In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Aren’t gay seminarians who haven’t yet renounced their sexuality still happy and blossoming? When I ask them about this point, their faces close, their smiles fade, doubt creeps in. Apart from the South American Lafcadio, who tells me that he ‘loves his life’, the others insist on the unease of always being ‘in a grey area’, slightly hidden, slightly silent, and the risks that they take for their future career in the Church.

  For many people, the seminary is an opportunity to ‘come out’, but it’s also a place where they become aware of an impasse. Most struggle with their homosexuality, which had become oppressive in this context. As the Poet writes: ‘laden with my vice, the vice that has spread its roots of suffering in my side since the age of reason – which rises to heaven, beats me, knocks me over, drags me along’.

  They are all afraid of missing out on their lives, of becoming fossils among people who resemble them too closely. At the seminary, life becomes clouded: they discover what their lives as priests will be, surrounded by lies and fantasies, the harsh life of a lonely and insincere Jansenist, a life flickering like a candle flame. As far as the eye can see, there is only suffering, silence, acts of tenderness prevented as soon as they are imagined, ‘false sentiments’, ‘captive beauties’ and most of all, ‘the deserts of love’; time passing, youth fading, the spectre of being prematurely old.

  Seminarians are obsessed with the idea of exhausting their ‘nocturnal capital’ before they have even had access to it. In the gay community, people generally speak of ‘gay death’; the ‘expiry date’ for a homosexual is said to be fixed at 30, the age that marks the end of easy cruising! Better to be married off before the axe falls. And yet, not having been able to give free rein to their passion before this, it is often at that age, when their ‘sexual market value’ declines, that many priests start going out. Hence the obsessive anxiety of seminarians who remain afraid to make up for time lost in the mist, the chem-sex and spanking parties. Hidden away in their seminaries, will they have to wait to be 30 years old to grow up in the back rooms?

  This dilemma, which has been described to me so often by Catholic priests, has increased tenfold. Before the 1970s, the Church was a refuge for those who suffered discrimination outside it; since then, it has become a prison for those who have come and those who have stayed – they all feel cramped and confined, while gays outside are freed. The Poet again: ‘Oh Christ! eternal theft of energies.’

  Unlike other, older seminarians, who have talked to me about flagellations, self-punishment or physical mistreatment, Ydier, Axel and Lafcadio have not endured such extreme torment; but they too have had their share of tears. They have cursed life and that suffering that feeds on itself as consenting and masochistic. They so wish they had been different, in the end repeating the terrible cry of André Gide: ‘I’m not like the others! I’m not like the others!’

  Which leaves masturbation. The Church’s obsession with it has reached its apogee in present-day seminaries, according to my interviewees, when priests themselves know from experience that it doesn’t make you blind. Of course, such exaggerated attempts to control and constrain behaviour barely have any effect these days: we are a long way from the time when seminarians ‘who had yielded to temporary onanism’ could fear for their health and be ‘persuaded to smell the sulphur’ (in Angelo Rinaldi’s memorable phrase).

  Masturbation, which was once a taboo subject in seminaries, and which was not discussed, is now a major subject that is frequently mentioned by teachers. This vain obsession is not aimed at the rejection of any form of sexuality without the purpose of procreation (the official reason for the prohibition) but, primarily, at the totalitarian control of the individual, depriving them of their family and their bodies; a genuine depersonalization is bound to follow. A fixed idea, repeated so frequently, so manically today, is that onanism becomes a kind of ‘closet’ within a ‘closet’, a double-locked form of homosexual identity. While priests engage in it furiously, dreaming of the ‘sweet burn’ of freedom.

  ‘To think they still teach seminarians that masturbation is a sin – it’s medieval! And the fact that it’s more discussed and targeted than paedophilia tells us a lot about the Catholic Church,’ Robert Mickens tells me.

  Another day, when I’m coming back from the Vatican, a young man stares hard at me near the Ottaviano Metro station. Wearing a big wooden cross on his tee-shirt, he is accompanied by an old priest (as he will tell me later), and, after an awkward moment, he comes over to me. His name is Andrea, and he shyly asks for my telephone number. Under his arm he has a copy of AsSaggi biblici, a theological manual edited by Franco Manzi – which gives him away and also makes him interesting in my eyes. I spark up a conversation.

  At the end of that evening, we have a coffee in a bar in Rome, and he quickly admits to me that he gave me a false name and that he is a seminarian. We will talk again several times and, like the other future priests, Andrea describes his universe to me.

  Contrary to expectations, Andrea, openly homosexual with me, is a devotee of Benedict XVI. ‘I preferred Benedetto. I don’t like Francis. I don’t like this pope. What I’d really like to do is re-establish contact with the Church from before Vatican II.’

  How does he reconcile his gay life with his life as a seminarian? Andrea shakes his head, visibly distressed and regretting that ambivalence. Between pride and flagellation, he was hesitant in his reply. ‘You see, I’m not as good a Christian as that. I’ve tried. And yet I can’t do it. The flesh, you know. And I reassure myself by reflecting that most of the seminarians I associate with are like me.’

  ‘Did you choose the seminary because you were gay?’

  ‘I don’t see things that way. The seminary was primarily a temporary solution. I wanted to see if homosexuality was a lasting thing for me. Afterwards, the seminary became a compromise solution. My parents want to believe that I’m not a homosexual; they like the fact that I’m in the seminary. And in a way it lets me live according to my tastes. It isn’t easy, but it’s better that way. If you have any doubts about your sexuality, if you don’t want people around you to know you’re gay, if you don’t want to hurt your mother: then you go to the seminary! To return to my own reasons, the predominant one is clearly homosexuality, even if I wasn’t originally completely aware of it. I only really had confirmation of my homosexuality once I entered the seminary.’

  And Andrea adds, in a sociological vein: ‘I think it’s a kind of rule: a large majority of priests have discovered that they were attracted by boys in the homoerotic and strictly masculine universe of the seminaries. When you’re at your school in the Italian provinces, you have only a very small chance of meeting homosexuals that you like. It’s always quite risky. And then you get to Rome, to the seminary, and there are almost only boys, and almost everyone is homosexual, and young, and handsome, and you understand that you too are like them.’

  During our discussions, the young seminarian gives me a detailed description of the atmosphere in the seminary. He tells me he often uses two apps: Grindr and ibreviary.com – the gay networking tool, and a Catholic breviary in five languages available free on smart phones. A perfect summary of his life!

  At the age of 20, Andrea has already had many lovers, about fifty.

  ‘I meet them on Grindr or among the seminarians.’

  Blaming himself for this double life, and to ease his disappointment at not being a saint, he has made up little rules to give himself a good conscience. So, for example, he tells me that he won’t allow himself to have sexual relations at a first meeting on Grindr: he always waits for at least the third!

  ‘That’s my method, my Ratzinger side,’ he tells me ironically.

  I press him on his reasons for going on wanting to become a priest. The alluring young man hesitates. He doesn’t really know. He thinks for a moment, then says: ‘Only God knows.’

  According to lots of statements I have collected in the Roman pontifical universities, the double life of seminarians has
evolved considerably over the last few years because of the internet and smart phones. A large proportion of those who went out at the dead of night looking for chance encounters or, in Rome, in clubs like Diabolo 23, K-Men’s Gay, the Bunker or the Vicious Club, can now cruise from the comfort of their own home. Thanks to apps like Grindr, Tinder or Hornet, and hook-up sites like GayRomeo (now PlanetRomeo), Scruff (for more mature men and ‘bears’), Daddyhunt (for those who like ‘daddies’), or Recon (for fetishists and ‘extreme’ sexualities), they no longer need to move, or to take too many risks.

  Along with my researchers in Rome, I also discover the homosexuality of several seminarians, priests or curia bishops thanks to the magic of the internet. Often they gave us their email addresses or mobile numbers out of politeness or complicity, when we met in the Vatican. After we went on to record the information, quite innocently, in our Gmail address books or on our smart phones, different accounts and names associated with them appeared automatically on WhatsApp, Google+, LinkedIn or Facebook. Often pseudonyms! Starting with these borrowed names, the double life of these seminarians, priests or curia bishops – certainly very discreet, but not geeky enough – emerged from these networking sites, as if through the intervention of the Holy Spirit! (Here I am thinking of a dozen precise cases, and especially several monsignori whom we have already encountered in the course of this book.)

  Today, lots of them spend their evenings on GayRomeo, Tinder, Scruff or Venerabilis – but mostly on Grindr. As for me, I have never liked this dehumanizing and repetitive app, but I understand its logic: using geolocation and in real time, it points you to all the nearby available gays. It’s demonic!

  According to several priests, Grindr has become a very widespread phenomenon in seminaries and priests’ meetings. So troublesome has the use of the app become for the Church that it has led to the eruption of several major scandals (for example, in the Irish seminary). Often priests spot each other without meaning to, having discovered that another gay cleric is a few metres away. And my team and I have also managed to prove that Grindr does its job every evening inside the Vatican State.

  All it took was two smart phones positioned on either side of the little Catholic state to discover that there is a very low margin of error in identifying the presence of gays. When we carried out the experiment, twice, not very many were connected in the Vatican, but according to several internal contacts, Vatican exchanges on Grindr are frequently intense.

  The site Venerabilis deserves a story all to itself. Created in 2007, it was an online platform dedicated entirely to ‘homosensitive’ priests, who posted advertisements or exchanged messages in chatrooms. A place of exchange and support, it led to the creation of real-life discussion groups: for a while, these groups even met at the café in the famous Feltrinelli bookshop at Largo Torre Argentina, at different times according to their university schedule. One of the site administrators, who was close to Tarcisio Bertone, Mgr Tommaso Stenico, was known within the Curia to be homosexual, but practising outside the Vatican (he was dismissed from his Vatican functions after being outed in an Italian television programme). Over time, Venerabilis developed into an ecclesiastical cruising site and, after being denounced by the conservative Catholic press, it was closed down. We have traces of it in web archives and on the ‘deep web’, but it is no longer accessible or indexed by search engines.

  On Facebook, another site used a lot for cruising, because of the diversity of its members, it is easy to spot gay priests or seminarians. This is true, for example, of several prelates that we followed in Rome: most of them were unfamiliar with the confidentiality protocols of the social network, and left their list of friends visible. You only had to look at the account of a Roman gay well connected in the homosexual community of the city, to determine from ‘friends in common’ whether a priest was gay or not. A timeline need not contain a single gay message: the way Facebook works almost always gives gays away.

  On Twitter, Instagram, Google+ or LinkedIn, by cross-connecting them with Facebook, you can do the same kind of research quite legally. Thanks to professional tools like Maltego, Brandwath, or KB Crawl, one can analyse all the social contacts of a priest, his friends, the contents that he has liked, shared or posted, and even see his different connected accounts (often under different identities). I have had the opportunity to use this kind of high-performing software that allows you to chart all of a person’s interactions on social networks on the basis of public information that he has left on the web. The result is impressive, because the person’s complete profile emerges from thousands of bits of data that he himself has communicated on these networks without even remembering: in most cases, if that person is homosexual, the information appears with a low margin of uncertainty. To escape this kind of tool you need to have compartmentalized your life – using separate networks and never having shared the slightest personal information – to such an extent that it is almost impossible.

  Smart phones and the internet are therefore busy changing the lives of seminarians and priests for better or for worse. In the course of this investigation, I too have made considerable use of new digital tools, renting flats on Airbnb, using Waze and driving around in Ubers, contacting priests on LinkedIn or Facebook, keeping important documents or recordings on Pocket, Wunderlist or Voice Record, and having secret exchanges with many sources on Skype, Signal, WhatsApp or Telegram. Today journalists are truly digital and I’m indeed a digital writer.

  In this book, I’m not trying to reduce the lives of seminarians and priests to homosexuality, orgies, masturbation or online pornography. There are, of course, certain clerics who might be called ‘ascetic’, who aren’t interested in sex and who accept their chastity with equanimity. But, according to witnesses, priests who are faithful to the vow of celibacy are in a minority.

  In fact, revelations about the homosexuality of priests and double lives in the Vatican are only beginning. With the proliferation of smart phones, which mean that everything can be filmed and recorded, and with the growth of social networks in which everything is known, the secrets of the Vatican will become harder and harder to keep. The word has been liberated. Now, brave journalists all over the world are investigating the generalized hypocrisy of the clergy, and witnesses are starting to talk. Some cardinals I have spoken to think that ‘these questions aren’t essential’, that ‘too much has been made of them’, and that ‘sexual controversies are behind us’. They want to turn the page.

  I think exactly the opposite. I believe we’ve barely touched the subject. And that everything I talk about in this book is only the first page in a long story that is being written. I even suspect that I’m falling short of reality. The revelation, the exposure, the narrative of the secret and almost unexplored world of The Closet, is only just starting.

  Part IV

  Benedict

  19

  Passivo e bianco

  At the headquarters of the Ratzinger Foundation, in Rome, the war is over. Now, history alone will judge – and God, in his mercy. On the walls: a number of photographs and paintings showing Benedict XVI. Here, he is still a cardinal; and there, he has already retired, pope ‘emeritus’.

  Between those two images, I am struck by a huge portrait, prominently exhibited: the pontiff, still in office, sitting in great pomp on a very high papal chair, red and golden, smiling, majestic in his white robes with their gold embroidery. His topaz-yellow mitre, with its haughty appearance, amplifies him still further, making him truly larger than life. Curly-haired cherubs, fauns, psyches or cupids, are carved into the wooden arms of the chair. The pope’s scarlet complexion, ex cathedra, predominates in a rainbow of colours and a firework display of lace. Benedict XVI sits enthroned like a king. At the peak of his glory.

  Looking at this timeless portrait from close up, I find a resemblance with Pope Innocent X as painted by Velázquez, sitting in majesty like Benedict, with his tawny robes and his frills and furbelows, the scarlet cap on his head and his gle
aming ring (the magnificent Portrait of Innocent X is in the Galeria Doria Pamphilj in Rome). Looking again more closely, the change, the radical transformations, become more obvious. Now I can see the face of the holy father as reproduced by Francis Bacon for his Study of a Pope II, after Velázquez, a version of which is shown in the Vatican museums.

  Innocent X’s Cubist face is completely distorted: it looks like a mask, the nose is twisted, almost erased; the eyes are piercing. Is the holy father furious, or is he hiding a secret? Is he a perverse narcissist or an incarnation of the purity of the world? Is he torn by desire, or thinking about his lost youth? Is he crying? Why is he crying? As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze has observed, Francis Bacon leaves out the causes of the pope’s anxiety, depriving us of a rational explanation. As in the paintings of Velázquez and Bacon, although executed with a far lesser degree of talent, the Ratzinger mystery is displayed in this large portrait that no one looks at, in the headquarters of a foundation that no one visits any more, and which is now deserted. A pontiff in all his ineffable simplicity and indecipherable complexity.

  Benedict XVI is the first modern pope to have retired from his role. It was said that it was for reasons of health; it was an element that counted, of course, among others – one of the 14 long stations of the cross that constituted his brief pontificate. Benedict wasn’t the victim of a gay lobby, as has been suggested. However, nine of the fourteen stages of this Via Dolorosa that would seal his fate and precipitate his fall concern homosexuality.

  When I visit the Ratzinger Foundation, nobody is there. Every time I’ve gone to these ghost offices, the official places of work of the Vatican on Via Conciliazione in Rome, to meet Father Federico Lombardi, he was alone. No secretary; no assistant; not a living soul. And when you show up at the entrance, the fat and inebriated doorman doesn’t even filter the visitors: there are so few of them.