In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  With Freud, we might think that there is no human life without sexual desire in the broadest sense, a libido that inevitably persists among the priesthood, even in sublimated or repressed forms. For Leonardo da Vinci it is, Freud tells us, about homosexuality repressed into knowledge, experiment, art and the non-consummated beauty of boys (even if recent research has starkly contradicted Freud, since the painter was indeed a practising homosexual). Leonardo da Vinci also wrote in his notebooks this much-discussed phrase: ‘intellectual passion drives out sensuality’.

  For Joseph Ratzinger, it appears that one can put forward a similar hypothesis, with all necessary prudence: has a certain latent homosexuality been sublimated into vocation and repressed into research? Might a literary and musical aesthetic, effeminacy, extravagant clothing, the cult of the beauty of boys, provide some clues? Is it just a matter of ‘bovarysme’, living one’s life through the lives of fictional characters to avoid confronting reality?

  Ratzinger’s life lies entirely within the horizon of his reading and writing. Did he have to build up his strength around a secret inner rigidity? That intellectual or aesthetic activity derives from desire is a well-known psychosexual process in artistic and literary lives, as well as in the religious life. If we wish to follow Freud, we might talk about an Oedipus complex sublimated into an ‘obsessional neurosis’: a Prometheus complex, perhaps?

  What we know about Benedict XVI’s emotional life is limited, but the little we do know is already more than significant: his emotional tendency points in a single direction. From the musicians Joseph Ratzinger likes, the androgynous figures he highlights in the operas that enchant him, the writers he reads, the friends he surrounds himself with, the cardinals he appoints, the countless decisions he has made against homosexuals, and even his final fall, partly wrapped up in the gay question, we might hypothesize that homophilia was the thorn in Joseph Ratzinger’s flesh.

  There can hardly be any doubt that he was the most tormented of men, overwhelmed by sin or, at least, by the sense of sin: in this, he is a tragic figure. The idea that this repression might explain his ‘internalized homophobia’ is one that has often been put forward by countless psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, priests and progressive theologians, and, of course, by gay militants, Some, like the journalist Pasquale Quaranta, have even suggested to me the expression ‘Ratzinger syndrome’ to define this archetypal model of ‘internalized homophobia’.

  Rarely has a man so argued against his ‘parish’ – and this obstinacy became suspicious in the end. Benedict XVI is believed by some to have made others pay for his own doubts. And yet it seems to me that this psychological explanation is frail, because if we subject Joseph Ratzinger’s writings to close analysis, we discover his most cherished secret. I would maintain another hypothesis, which is that he is not in fact a homophobic homosexual, as many have said, if we extend the term to include a profound and general aversion to homosexuals. In fact, Cardinal Ratzinger has always been careful, as no prelate has so clearly been before him, to distinguish between two forms of homosexuality. The first of these, homosexuality lived and emphasized, gay identity and culture, is intrinsically disordered. What Ratzinger rejects is the homosexual act. The weakness of the flesh, sexuality between men – that’s the sin.

  On the other hand, and this point seems to me to have been neglected, there is a homosexuality that Ratzinger has never rejected, even elevating it into an indispensable model, far superior in his eyes to carnal love between a man and a woman This is ascetic homosexuality, which has been corrected by ‘superhuman legislations’: this struggle against the self – energetic, incessant and truly diabolical – which in the end opens up into abstinence. This triumph over the senses is the model towards which the whole of Ratzinger’s personality and work has tended. Nietzsche warned us in Twilight of the Idols, when he turned the eunuch into the ideal model of the Church: ‘The saint pleasing to God is the ideal castrato.’

  In the end, we might say that if he rejects ‘LGBT’ individuals, Ratzinger does not reserve the same harsh treatment for those who hesitate, those who seek, those sexual agnostics, those who are ‘questioning’, the ‘Qs’ in the American terminology, who appear in the new formulation LGBTQ! By and large, among the despised gays, the pope is said to be disposed to save those who renounce, those who do not indulge in ‘acts of homosexuality’, who remain chaste.

  Ratzinger forged this ideal of the abstinent homosexual saint and repeated it in his encyclicals, motu proprio, apostolic exhortations, letters, books and interviews. We could go back to the most elaborate text, which is of great importance: the key articles in the New Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992). We know that Cardinal Ratzinger was its editor-in-chief, assisted by a talented German-speaking bishop whom Professor Ratzinger had as a pupil and took under his wing – Christoph Schönborn. While the enterprise was collective, the work of the hands of about fifteen prelates, based on the work of a thousand bishops, it was Ratzinger who coordinated the project as a whole and personally wrote, along with Schönborn and the French bishop Jean-Louis Bruguès, the three key articles concerning homosexuality (§ 2357ff.). The section in which they are collected is entitled – giving a sense of the tone – ‘Chastity and homosexuality’.

  In the first article, the Catechism merely affirms that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.’ After signalling that the number of people who have ‘deep-seated homosexual tendencies’ is ‘not negligible’, that it is a ‘trial’ for them, and that they must be ‘accepted with respect, compassion and delicacy’, the Catechism opens up on to Ratzinger’s grand theory. ‘Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.’

  Christian perfection! Homosexuals weren’t asking for that much! It is possible that the true author of the text, Ratzinger, reveals himself marvellously here, by over-estimating ‘abstinent’ homosexuals after condemning ‘practising’ homosexuals (the two other authors, more ‘friendly’, Schönborn and Bruguès, are more progressive in this respect).

  This is the binary proposition: a rejection of the practices and ‘exercise’ of homosexuality; the idealization of chastity and ‘non-consummated’ homosexuality. The practising homosexual is blamed; the non-practising praised. A completely self-contradictory position, if one thinks about it. Here we are at the heart, the very quintessence, of the Ratzingerian system.

  Pope Benedict XVI would come back to this like a demon. In several books and interviews he would repeat his phrases amid the most colourful formulations. For example, in Light of the World, a book of official interviews: ‘If someone has deep homosexual tendencies – even today we do not know if they are truly innate or whether they appear in early childhood – in any case, if those tendencies hold that person in their power, it is a great trial for that person … But that still does not mean that homosexuality is just.’ The interviewer, normally less reckless, adds that there are many homosexuals in the Church. And Benedict XVI replies: ‘That is also one of the difficulties of the Church. And the people concerned must at least try not to yield to that tendency actively so that they may remain faithful to the mission inherent in their ministry.’

  We are familiar with this ‘mastered’ homosexuality: it’s Plato and Platonic love rather than Socrates and Socratic love; it is Saint Augustine being fickly heterosexual, but struggling against himself and attaining sanctity by becoming chaste; it is Handel, Schubert, Chopin and perhaps Mozart; it is Jacques Maritain and the young André Gide; it is François Mauriac and the young Julien Green; it is Rimbaud as dreamed of by Claudel, who imagined him as abstinent; it is Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo be
fore they put their desires into practice. In other words: all the intellectual and artistic passions of Joseph Ratzinger.

  Accepting the homosexual as long as he renounces his sexuality. It’s a daring wager on Ratzinger’s part. And what heroic man, by means of self-flagellation, can achieve such a feat? Perhaps a Ratzinger or, by making sacrifices, a replicant or a Jedi! For everyone else, the ‘normal people’ who know that abstinence is unnatural’, Benedict XVI’s thought leads inevitably to a double life, and as the Poet puts it, ‘the old lying loves’ and ‘lying couples’. In principle, the Ratzingerian project was doomed to failure and hypocrisy – around the world and within the pontifical house itself.

  Did he go too far in this praise of abstinence that condemns the practice more than the idea? Did he not gullibly open the door to countless hypocrisies in a Church that was becoming homosexualized at a great rate? In fact, Cardinal Ratzinger saw the trap and the limits of his grand theory. So, in 1986, with the help of the American episcopate, which surreptitiously suggested a form of words to him, he summed things up in his famous Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons – the first document in the whole history of Christianity devoted solely to the question. Bearing in mind that a distinction must be made between the homosexual ‘condition’ and ‘tendency’ on the one hand, and homosexual ‘acts’ on the other, Cardinal Ratzinger confirmed that only the latter, homosexual acts, are ‘intrinsically disordered’. But he immediately added a caveat: taking into account the ‘excessively benevolent’ interpretations that he had been able to observe, he need only point out that the ‘inclination itself’ is bad, even if it is not a sin. Indulgence has its limits.

  More perhaps than another man of his generation, Joseph Ratzinger has run counter to history – and to his own life. His reasoning, which is absolutely perverse, would soon lead him to justify discrimination against homosexuals, encouraging their dismissal from workplaces or the army, encouraging the refusal of employment or access to housing for them. By legitimizing institutional homophobia in this way, the cardinal and then the pope would inadvertently confirm that his theological power was not without its prejudices.

  Perhaps that was how it had to be? Because let us not forget that Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927, and that he was 42 when the gay ‘liberation’ of Stonewall happened. He became pope at 78 – already an old man. His thinking is that of a man who has remained locked in the homophobic ideas of his time.

  In the end, and more than when I began this investigation, I feel a certain tenderness towards this introverted, locked-up, thwarted man, for this tragic figure whose anachronism haunts me. This serious intellectual has thought of everything – but failed to deal honestly with the issue that is most essential for him: a man of another age, for whom a lifetime has not been enough to resolve his own inner conflict, while today, tens of millions of teenagers all over the world, less literate or intelligent than he, are able to decode the same puzzle within a few months, before they turn 18.

  Then I wonder how, perhaps, in other places or other times, some Michelangelo might have helped to reveal his identity, hidden away in a block of marble, and revealed this ‘closeted’ man, this Atlas, this Slave, this young or bearded Prisoner, like those one can see so splendidly emerging from the stone in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. Shouldn’t we, in the end, have a certain respect for this man who loved beauty and who struggled against himself all his life – an illusory combat, certainly; tragic in its way; but ultimately sincere?

  Whatever the truth of this question – a truth that we will probably never know – I prefer to fall back on this generous hypothesis of a priesthood that he chose to protect himself from himself, a conjecture that gives a humanity and a tenderness to one of the most enduring homophobes of the twentieth century.

  ‘Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret’, Horace writes (Drive away nature with a fork, it comes back at a gallop). Can one conceal one’s true nature in the long run? One of the most revealing phrases in Benedict XVI’s pontificate, and one of the most extraordinary, appears – albeit anecdotally – in his book of official interviews, Light of the World, published in 2010. In one long interview, the pope returns at length to the huge global controversy provoked by his obscurantist words about AIDS (on his first trip to Africa, he had declared that the distribution of condoms was ‘aggravating’ the epidemic). So the pope set about correcting his words, to make himself more easily understood. And all of a sudden, in his reply, he says: ‘There may be individual cases, for example when a [male] prostitute uses a condom, when that may become a first step towards moralisation … But it is not the true way of responding to the evil of the HIV virus. The correct response lies necessarily in the humanisation of sexuality.’

  Freud would have loved this phrase, which he would doubtless have dissected as meticulously as he did Leonardo da Vinci’s childhood memory. What is absolutely extraordinary here is not the pope’s formulation on AIDS, but his lapsus linguae doubled by a lapsus calami. Uttered verbally and reread when written down, the phrase has been validated twice as such (I have checked the original, and it is written with a masculine article, ‘ein Prostituierter’, pp. 146–7 in the German edition). In Africa, where the very great majority of cases of AIDS involve heterosexuals, the only concession that Benedict will agree to make concerns a male prostitute. Not even a female sex worker. When he thinks about prostitutes in Africa, Benedict, whatever the cost, imagines them as masculine! Never has a slip been so revealing. And I have lost count of the number of priests, bishops, journalists or gay militants who have quoted this phrase to me, whether embarrassed or radiant, sometimes indeed bursting out laughing. This double slip is probably one of the most revealing confessions in the whole history of Catholicism.

  20

  The vice-pope

  The photo is so unreal that it looks as if it’s photoshopped. The cardinal secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone appears enthroned in majesty: he is sitting on a chair elevated on a blue rostrum, wearing his red-lined yellow mitre. This triply staged subterfuge – the rostrum, the throne, the mitre – makes him look like a slightly scary giant. He sits stiffly like an emperor during a sacred rite, unless it’s just an excess of calcium.

  On his right, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio is very small: sitting on a plain metal chair, off the rostrum, he is dressed simply in white. Bertone wears black aviator sunglasses; Bergoglio his big spectacles. Bertone’s gold-coloured chasuble ends in white lace that reminds me of my grandmother’s doilies; on his wrist a watch glitters: a Rolex, it has been established. The tension between the two men is palpable: Bertone stares straight ahead with an inquisitorial expression, frozen like a mummy; Bergoglio’s mouth is open with alarm, perhaps at the sight of this pedantic Caesar.

  This photograph, which is easy to find on Google and Instagram, dates from November 2007: it was taken during a trip by the secretary of state to Argentina for a beatification ceremony. At the time, Bertone was the most powerful figure in the Catholic Church, after Benedict XVI: he was known as ‘the vice-pope’. A few years later, he would be moved aside; Bergoglio would be elected pontiff under the name of Francis.

  Tarcisio Bertone was born in Piedmont in 1934. He shares this place of origin – Northern Italy – with Angelo Sodano, his predecessor at the Secretariat of State. Along with Sodano, he is the second villain in this book. And of course, in the great Shakespearean theatre that the Roman Curia has always been, these two giants of vanity and rigidity would become ‘complementary enemies’.

  The son of mountain peasants, Bertone is a Salesian, a member of a Catholic congregation founded in Italy that places education at the heart of its mission. For a long time, his career was quite tranquil. For 30 years he was seldom mentioned: he was a priest, and he taught. Of course, discreetly, he was networking; and in the end he was appointed, at the age of 56, Archbishop of Vercelli in the Piedmont of his birth.

  One of the men who knew him wel
l at this time was Cardinal Raffaele Farina, who is also a Salesian, and who welcomes Daniele and me into his apartment in the Vatican. From his window we can see the pope’s apartments a few metres away and, a little further off, the spectacular terraces of Cardinals Giovanni Battista Re and Bertone. And even further off, the penthouse terrace of Angelo Sodano. All of these octogenarians observe one another like china dogs, with envy and animosity, from their respective windows. Terrace warfare.

  ‘I was in charge of the Salesian University when Bertone joined us,’ Farina explains. ‘He was my deputy. I know him well, and I would never have appointed him secretary of state of the Vatican. He liked travelling and looking after his own business. He talks a lot, particularly in Italian and sometimes in French; he has a lot of international contacts but he failed at the Salesian University before failing at everything in the Vatican.’

  And Cardinal Farina adds, as if by way of digression: ‘Bertone always moved his hands around. He’s a northern Italian who talks with his hands like a man of the South!’

  Farina knows all the secrets of the Vatican. Created cardinal by Benedict XVI, to whom he was close, he was appointed by Francis to the presidency of the important commission for the reform of the Vatican Bank. Between finance, corruption and homosexuality, he knows everything, and we talk at length about these subjects with astonishing freedom over the course of several conversations.

  At the end of one of our meetings, we accompany Farina to his next destination. We get into his little car, a Volkswagen Up!, and end our conversation in this Vatican diplomatic vehicle, which he drives himself at the age of 85. We pass in front of the apartment building where Tarcisio Bertone lives, then in front of Angelo Sodano’s. We drive along the steep streets of the Vatican, among the blossoming cherry trees, beneath the vigilant eye of the police who know from experience that Cardinal Farina is no longer as keen-eyed as he was. Here he’s just ignored a stop sign; now he’s going the wrong way down a one-way street; each time, the police wave at him and politely point him in the right direction. Safe and sound, though after a few hair-raising moments, we reach the Porta Santa Anna, complete with a marvellous memory of a discussion with a cardinal who has told us a lot. My goodness, how much!