In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  ‘He was very “touchy” and very intimate with the seminarians,’ admits the priest Urien, who witnessed him in action.

  Two other extremely gay bishops assigned to the pope, who surrounded Ratzinger with their affection and were close to secretary of state Bertone, also enjoyed pursuing boys: having honed their techniques under John Paul II, they went on perfecting them under Ratzinger. (I met both of them with Daniele, and one of them came on to us assiduously.)

  In the Vatican, all this became so dominant a subject of gossip that some priests became annoyed. So, for example, the archbishop and nuncio Angelo Mottola, who held posts in Iran and Montenegro, addressed Cardinal Tauran during one of his visits to Rome and said (according to an eye-witness): ‘I don’t understand why this pope [Benedict XVI] condemns homosexuals when he surrounds himself with all these “ricchioni”’ (the Italian word is hard to translate: ‘faggots’ would be the closest meaning).

  The pope paid no heed to rumours, and pursued his own course. When Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint John the Baptist was shown at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, during the long tour organized by the Louvre after its restoration, he decided to go there in majesty. Benedict XVI, surrounded by his entourage, made a special trip. Was it the androgyne with curly Venetian-blond hair that attracted him, or the index finger of the left hand of this ‘son of thunder’ pointing towards heaven? Restored and sublime, Saint John the Baptist had just had his coming out, and the pope didn’t want to miss the event. (The model for Saint John the Baptist is believed to have been Salai, a poor and delinquent boy with an intense angelic and androgynous beauty, whom Leonardo da Vinci met by chance in the streets of Milan in 1490: this ‘little devil’ with the long curls remained his lover for a long time.)

  Another time, in 2010, during a general audience, the pope witnessed a brief dance display in the Paul VI Hall: four sexy acrobats came on stage and, before the holy father’s admiring eyes, suddenly undressed, removing their tee-shirts. Bare-chested, bursting with youth and beauty, they then performed a cheerful number that can be found on YouTube. Sitting on his huge white papal throne, the holy father got spontaneously to his feet, overwhelmed, to salute them. Behind him, Cardinal Bertone and Georg Gänswein applauded enthusiastically. It was later learned that the little troupe had had the same success at Gay Pride in Barcelona. Might a member of the pope’s entourage have spotted them there?

  None of this stopped the pope, once again, from redoubling his attacks against the gays. Recently elected, and taking into account the fact that ‘homosexual culture was constantly advancing’, Benedict XVI had, at the end of 2005, already asked the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to write a new text condemning homosexuality even more severely. There was a lively debate among his entourage to decide whether it should be an encyclical or a mere ‘document’. The text was eventually finalized in a highly polished version, which was circulated for commentary, as is the rule, among the members of the Council of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (one of the priests who assisted Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran had access to this document and described it to me in detail). The viciousness of the text was shocking, according to this priest, who had also read the opinions of the consultants and members of the Congregation, Tauran among them, concerning the file (including those of the bishops and future cardinals Albert Vanhoye and Giovanni Lajolo, and of the bishop Enrico Dal Covolo, all three of whom were very homophobic in their commentaries.) The priest remembers medieval phrases about ‘unnatural sin’, the ‘baseness’ of homosexuals and, indeed, the ‘power of the international gay lobby’.

  ‘Some of the people consulted argued for a powerful intervention in the form of an encyclical; others recommended producing a less significant document; still others advised, given the risk of counter-productive consequences, not to return to this question,’ the priest remembers.

  The option of an encyclical would finally be abandoned, the pope’s entourage having once again dissuaded him from returning to the subject – once too often? But the spirit of the text would live on.

  In a context that was already that of the end of an era, after less than five years of the pontificate, the Vatican machine came to an almost complete standstill. Benedict XVI retreated into shyness and began weeping often. The vice-pope, Bertone, suspicious by nature, became totally paranoid. He saw plots everywhere, machinations, cabals! In reaction to this he is said to have intensified his checks, the rumour factory worked overtime, the files filled up and there were increasing numbers of wire-taps by the Vatican police.

  In the ministries and congregations of the Vatican, there were multiple resignations, whether voluntary or imposed. In the Secretariat of State, the nerve centre of power, Bertone took personal charge of the spring-cleaning process, so suspicious was he of traitors and even more of clever characters who might have outshone him. So various Judases, Peters and Johns, all living under the same roof, were asked to leave the Last Supper.

  Tarcisio Bertone got rid of two of the most experienced nuncios in the Secretariat of State: Mgr Gabriele Caccia, exiled to Lebanon (where I met him); Pietro Parolin was sent to Venezuela.

  ‘When Caccia and Parolin departed, Bertone was left on his own. The system, which was seriously dysfunctional, violently collapsed,’ the American Vaticanologist Robert Carl Mickens observes.

  Many people began requesting audiences with the pope without having to go through the troublesome secretary of state. Sodano said everything that he had on his heart to the pope; and Georg Gänswein, who was approached directly in order to short-circuit Bertone, received all the malcontents, who formed a lengthy queue outside his office. And while the pontificate was in its death-throes, four important cardinals – Schönborn, Scola, Bagnasco and Ruini – suddenly emerged to ask for an audience with Benedict XVI. These experts in Vatican intrigues, keen connoisseurs of the bad habits of the curia, proposed that Bertone be replaced immediately. And as if by chance, their action was leaked immediately to the press. The pope wouldn’t hear a word of it, and cut them short. ‘Bertone’s staying, basta!’

  It is beyond doubt that homosexuality has been at the heart of numerous intrigues and several scandals within the pontificate. But it would be a mistake here to oppose two camps, as some have done: one ‘friendly’ and the other homophobic, or one ‘closeted’ by contrast with chaste heterosexuals. The pontificate of Benedict XVI, whose scandals were, on the one hand, the product of the ‘rings of lust’ that began to gleam under John Paul II, in fact opposed several homosexual clans who all shared the same homophobia. Under this pontificate, all, or nearly all, were chips off the same block.

  War was unleashed against gays, condoms and civil partnerships. But while in 2005, with the election of Joseph Ratzinger, gay marriage was still a very limited phenomenon, eight years later, by the time of Benedict XVI’s resignation, it was becoming almost universal throughout Europe and Latin America. This abbreviated pontificate can be summed up in an incredible sequence of battles lost in advance. No pope in modern history has been so anti-gay; and no pope has impotently witnessed such momentum in favour of the rights of gays and lesbians. Soon, almost thirty countries would recognize marriage between people of the same sex, including the Germany of the pope’s birth, which would in 2018, by a very large parliamentary majority, adopt the law against which Joseph Ratzinger had fought throughout his life.

  However, Benedict XVI never stopped fighting. The list of bulls and briefs, his interventions, his letters, his messages against gay marriage, is endless. In open contempt of the separation between Church and State, he intervened frequently in the public debate and, in the background, the Vatican manipulated all the anti-gay-marriage demonstrations.

  It was the same failure every time. But what is very revealing, here again, is that many of those involved in the battle were themselves homophilic, ‘in the closet’ or practising. They were often ‘of the parish’.

  The guerrilla war against gay marriage was waged, under the pope�
�s authority, by nine men: Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state, assisted by his deputies Leonardo Sandri, as substitute or ‘minister’ of the interior, Fernando Filoni, and Dominique Mamberti, as ‘minister’ of foreign affairs, as well as by William Levada and then Gerhard Müller, at the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Giovanni Battista Re and Marc Ouellet played the same role within the Congregation for Bishops. And, of course, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, at the head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, blustered against gay marriage.

  Let’s take for example another Ratzingerian, the Swiss cardinal Kurt Koch, a bishop from Basel, whom the pope called to his Curia in 2010. At the same time, the journalist Michael Meier, a specialist in religious questions at the Tages-Anzeiger, the main German-speaking Swiss daily newspaper, published a long report about Koch based on several first-hand eye-witness statements and original documents. In it, Meier reveals the existence of a book published by Koch, but one that has strangely disappeared from his bibliography, Lebensspiel der Freundschaft, Meditativer Brief an meine Freund (literally: The Game of Friendship: A Meditative Letter to My Friend). This book, of which I have a copy, reads as a real love letter to a young theologian. Meier also describes the cardinal’s sensitive entourage. He reveals a secret apartment that Koch is supposed to have shared with another priest, and implies that Koch was leading a double life. Koch has never publicly challenged this.

  ‘Everyone understood that Koch was uncomfortable in his skin,’ Michael Meier told me at several interviews in his Zurich apartment. To my knowledge Meier’s article has never been criticized by Koch; he never made use of his right to reply.

  Was Koch the victim of slanderous denunciations by his entourage? The fact remains that Ratzinger brought Koch to his Curia. By creating him cardinal and making him his minister of ‘ecumenism’, he gently exfiltrated him from Basel. (Cardinal Koch refused to answer my questions, but in Rome I questioned one of his deputies, Father Hyacinthe Destivelle, who described to me at length the ‘Schülerkreis’, the circle of Ratzinger’s disciples of which Koch was in charge.)

  In Italy, however, Benedict XVI’s morbid homophobia was beginning to exasperate his gay-friendly milieu. It was falling increasingly out of line with public opinion (the Italians understood its logic!) and LGBT activists were fighting back. The times were changing. The pope would find this out to his cost.

  By tragically fighting the wrong battle – he was essentially attacking homosexuality, while facing up to paedophilia barely at all – the holy father first lost the moral campaign. He would be attacked on a personal level more than any other pope who had come before him. Today it is hard to imagine the criticism to which Pope Benedict XVI was subjected during his pontificate. Nicknamed, in an incredible phrase, ‘Passivo e Bianco’ by Italian homosexual circles, he was regularly denounced as being ‘in the closet’, and turned into a symbol of internalized homophobia. He was effectively crucified by LGBT activists and the media.

  In the archives of Italian gay associations, on the internet and on the deep web, I have found countless articles, tracts and photographs that illustrate this guerrilla war. In all likelihood no pope has ever been so hated in the modern history of the Vatican.

  ‘I have never seen anything like it. It was literally a continuous flood of highly charged articles, rumours, attacks from all sides, violent articles by bloggers, insulting letters, in every language, from all countries. Hypocrisy, duplicity, insincerity, double dealing, internalized homophobia, he was accused of all of these ad nauseam,’ I am told by a priest who worked in the Vatican press office during that time.

  At demonstrations in favour of civil partnerships in Italy in 2007, I saw placards that bore these words: ‘Joseph e Georg, Lottiamo anche per voi’ (Joseph and Georg, we’re fighting for you too). Or this one: ‘Il Papa è Gay come Noi’ (The Pope is gay like us).

  In a little book that enjoyed modest success, but that struck people with its audacity, the anarchist journalist and well-known figure on the Italian underground scene, Angelo Quattrocchi, literally outed Benedict XVI. Entitled The Pope is NOT Gay, his ironic book brought together many girly and sissy photographs of the pope and his protégé Georg. The text itself is mediocre and crammed with factual errors, and includes neither proof of what it suggests nor any new information; but the photographs depict their bromance and are very funny. Nicknamed ‘the Pink Pope’, Ratzinger is shown from every angle.

  At the same time, Benedict XVI’s nicknames proliferated, each one crueller than the last: one of the worst, along with ‘Passivo e bianco’, was ‘La Maledetta’ (‘the cursed one’, and a play on ‘Benedetto’).

  Former classmates or students who knew the pope also started talking, like the German author Uta Ranke-Heinemann, who studied with him at Munich University. At the age of 84 she stated that, in her view, the pope was gay. (She supplied no proof beyond her own testimony.)

  Everyone in the world, dozens of LGBT associations, gay media outlets, as well as the tabloid press in Britain and elsewhere, hurled themselves into a crazed campaign against Ratzinger. And how skilled the celebrity columnists were at using innuendo and allusion, veiled phrases and clever wordplay, to say things without actually saying them!

  The famous American blogger Andrew Sullivan – a noted conservative polemicist and long-time gay activist – attacked the pope in turn, in an article that enjoyed considerable success. The impact of his attack was all the greater for Sullivan, himself, being Catholic. For Sullivan there was no doubt that the pope was gay, even though he advanced no proof beyond Benedict XVI’s extravagant accoutrements and his ‘bromance’ with Georg.

  Every time, these campaigns specifically targeted Georg Gänswein, generally described as Ratzinger’s ‘favourite’ secretary, ‘rumoured boyfriend’ and ‘the holy father’s life partner’. In Germany, Georg was nicknamed, in a play on the pronunciation of his first name: ‘gay.org’.

  So outrageous did things become that one gay priest was supposed to have developed the habit of cruising in the parks of Rome and introducing himself as ‘Georg Gänswein, personal secretary to the pope’. This was a total invention, of course, but it may have helped to amplify the rumour. The story recalls the technique of the great writer André Gide, who, after making love with beautiful boys in North Africa, told them (according to one of his biographers): ‘Remember that you’ve slept with one of the greatest French writers: François Mauriac!’

  How can we explain such dogged persecution? First of all, there was the anti-homosexual discourse of Benedict XVI, who was naturally preparing for the attack, since, as the expression goes, he had created a rod for his own back.

  It’s a fact: the pope had forgotten the Gospel of Luke: ‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged; do not condemn, so that you may not be condemned.’

  The former Curia priest Francesco Lepore, one of whose books had a foreword written by Joseph Ratzinger, explained to me: ‘It’s obvious that a pope who is so refined, so effeminate and so close to his magnificent private secretary, was an easy target for gay activists. But it was primarily because of his very homophobic positions that these attacks were directed at him. Many people said that he was a closeted homosexual, but no one supplied any proof. Personally I think that he’s homophilic, because there are so many clues in that direction, but at the same time I think he never practised.’

  Another Italian priest who works at the Vatican puts this point of view in perspective. ‘Those images exist, and it’s true that any gay looking at photographs of Benedict XVI, his smile, his gait, his manners, might think that he is homosexual. All the denials in the world will not shake that deep conviction people have. Besides – and this is the trap that he fell into – as a priest he can’t deny these rumours, because he couldn’t have wives or mistresses. A priest will never be able to prove that he was heterosexual!’

  Federico Lombardi, Benedict XVI’s spokesman and the current director of the Ratzinger Foundation, is unmoved b
y this wave of criticism that continues even today. ‘You know, I lived through the Irish crisis, the German crisis, the Mexican crisis … I think that history will pay tribute to Benedict XVI on the question of paedophilia, where he clarified the positions of the Church and denounced sexual abuse. He was braver than anyone else.’

  Which leaves us with the question of the ‘gay lobby’, which poisoned the pontificate and was a genuine obsession of Ratzinger’s. Real or imagined, Benedict XVI still felt that he was placed in difficulties by this ‘lobby’, which, in his Last Testament, he would rashly congratulate himself for dissolving! Francis, too, denounced a ‘gay lobby’ in his famous reply: ‘Who am I to judge?’ (and in his first conversation with the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro).

  On the basis of hundreds of interviews carried out for this book, I reached the conclusion that such a lobby does not exist in the precise sense of the term. If it did, this kind of secret freemasonry would have to work for a cause, in this instance the promotion of homosexuals. There is no such thing in the Vatican; if a gay lobby did exist there, it would not live up to its name, since most of the homosexual cardinals and prelates in the holy see generally act against the interests of gays.

  ‘I think that talking about a gay lobby in the Vatican is a mistake,’ the former Curia priest Francesco Lepore confirms. A lobby would imply a power structure aimed secretly at achieving a goal. That’s impossible and absurd. The reality is that in the Vatican there is a majority of homosexuals with power. Out of shame, out of power, but also out of careerism, these cardinals, these archbishops, these priests want to protect their power and their secret lives. These people have no intention of doing anything at all for homosexuals. They lie to everyone else, and sometimes they lie to themselves. But there is no lobby.’

  Here I would put forward another concept that seems to me to provide a better image, not so much of a ‘lobby’ but of gay life in the Vatican: the ‘rhizome’. In botany, a rhizome is a plant that doesn’t just have an underground root but also vegetation that is rich in horizontal and vertical ramifications, multiplying everywhere, to the point that one no longer knows whether the plant is under or above ground, or what is root and what is aerial stem. On a social level, the ‘rhizome’ (an image that I have borrowed from the book A Thousand Plateaux by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) is a network of entirely decentralized, disordered relationships and liaisons, with no beginnings or limits; each branch of the rhizome can connect with any other, without hierarchy or logic, without a centre.