In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Is Bertone an idiot? That’s what everybody tells me at the Vatican today. It’s hard to find a prelate or a nuncio to defend him, even if those outraged criticisms, now coming from the same people who carried him to his pinnacle only yesterday, forget Bertone’s rare qualities. Among which are: his great capacity for work; his loyalty to his colleagues; his sense of networking in the Italian episcopate; his Ratzingerian dogmatism. But for want of natural authority he has, like many an incompetent before him, become authoritarian. People who knew him in Genoa describe him as a formalist; as someone who was very arrogant and who surrounded himself with young celibates and old bachelors in the palace where he received his guests.

  ‘He kept us waiting as if we were having an audience with the pope,’ the former French ambassador to the Vatican, Pierre Morel, tells me, describing one such occasion.

  One of Bertone’s former students, when he was teaching law and French, a priest who I meet in London, tells me on the other hand that ‘he was a very good teacher and very funny’. Bertone liked to quote, the same source tells me, Claudel, Bernanos and Jacques Maritain. In a written exchange, Bertone confirms that he has read these authors, apologizes for his slightly rusty French, and thanks me for ‘refreshing’ it by giving him a book – the famous little white book.

  For many, Tarcisio Bertone reached his level of incompetence at the Secretariat of State. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, former ‘minister’ of the interior to John Paul II and an enemy of Bertone, weighs his words carefully: ‘Bertone was very good at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but he wasn’t ready for the post of secretary of state.’

  Don Julius, the confessor at St Peter’s, who associated with Bertone and may have taken his confession, adds: ‘He was presumptuous; he was a bad teacher of canon law.’

  The confessors at St Peter’s, most of whom are homophilic at the least, are an interesting source of information within the Vatican. Lodged in an ancient building on Piazza Santa Marta, they live in individual cells and lovely collective refectories. I often had my meetings there, in the parlatorio which, even though it is located at the nerve centre of the holy see, is as discreet a place as one might wish for: no one disturbs a confessor who is taking confession – or confessing himself.

  From this observation post between the Palace of Justice and the offices of the Vatican police, a stone’s throw from Pope Francis’s residence and facing Bertone’s apartment, the confessors see and know everything. It was here that Paolo Gabriele was placed in detention after the VatiLeaks affair: for the first time, their cells became a genuine prison.

  With a guarantee of anonymity, the confessors of St Peter’s tell me everything. They know which cardinal is implicated in which corruption scandal; who is sleeping with whom; which handsome assistant joins his boss in his luxury apartment in the evening; who likes the Swiss Guards, or who prefers the more manly policemen.

  One of the priests, preserving the secrets of the confessional, tells me: ‘No corrupt cardinal has ever told us in confession that he is corrupt! No homophilic cardinal has confessed his inclinations! They talk to us about stupid things, about unimportant details. And yet we know they are so corrupt that they no longer have any idea what corruption is. They even lie in confession.’

  Bertone’s career really took off when Joseph Ratzinger appointed him number two at the important Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith This was in 1995; he was 60.

  For a rigid man, being appointed to the most doctrinaire post in the whole of the Church was a blessing. ‘Rigidity squared’, a Curia priest tells me. It was here that Bertone acquired a bad reputation as a member of the thought police.

  Mgr Krzysztof Charamsa, who has worked at the Palace of the Holy Office for many years, compares it to a ‘branch of the KGB’, a real oppressive totalitarian system that ‘controlled souls and bedrooms’. Did Bertone exert psychological pressure on certain homosexual bishops? Did he tell a particular cardinal that there was a file about him and that he should keep his nose clean? Charamsa remains evasive when I ask him.

  The fact remains that this way of working at the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith earned Bertone the nickname of Hoover.

  ‘He was a less intelligent Hoover, though,’ the archbishop who revealed this nickname to me adds by way of correction.

  J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the US Bureau of Investigation and its successor, the FBI, for almost fifty years, combined an intelligent understanding of people and situations with a strict organization of his cloistered existence. Fighting ceaselessly and demonically against himself, he drew up very thorough secret files of the private lives of countless public figures and American politicians. We know now that this extraordinary capacity for work, this perverse taste for power, this anti-communist obsession, coexisted with a secret: he was also homosexual. This man who liked dressing up as a woman in private lived a large part of his contradiction-filled life with his chief deputy Clyde Tolson, whom he appointed deputy director of the FBI before making him his heir.

  The comparison with Bertone breaks down on certain points, the copy might be different from the model, but the psychology is there. Bertone is a failed Hoover.

  In 2002, Tarcisio Bertone was made Archbishop of Genoa by John Paul II then created cardinal on Ratzinger’s insistence. A few months after his election, Benedict XVI called for him to replace Angelo Sodano as seceretary of state: Bertone became the pope’s ‘prime minister’.

  The successful arriviste now had all the powers. Just as Sodano had really been the vice-pope for the last ten years of John Paul II’s pontificate because of the holy father’s long illness, Bertone became vice-pope thanks to Benedict XVI’s lack of interest in the management of affairs of state.

  According to several sources, Bertone put in place a system of internal controls consisting of signals, alerts and ‘monitoring’, a whole chain of command that came back to him, to protect the secrets of the Vatican. This system should have allowed him to stay in power for a long time, if he hadn’t encountered two unexpected complications in his otherwise faultless career: the VatiLeaks affair, first of all, and then, still more unexpectedly, Benedict XVI’s ‘abdication’.

  Less organized than Hoover, Bertone knew, like him, how to correct his shortcomings in his choice of men. So he became close to a certain Domenico Giani, whom he appointed to the head of the Corpo della gendarmeria of the Vatican, in spite of the fierce opposition of Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who hoped that he himself would be able to go on pulling the strings. At the head of a hundred gendarmes, inspectors and police officers, this former officer of the Italian Guardia di Finanza became Bertone’s shadow in all secret affairs and missions.

  ‘The Italian chiefs of police were very critical towards the Vatican gendarmerie, which refused to cooperate with us and used zones of extraterritoriality and diplomatic immunity to cover up certain scandals. Relations became increasingly tense,’ a senior Italian policeman tells me.

  In a book that is controversial but that contains information provided by Georg Gänswein and an assistant of Bertone’s, the essayist Nicolas Diat suggests that Domenico Giani was subject to external influences, without stating whether this might have come from freemasonry, the gay lobby or the Italian secret service. A cardinal he quotes considered that he was ‘guilty of high treason’, and that this was one of the ‘most serious examples of infiltration in the holy see’. (These serious insinuations have never been proven; they have been firmly denied by the spokesman for Benedict XVI; and Pope Francis renewed his trust in Giani.)

  With the help of Domenico Giani and the technical services of the Vatican, Bertone kept the Curia under surveillance. Hundreds of cameras were installed everywhere; communications were screened. There was even a plan to authorize just a single, particularly secure model of mobile phone. Uproar among the bishops! They refused to be monitored! The attempt to harmonize smartphones failed, but checks took place nonetheless. (Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran confirmed this point.)
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br />   ‘Means of communication, telephones and computers, were closely screened and checked by the Vatican. That way they knew everything that happened in the holy see and, if need be, they had proof against anyone who might cause problems. But generally speaking they kept it all to themselves,’ I am told by the former priest Francesco Lepore, who was himself subject to reinforced surveillance before his dismissal.

  John Paul II’s former ‘minister’ of the interior, Giovanni Battista Re, whom I spoke to on this subject, in the presence of Daniele, still doubts that the Vatican would have been capable of surveillance at this level. ‘By definition, at the Vatican, the secretary of state knows everything and, of course, has files on everybody. But I don’t think Bertone was as organized as that, or that he had files on everyone.’

  Like most surveillance systems, that of Bertone and Giani prompted strategies of avoidance on the part of the curia prelates. Most of them started using secure applications like Signal or Telegram; they also bought themselves second private mobile phones, using which they could safely speak ill of the secretary of state, discuss rumours about their co-religionists or hook up on Grindr. Inside the Vatican, where use of the internet was particularly monitored and screened, that second telephone allowed them to get through the firewall to forbidden addresses, such as erotic sites.

  One day, when I was in the private apartment of a priest I was staying with inside the Vatican, we carried out an experiment. We tested several erotic sites and were blocked by a message: ‘If you want to unblock this site, please call the internal number 181, formerly 83511, or 90500.’ Talk about ‘parental control’!

  I carried out the same experiment again a few months later from the apartment of a bishop, still inside the Vatican, and this time I read on the screen that ‘access to the web page requested’ is blocked on the initiative of ‘the security police’ of the Vatican. One reason was given: ‘Adult content’. I just had to tap ‘send’ to ask for it to be unblocked.

  ‘Senior Vatican figures think they can escape this supervision. They are allowed to get on with it; but if one day they become an “obstacle”, what is known can be used to control them,’ Francesco Lepore explains.

  Pornography, essentially gay pornography, is such a frequent phenomenon in the Vatican that my sources speak of ‘serious addiction problems among the Curia prelates’. Some priests have even resorted to dedicated services to battle these addictions, like NoFap, a specialist site based in a Catholic church in Pennsylvania.

  This internal surveillance was stepped up during the pontificate of Benedict XVI, as scandals, rumours and, of course, the first VatiLeaks affair proliferated. Tarcisio Bertone was himself caught up in these leaks, and his paranoia redoubled. He started looking for microphones in private apartments, suspecting colleagues, and even dismissed his chauffeur, whom he suspected of informing Cardinal Sodano.

  Meanwhile, the Vatican machine seized up. In charge of international relations, but poor at speaking foreign languages, Bertone became isolated from the local episcopates and started making mistake after mistake. A poor diplomat, he concentrated on what he knew best, namely Italian politics and relations with the country’s rulers, whom he had hoped to be able to control directly (this point was confirmed to me by two presidents of the CEI, Cardinals Ruini and Bagnasco).

  Benedict XVI’s secretary of state also surrounded himself with undistinguished colleagues, prompting a number of rumours. These included the famous Lech Piechota, Bertone’s favourite assistant, from whom he seems to have been inseparable, like Ratzinger with Georg Gänswein or John Paul II with Stanisław Dziwisz.

  I tried to interview Piechota, but without success. Since the end of the pontificate of Benedict XVI, this Polish priest has been transferred, I was informed, to the Pontifical Council of Culture. During one of my many visits to that ministry, I asked after Piechota and tried to find out by what miracle – he having never had the slightest interest in the arts – he had fetched up there. Did he have some hidden artistic talent? Had he been shunted sideways? I tried innocently to understand.

  So I interviewed the directors of the Ministry of Culture twice about Piechota. Was he there? The reply was categorical: ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about. He isn’t here.’

  A strange denial. Lech Piechota appears in the Annuario Pontificio as being a policy officer for the Pontifical Council of Culture, alongside the names of Father Laurent Mazas, the priest Pasquale Iacobone and Archbishop Carlos Azevedo, all three of whom I have interviewed. And when I call the switchboard of that ministry, I am put through to Piechota. We speak briefly, but, strangely, the former assistant to the ‘prime minister’, a man who used to talk every day with dozens of cardinals and heads of government from all over the world, speaks neither French nor English nor Spanish.

  So Piechota is a policy officer in the Ministry of Culture, but they seem to have forgotten that he’s there. Has he got into trouble since his name was leaked in the VatiLeaks scandal? Does this personal private secretary of Cardinal Bertone need to be protected? Why does this Polish priest Piechota keep himself so much to himself? Why does he sometimes leave his office at the Pontifical Council of Culture when Bertone tells him to (according to two witnesses)? Why do we see him driving about in a big official car: a luxury Audi A6, with tinted windows and back windscreen and a diplomatic Vatican plate? Why does Piechota still live in the Palace of the Holy Office, where I have bumped into him several times, and where this big car is parked in a privileged parking place where no one else is allowed to park? And when I asked these questions to members of the Curia, why did they smile? Why? Why?

  It has to be said that Tarcisio Bertone has lots of enemies. Among them, there is Angelo Sodano, who stayed within the walls at the start of the pontificate of Benedict XVI. From his Ethiopian College, which he has had restored at great expense, the former secretary of state has been caught in an ambush. He has certainly been stripped of his responsibilities, but he remains a decano (dean) in the College of Cardinals: this title gives him even greater authority over the electors in the conclave, who still see him as a pope-maker. Since Sodano has exercised power for such a long time, he too has his bad habits: from his gilded closet, he shuffles men and files about those men as if he were still in charge. Bertone understood too late that Sodano was one of the dynamiters-in-chief of the pontificate of Benedict XVI.

  It all began, as so often, with a humiliation. The former cardinal secretary of state of John Paul II did everything he could to stay in the court. For the first year of his reign, the pope kept Sodano in his post for form’s sake, and for another more significant reason: there was no one else to appeal to! Joseph Ratzinger had never been a political cardinal: he had no gang, no team, no one to place or promote but Georg, his personal assistant. But Ratzinger had always been highly suspicious of Sodano, about whom he, like everyone else, had received shocking information. He was flabbergasted by what he was told about his Chilean past, so much so that he didn’t want to believe the rumours.

  Taking advantage of his canonical age of 79, Benedict XVI finally parted company with Sodano. According to his memoirs, it happened as follows: ‘He was the same age as me. If the pope is old, because he was elected when elderly, the secretary of state, at least, has to be in top form.’

  Making a cardinal of almost eighty retire: Sodano couldn’t bear it. Without waiting, he reared up, rebelled, started casting aspersions. He resisted. When he understood that the game was up, he demanded to be able to choose his successor (his protégé and deputy Giovanni Lajolo, a former member of the APSA who was a nuncio in Germany), but without success. And when at last he learned the name of his replacement, the Archbishop of Genoa Tarcisio Bertone, he was horrified: ‘He could have been my deputy! He isn’t even a nuncio! He doesn’t even speak English! He isn’t part of the cassocked aristocracy!’ (In his defence, Bertone speaks quite good French and Spanish, as well as Italian, as I have been able to check.)

  Now begins an episode of
slander, gossip and revenge of a kind unknown in Italy since the time of Julius Caesar, when the emperor punished his soldiers for outing him by calling him ‘Queen’!

  Of course gossip has always played a large part in the history of the holy see. It is the ‘gay poison’ that the poet speaks of, and the ‘sickness of rumours, slander and gossip’ denounced by Pope Francis. This kind of gossip was typical of homosexual life before ‘gay liberation’. It consists of the same allusions, the same jokes, the same slanders that cardinals use today to hurt and wound – in the hope of hiding their own double lives.

  ‘The Vatican is a court with a monarch. And as with the clergy, there is no separation between private and public life, no family, everyone lives in a community, everything is known, everything is mixed up. That’s how rumours, gossip and slander become a system,’ the Vaticanologist Romilda Ferrauto, who was for a long time one of the directors of Radio Vatican, tells me.

  Rabelais, a former monk himself, had been aware of this tendency among prelates of the pontifical court to ‘curse everyone’ while ‘fornicating like mad’. As for ‘outing’, the terrible weapon of homophobes, it has always been highly prized by homosexuals themselves, in the gay clubs of the 1950s, as it is in the principality of the Vatican today.

  Pope Francis, a shrewd observer of ‘his’ Curia, was not mistaken when he mentioned in his speech, among the ‘15 curial diseases’: existential schizophrenia; courtiers who ‘murder in cold blood’ the reputation of their fellow cardinals; the ‘terrorism of gossip’ and those prelates who ‘create a parallel world for themselves, where they set aside all that they severely teach others, and begin to live a hidden and often dissolute life’. Could it be clearer? The connection between slander and double lives is now established by the most irrefutable witness there is: the pope.