In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Be that as it may, the former secretary of state, Angelo Sodano, organized his revenge on Bertone in great detail: having trained in Pinochet’s Chile, he knew the score, the murderous rumours and the ruthless methods. First of all, he refused to leave his luxury apartment, which Bertone had to recover from him. After all, the new secretary of state had to make do with a pied-à-terre while Sodano’s new penthouse was being restored and polished.

  On the side of the resistance, the bad-tempered Sodano stirred up his networks within the College of Cardinals and the rumour machine. Bertone was slow in taking the exact measure of the battle of celestial egos. By the time he did, after VatiLeaks, it would be too late. By that time, everyone had already been given early retirement, along with the pope!

  One of Sodano’s close accomplices was an Argentinian archbishop who was a nuncio in Venezuela and Mexico: Leonardo Sandri, whom we have already mentioned. The new pope, who was as suspicious of him as he was of Sodano, chose to part company with this troublesome Argentinian as well. He did respect conventions: he made Sandri a cardinal in 2007 and put him in charge of the Eastern Churches. But that wasn’t enough for this egoistic macho man, who couldn’t bear the idea of being stripped of his post as ‘minister’ of the interior to the pope. In turn, he joined Sodano in the resistance, a foot soldier in a small guerrilla force in the Sierra Maestra of the Vatican.

  The holy see has never been spared scenes of domestic discord and family feuds. In the Vatican ocean of ambitions, perversions and slander, many popes have managed to navigate dangerous cross-winds. Another secretary of state could probably have steered the Vatican ship to a safe harbour – even with Benedict XVI; another pope, if he had taken care of the Curia, would have been able to float the ship again – even with Bertone. But the association between an ideologically driven pope and a cardinal who was incapable of managing the Curia, so full of himself and so craving recognition, could not work. The pontifical couple had been a shaky team from the beginning, and its failure was swiftly confirmed. ‘We trusted each other, we got on well, so I didn’t let go,’ the pope emeritus would later confirm with good will and generosity, speaking of Bertone.

  Controversies erupted one after the other, and with startling speed and violence: during his speech in Regensburg, the pope provoked an international scandal by suggesting that Islam was intrinsically violent, thus undoing all the efforts of interreligious dialogue by the Vatican (the speech had not been read through, and in the end the pope had to apologize); by swiftly and unconditionally rehabilitating the Lefebvrist ultra-fundamentalists, including a notorious anti-Semite and revisionist, the pope was accused of supporting the far right and entered a huge controversy with the Jews. These grave and fundamental errors of communication quickly weakened the holy father. And, inevitably, his past in the Hitler Youth rose to the surface.

  Cardinal Bertone would soon be at the centre of a huge property scandal. The press, drawing on information from VatiLeaks, accused him of having grabbed himself a penthouse, like Sodano – 350 square metres in the Palazzo San Carlo, created by knocking together two previous apartments – and of adding a vast terrace, itself measuring 300 square metres. The restoration work on his palazzo, costing 200,000 euros, was said to have been financed by the foundation of the Bambino Gesù Paediatric Hospital. (Pope Francis would ask Bertone to return this sum, and a trial by the Vatican was announced against the extravagant cardinal.)

  Little is known about it, but in the background a gay camarilla was stirring up plots and intrigues like mad. Among them, cardinals and bishops, all practising, were on manoeuvres. A real war of nerves began, aimed at Bertone and of course, through him, the pope. The backdrop to these plots consisted of so many reheated hatreds, slander, rumours, relationships, old break-ups and sometimes love stories that it is hard to disentangle the interpersonal problems from the real underlying questions. (In his ‘Testimonianza’, Archbishop Viganò suspected Cardinal Bertone ‘of being notoriously in favour of the promotion of homosexuals to positions of responsibility’.)

  In this ill-tempered context, new and serious revelations of sexual abuse scandals reached the holy see from several countries. Already on the brink of exploding, the Vatican would be swept away by this great groundswell from which, over ten years later, it still has not recovered.

  As homophobic as Sodano, Bertone had his own theory about the paedophile question, which he finally delivered to the public and the press during a trip to Chile, where he arrived looking in great spirits and flanked by his favourite assistant. The secretary of state expressed himself officially here, in April 2010, concerning the psychology of paedophile priests. A new global controversy was about to erupt.

  This is what Cardinal Bertone said: ‘Many psychologists, many psychiatrists, have shown that there is no connection between celibacy [of priests] and paedophilia; but many others have shown, I have been told recently, that there is a connection between homosexuality and paedophilia. That is true. That is the problem.’

  The official intervention, made by the number two at the Vatican, did not go unnoticed. These words, uttered vaguely, prompted international outrage: hundreds of personalities, including LGBT militants but also European ministers and Catholic theologians, denounced the prelate’s irresponsible words. For the first time, his declaration brought a prudent denial from the Vatican press service, validated by the pope. For Benedict XVI to emerge from the shadows to express a hint of disagreement with his excessively homophobic ‘prime minister’: it was not without a certain irony. This was a serious moment.

  How could Bertone come out with such absurd language? I have interviewed several cardinals and prelates about this point: they pleaded error of communication or clumsiness; only one gave me an interesting explanation. According to this curia priest who worked at the Vatican under Benedict XVI, Bertone’s position on homosexuality was strategic, but also reflected the essentials of his thought. Strategic, primarily, because it was a tried and tested technique for casting the blame on the lost sheep that had no business being in the Church rather than calling the celibacy of the priesthood into question. The secretary of state’s statement also reflects his underlying thoughts because, according to the same source, it reflected the thinking of theorists to whom Bertone was close, such as Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo or the priest-psychoanalyst Tony Anatrella. Both of them were highly practising homosexuals.

  To this we would also have to add some context that I discovered during my trips to Chile. The first is that the congregation most affected by sexual abuse in Chile is the very one from which Bertone himself emerged: the Salesians of don Bosco.

  Then, and this caused much mirth: when Bertone spoke in public to denounce homosexuality as a template for paedophilia he was surrounded in hundreds of photographs by at least two notorious homosexual priests. His declaration ‘lost credibility’ as a result of that simple fact, several sources indicate.

  Finally, Juan Pablo Hermosilla, one of the main Chilean lawyers in the Church’s sexual abuse scandals, particularly that of the paedophile priest Fernando Karadima, gave me the following explanation about the links between homosexuality and paedophilia, which strikes me as pertinent.

  ‘My theory is that paedophile priests use information that the Catholic hierarchy has at its disposal in order to protect itself. It is a form of pressure or blackmail. Bishops who had homosexual relations themselves were obliged to say nothing. This explains why Karadima was protected by bishops and archbishops: not because they were paedophiles themselves, and most of them are not, but to avoid the discovery of their own homosexuality. That, for me, is the true source of the Church’s corruption and cover-up.’

  We could go further than that. Many of the excesses of the Church, many silences, many mysteries are explained by this simple rule of The Closet: ‘everybody looks out for each other’. Why do the cardinals say nothing? Why do they all close their eyes? Why was Pope Benedict XVI, who knew about many sexual scandals, never brought to j
ustice? Why did Cardinal Bertone, ruined by the attacks of Angelo Sodano, not bring out the files that he had about his enemy? Talking about others means that they may talk about you. That is the key to the omertà and the general lies of the Church. The Vatican and the Vatican closet are like Fight Club – and the first rule of Fight Club is, you don’t talk about Fight Club.

  Bertone’s homophobia didn’t stop him buying a gay sauna in Rome city centre. It was in such terms, at least, that the press presented this incredible news.

  In order to understand this new scandal, I went to the place in question, no. 40 Via Aureliana, the sauna Europa Multiclub. One of the most popular gay establishments in Rome, it is a sports club-cum-cruising spot with saunas and hammams. Frolicking is possible and legal there, because the club is considered ‘private’. You need a membership card to get in, as in most gay places in Italy – a national peculiarity. For a long time, the card was distributed by the association Arcigay; now it is sold for 15 euros by Anddos, a kind of lobby group for the patrons of gay establishments.

  ‘The membership card is compulsory to get in to the sauna, because the law forbids sexual relations in a public place. We’re a private place,’ Mario Marco Canale, the manager of the Europa Multiclub, says by way of self-justification.

  He is both the manager of the Europa Multiclub and the president of the Anddos association. He receives me wearing both hats at the very site of the controversy.

  He goes on, this time wearing the hat of his association: ‘We have almost 200,000 members in Italy because a large number of bars, clubs and saunas require the Anddos card for entrance.’

  This membership-card system for gay venues is unique in Europe. Originally, in the anti-gay, macho Italy of the 1980s, it was designed to make homosexual places safe, keep their clientele loyal and legalize sexuality on-site. Today, it persists for less essential reasons, under the pressure of the managers of the 70 clubs that form the Anddos association, and perhaps also because it allows the association to wage its struggle against AIDS and receive public subventions.

  For several gay militants I have spoken to, ‘this card is an archaic remnant and it’s high time it was got rid of’. Apart from the possible surveillance of homosexuals in Italy (which Anddos firmly denies), according to an activist, this card is the symbol of a ‘homosexuality that is closeted and shameful, and which seeks to be a private affair’.

  I interviewed Marco Canale about the controversy and the many press articles that presented the Europa Multiclub as a place run by the Vatican, indeed by Cardinal Bertone himself.

  ‘In Rome, you have to bear in mind that hundreds of buildings belong to the holy see,’ Canale tells me, without clearly denying the information.

  In fact, the building on the corner of Via Aureliana and Via Carducci, in which the sauna is located, was bought by the Vatican for 20 million euros in May 2008. Cardinal Bertone, at the time ‘prime minister’ to Pope Benedict XVI, supervised and rubber-stamped the financial operation. According to my information, the sauna only represents part of a vast property complex, also including about twenty priests’ apartments and even one cardinal’s apartment. This was how the press managed to put two and two together and get the eye-catching headline: ‘Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone has bought the biggest gay sauna in Italy!’

  But the scandal remained disconcertingly amateurish, because the secretary of state and his office were able to give the green light to this huge property purchase without anyone noticing that it contained the biggest gay sauna in Italy, visible and known to everybody and opening on to the street. As for the price paid by the Vatican, it seems unusual: according to a survey by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, the building had previously been sold for 9 million euros, and therefore the Vatican had been diddled out of 11 million for this financial operation!

  When we met, Marco Canale was amused by the controversy, even though he revealed another secret motivation behind it: ‘At the Europa Multiclub we receive lots of priests and even cardinals. And every time there’s a jubilee, a synod or a conclave, we realize immediately: the sauna is fuller than usual. Thanks to all the visiting priests!’

  According to another source, the number of priests who are members of the Anddos gay association is equally high. It is possible to find out, because to become a member you have to supply a valid identification document; and the person’s profession appears on an Italian ID even if it is immediately anonymized by the computer system.

  ‘But we’re not the police. We don’t keep tabs on anybody. We have lots of members who are priests, that’s all!’ Canale concludes.

  Another affair that was played out under Benedict XVI and Bertone, but that would only be revealed under Francis, concerns ‘chem-sex parties’. I had heard for a long time that parties like this were happening inside the Vatican itself, real collective orgies in which sex and drugs combined in a sometimes dangerous cocktail (‘chem’ here means ‘chemicals’ for synthetic drugs, often MDMA, GHB, DOM, DOB and DiPT).

  For a while I thought these were rumours, of which there are so many in the Vatican. And then, all of a sudden, in the summer of 2017, the Italian press revealed that a monsignore, the priest Luigi Capozzi, who had been one of the chief assistants to Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, had been arrested by the Vatican police for organizing ‘chem-sex parties’ in his private apartment in the Vatican. (On this matter I questioned a Curia priest who knew Capozzi well, and I also met Cardinal Coccopalmerio.)

  Close to Tarcisio Bertone, and greatly appreciated by Cardinal Ratzinger, Capozzi lived in an apartment in the Palace of the Holy Office, surrounded by four cardinals, several archbishops and numerous prelates, including Lech Piechota, assistant to Cardinal Bertone, and Josef Clemens, the former private secretary to Cardinal Ratzinger.

  I know this building well, because I have had the opportunity to dine there dozens of times: one of its entrances is on Italian territory, the other inside the Vatican. Capozzi had an apartment ideally located for organizing those startling orgies, because he was able to have it both ways: the Italian police couldn’t search his apartment or his diplomatic vehicle, because he lived inside the Vatican; but he was able to leave his home with impunity, without passing through checks made by the holy see or being searched by the Swiss Guard, because of the door that opens directly on to Italy. A whole ritual was acted out inside: the ‘chem-sex parties’ took place in a muted red light, with the consumption of large quantities of hard drugs, glasses of cannabis vodka and very lubricious guests. Real ‘nights in hell’!

  According to the witnesses I have interviewed, Capozzi’s homosexuality was common knowledge – and was therefore probably known to his superiors, to Cardinal Coccopalmerio and Tarcisio Bertone – all the more so given that the priest had no hesitation in going out to Rome’s gay clubs or, in the summer, attending the big LGBT parties held at the Fantasia Gay Village in the south of the capital.

  ‘During those chem-sex parties, there were also priests and Vatican employees,’ one witness adds, a monsignore who took part in these parties.

  Since these revelations, Luigi Capozzi has been hospitalized in the Pius XI Clinic, and hasn’t communicated with the outside world. (He is still presumed innocent, since his trial for the use and possession of drugs has not taken place.)

  So Benedict XVI’s pontificate hit the ground running and developed with a swift and unbridled proliferation of scandals. On the gay question, the war against homosexuals resumed unabated, as in the time of John Paul II, and hypocrisy was more than ever at the heart of the system. A hatred of homosexuals on the outside; homophilia and the double life on the inside. The circus went on.

  ‘The gayest pontificate in history’: the expression comes from the former prelate Krzysztof Charamsa. When I interviewed him in Barcelona, and then in Paris, this priest who had worked beside Joseph Ratzinger for a long time repeated this expression about the Benedict XVI years several times: ‘the gayest pontificate in history’. The Curia priest Don Ju
lius, who notes that it was ‘difficult to be heterosexual under Benedict XVI’, even if there are some rare exceptions, uses a potent expression to describe the pope’s entourage: ‘fifty shades of gay’.

  Francis himself, unmistakably more direct than his predecessor, stresses the paradoxes of this incongruous entourage, using a cutting phrase to attack the Ratzingerians: ‘theological narcissism’. Another code that he uses to imply homosexuality is ‘self-referential’. Rigidity, as we know, often conceals double lives.

  ‘I feel deep sadness when I think about Benedict’s pontificate, one of the darkest moments for the Church, in which homophobia represented a constant and desperate attempt to conceal the very existence of homosexuality,’ Charamsa tells me.

  During the pontificate of Benedict XVI, the higher up the Vatican hierarchy you went, the more homosexuals you found. The majority of the cardinals that the pope created are said to be homophile at least, and some are even very ‘practising’.

  ‘Under Benedict XVI, a homosexual bishop who gave the appearance of being chaste had more chance of becoming a cardinal than a heterosexual bishop,’ I am told by a well-known Dominican friar, a keen connoisseur of Ratzingerian thought, who held the Benedict XVI Chair in Regensburg.

  Every time he travelled, the pope was accompanied by some of his closest collaborators. Among them was the famous prelate nicknamed Mgr Jessica by the press, which claimed he took advantage of the holy father’s regular visits to the church of Saint Sabina in Rome, the headquarters of the Dominicans, to give his visiting card to the younger friars. His ‘pickup line’ was discussed by the whole world when it was revealed in a report by Vanity Fair: he tried to proposition seminarians by suggesting that they go and see John XXIII’s bed!