normally as couples, pro-LGBT meetings were held in Catholic establishments, and going out in the evening to gay bars in the city had become, if not accepted practice, then at least a possibility.
In 2005, when he wrote his circular, Grocholewski received a request for help from the United States to deal with the homosexualization of the seminaries. Some were said to be ‘almost specialists in the recruitment of homosexuals’. The same was true in Austria, where the seminary of Sankt-Polten had become a model of the genre: photographs shown in the press show the director of the Catholic institution, as well as the deputy director, kissing student priests (the seminary has since been closed).
‘It was a very big scandal in the Vatican,’ confirms the former priest Francesco Lepore. The photographs were really shocking. But it was an extreme case, most unusual. The fact that the director of the seminary was himself involved in this misbehaviour is, to my knowledge, unique. On the other hand, the fact that seminaries have a large majority of young gays has become quite banal: they experience their homosexuality as perfectly normal, and go out discreetly to gay clubs without too much difficulty.
Given scandals of this kind, the American episcopate ordered an inspection of 56 seminarians. It was entrusted to the archbishop of the armed forces, the American Edwin O’Brien. It was a choice that seemed odd to some; O’Brien would later be identified as being part of a ‘homosexual current’ in Mgr Viganò’s ‘Testimonianza’.
Another symptomatic case that Grocholewski knew well was that of the seminaries in the country of his birth: the Archbishop of Poznań, one Juliusz Paetz, was accused of sexual harassment of seminarians; he denied it but had to resign from his post. We might also cite numerous affairs of ‘disorderly conduct’, which were much talked about in Jesuit seminaries in Germany, Dominican ones in France, Benedictine ones in Italy and England … As for Brazil, hundreds of seminarians, priests and even bishops were filmed chatting up a top model on their webcam, and even masturbating in front o
f the camera (for what would become the famous documentary Amores Santos, directed by Dener Giovanini).
All of these scandals – and other less notorious ones, which the Church claimed it was totally powerless to deal with – led the Vatican to take measures. According to the cardinals that I interviewed, no one ever believed in the efficacy of these, for three reasons. The first was that they inevitably deprived the Church of vocations, at a time when it cruelly needed them, homosexuality having supplied a recruitment base for decades. We might speculate that the crisis in vocations in Europe was connected with this phenomenon: gay liberation hardly encourages homosexuals to become priests, especially when they feel increasingly rejected by a Church that has become homophobic to the point of caricature.
The second reason was that the measures forced homosexual seminarians who had stayed in the religious institution to hide even more: they would lead a yet more ‘closeted’ double life than before. The psychological effects of such repression and internalized homophobia in seminaries obviously cause great confusion, which can lead to serious existential unease, suicides and future perversion. So the Grocholewski circular only made the problem worse, rather than containing it.
The third reason is a legal one: forbidding entry to seminaries on the grounds of a candidate’s supposed sexual orientation has become discriminatory. Of course, such discrimination is illegal in many countries. Pope Francis said the following in December 2018, ‘Homosexuality among the clergy is a very serious issue which should be the subject of discernment among candidates for the priesthood or the religious life’. However he insists: ‘Homosexuality is nonetheless a reality which it is impossible to deny. This is what is causing me much concern’. For this the Pope was heavily criticised.
One of the people who inspired this text deserves a mention here: he is the French priest-psychoanalyst Tony Anatrella, an adviser to the pontifical councils on the family and health. A theorist close to Cardinal Ratzinger and whose influence in Rome was significant at the time, Anatrella stated in 2005: ‘We must free ourselves from the belief that insofar as a homosexual respects his commitment to continence lived in chastity he will pose no problems, and could therefore be ordained a priest.’ Anatrella argued insistently that not only practising homosexuals should be got rid of, but also those with ‘inclinations’ and tendencies who don’t necessarily act upon them.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 49
