In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Homosexual life in the Vatican and more broadly in the Catholic Church, taking the form of clandestine companionship, seems to me to be structured as a rhizome. With its own internal dynamic, whose energy derives both from desire and from secrecy, homosexuality links hundreds of prelates and cardinals in a way that escapes hierarchies and codes. By virtue of this fact – involving multiplicity, acceleration, derivation – it creates countless multidirectional connections: loving relationships, sexual liaisons, emotional break-ups, friendships, reciprocal arrangements, situations of dependency and professional promotions, abuses of dominant positions and droits de seigneur; nevertheless the lines of causation, the ramifications and the relationships cannot be clearly established or decoded from outside. Each ‘branch’ of the rhizome, each ‘fragment’ of the Great Work, often ignores the sexuality of the other branches: it’s homosexuality at different levels, isolated ‘drawers’ of the same closet (the American theologian Mark Jordan chose a different image, comparing the Vatican to a hive with its ‘honeycomb of closets’: this is constructed from so many tiny closets, each homosexual priest being to an extent isolated in his own alveola). So you mustn’t underestimate the opacity of individuals and the isolation they feel, even when they are part of the rhizome. An aggregation of weak creatures whose unity does not bring strength, it is a network in which everyone is vulnerable and often unhappy. And in this way, we can explain why some bishops and cardinals whom I have interviewed, even when they are themselves gay, seemed sincerely startled by the extent of homosexuality within the Vatican.

  In the end, the thousand-strong homosexual contingent in the Vatican, this extraordinarily dense and secret rhizome, is more than a simple ‘lobby’. It is a system. It’s the template of the Vatican closet.

  Did Cardinal Ratzinger understand that system? Impossible to say. On the other hand, it is clear that Pope Francis discovered the resources and extent of the rhizome when he reached St Peter’s throne. And we cannot understand VatiLeaks, the war on Francis, the culture of silence about thousands of sex-abuse cases, the recurrent homophobia of the cardinals, or indeed the resignation of Benedict XVI, if we fail to measure the extent and the depth of the rhizome.

  So there is no ‘gay lobby’; there is something else in the Vatican: a network of homophilic or homosexualized, polymorphic relations, without a centre, but dominated by secrecy, double lives and lies, constructed as a ‘rhizome’. Which we might just as well call: The Closet.

  21

  Dissidents

  ‘I fear he won’t make it through the winter,’ Radcliffe says to me in a whisper.

  The priest takes a coin from his pocket. He gives it to an old man sitting in the street. He strikes up a conversation with him, and then we continue on our way along the streets of Oxford. It is freezing.

  ‘Every year I think he ages by five years.’

  Timothy Radcliffe knows the homeless people in his district, and tries to help them with whatever he has to hand. It’s a small and inconspicuous gesture, banal in its simplicity, and one that has become rare in a ‘self-reverential’ Church that tends to move away from the poor.

  This Dominican friar isn’t a rebel as such; he is an English priest and theologian with an international reputation, and one of the great figures of the Church, since he was ‘master’ of the Dominican order between 1992 and 2001. However, Radcliffe is one of the critical minds.

  While the Vatican of Benedict XVI was already in a state of siege, secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone was getting out of his depth and opposition was getting more intense in the Roman Curia, other fronts appeared. Around the world, ‘dissidents’ were beginning to rebel against the intransigence and rigidity of the pope. Timothy Radcliffe is one of those who opposed the conservative drift of the pontificate.

  ‘I hated Ratzinger for a long time; it was stronger than me. I even wrote an article against him. And then, when I got to Rome, as master of the Dominicans, and met him, my judgement evolved. He was a cardinal at the time and I could talk to him with confidence, because I represented one of the important orders of the Church. I talked to him a lot. And I would have to say that you could always argue with Ratzinger. In the end, I had respect and even affection for him.’

  After a first interview with Radcliffe in Blackfriars Hall at Oxford University, where he lives, we continue the discussion in a French restaurant in the city. Radcliffe has time: now an international speaker, he isn’t taking the plane until the next morning. We talk all evening, and I spend the night at the house of the Blackfriars so that I don’t have to get the last train back to London.

  When the Dominican order elected as its head, in 1992, the very liberal and gay-friendly Timothy Radcliffe, the Vatican was startled. How could such an error have happened? Had the Dominicans all gone mad? Scandalized, Cardinals Angelo Sodano and Giovanni Battista Re tried to come up with a stratagem to contest the choice. The cardinal in charge of religious orders, Jean Jérôme Hamer, a Belgian, was prompted to take retaliatory measures.

  ‘Hamer, who was a Dominican himself, boycotted me! After I was elected, he only came to visit the order when I wasn’t there! And then we talked. He was more accepting of me. Then he only came when I was there!’ Radcliffe tells me.

  It has to be said that Timothy Radcliffe is a rare species in Roman Catholicism: an openly pro-gay theologian. He has always defended LGBT people and made significant gestures to include them in the Church. In particular, he declared that homosexuals could be faithful to Christ, and that relationships between men could be as ‘generous, vulnerable, tender or mutual’ as heterosexual relations. He also published a book on the question of AIDS and adopted courageous positions on the question of condoms.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or heterosexual: the essential thing is to love,’ Radcliffe tells me during our interview, speaking very freely, perhaps under the influence of a very robust Côtes du Rhône.

  Few prelates at this level talk straight. About the homosexuality and homophobia of the Church, Radcliffe has no taboos. He never campaigns: he states the facts. Calmly, serenely. He preaches.

  He is a man of immense culture, theological, of course, but also philosophical, geopolitical and artistic. He is capable of writing long articles about Rembrandt, or of making a thrilling comparison between Jurassic Park and Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.

  During his years in Rome, the Dominican made close connections with the moderate wing of the Church, becoming a friend of the great liberal cardinals Carlo Maria Martini and Achille Silvestrini. He tells me of their shared outings in the capital in Silvestrini’s little car.

  His long period in the Vatican was marked, at the end of the pontificate of John Paul II, when the church of Cardinals Sodano and Ratzinger became ultra-conservative, out of a need to protect dissident theologians who were often threatened. Radcliffe defended numerous key figures, in the first rank of whom was the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, who in fact became a Dominican …

  ‘When you join the order, you’re protected. Of course the Dominicans protect their friars,’ Radcliffe comments simply.

  The priest is discreet about these battles, but, according to other sources, Timothy Radcliffe defended priests who risked being excommunicated; he wrote large numbers of letters and, in the most difficult cases, he went to see Cardinal Ratzinger in person to plead a case, avoid a punishment or request a period of grace. Faced with the cardinal’s ‘Tipp-Ex technique’, which consisted of deleting the names of the dissidents he didn’t like, the Dominican chose to argue.

  Dissident? Radcliffe is just a believer, and a demanding one. He adds, insisting forcefully on this point, when we say goodbye: ‘I love my Church. Yes, I love it.’

  James Alison is one of those dissidents who needed protecting. An Englishman, like Timothy Radcliffe, and also trained by the Dominicans, this priest is one of the bravest figures I have met in the Church. An openly gay theologian and priest, Alison is a specialist in Latin America, where
he spent many years, particularly in Mexico and Brazil. He also spent a long time in the United States, before moving to Madrid.

  We are in a vinoteca in the gay district of Chueca, and Alison is with his dog Nicholas, a French bulldog he adopted in Brazil. The priest tells me about his career and his passion for travel. This ‘travelling preacher’ goes round the world to give talks and colloquia, and has no hesitation along the way in celebrating masses for LGBT groups. In Madrid, for example, I see him officiating within the Crismhom association, a group of gay Christians with more than two hundred members who meet in a little bar in Chueca, which is where I go to see them.

  Having been a priest in Latin America for a long time, Alison tells me of the battles between Joseph Ratzinger and the liberation theologians. For several decades, the cardinal obsessively pursued the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez, who was summoned to explain himself before the great German professor, called to Rome and humiliated. The Brazilian Leonardo Boff, a highly respected figure in Latin America, was silenced by Ratzinger for his controversial views, before choosing to leave the Franciscan order for personal reasons. The Jesuit priest and theologian Jon Sobrino, an advocate of left-wing theology, was attacked by Alfonso López Trujillo and Joseph Ratzinger for many years. The Marxist Frei Betto, a Brazilian progressive theologian, who spent several years in prison under the dictatorship, was given a dressing-down by the pope.

  What is paradoxical about this rearguard action is that the great figures of liberation theology – especially Gutiérrez, Boff, Sobrino, Betto – were the manifestly non-gay clerics, whereas most of the cardinals or bishops who attacked them, both in Latin America and in the Vatican, and accused them of ‘deviance’ from the norm, were homophilic or practising homosexuals! We need only think of Cardinals Alfonso López Trujillo or Sebastiano Baggio, among others … The world turned upside down, in short.

  ‘I have always had a lot of respect for the theology of Benedict XVI. I only regret that Ratzinger accentuated the intellectual winter decreed by John Paul II. And I am very happy that Pope Francis has rehabilitated several of those thinkers who were marginalized for too long,’ Alison says prudently.

  Cardinal Walter Kasper, a major figure in the liberal wing of the Curia, and one of those who inspired Pope Francis’s project, qualifies the situation. ‘These figures from liberation theology are very different. Gustavo Gutiérrez, for example, was sincerely committed to the poor. He wasn’t aggressive, he was thinking of the Church. To me, he was credible. Boff, on the other hand, could be very naïve about Marxism, for example; he was more aggressive. Others made the choice of joining guerrilla organizations and taking up arms. That couldn’t be tolerated.’

  On the gay question, liberation theology was relatively slow and divided. Prisoners of the Marxist vulgate, few of the thinkers in this ‘liberationist’ movement understood the importance of race, sex or sexual orientation in relation to exclusion or poverty, at least at first. Frei Betto, one of the key figures in the movement, acknowledged when I interviewed him in Rio de Janeiro: ‘Liberation theology evolved according to its context. At first, in the 1960s and 1970s, the discovery of Marxism was crucial as a frame of reference. Even today, Marx remains essential for the analysis of capitalism. At the same time, as new questions emerged, liberation theology adapted. On ecology, for example, Leonardo Boff is known today as one of the fathers of eco-theology, and he had a great influence on Pope Francis’s encyclical on integral ecology: Laudato si. And, thanks to the women involved in the base communities, and to feminist theologians, questions like sexuality and gender arose. I myself have just published a little manual on questions of gender and sexual orientation. No subject is taboo to us.’

  For his part, the Cardinal Archbishop of São Paulo, Paulo Evaristo Arns, who was close to liberation theology, dared to encourage the use of condoms and criticized John Paul II for forbidding the debate on the celibacy of priests, which did not, in his view, have any serious foundation (he also went to Rome to defend Boff against Ratzinger). Mannered and effeminate, Evaristo Arns was so strangely gay-friendly that certain Brazilian theologians who were among his friends suspected him of having tendencies, which in their view explained his liberalism. But this hypothesis, which I heard often during my investigation in Rio, Brasília and São Paulo, does not seem to be based on any precise evidence and has never been confirmed; on the other hand, it is clear that he was an opponent of the dictatorship in Brazil, and that he ‘celebrated masses for the victims of military power’ (according to the testimony of André Fischer, one of the main figures in the Brazilian gay movement, whom I met in São Paulo).

  In any case, it was in the liberation theology movement, and later (from the 1990s), that an actively pro-gay movement appeared, of which James Alison was one of the theorists: a veritable ‘gay theology’.

  ‘Alison was one of those who anticipated and accompanied this movement of liberation theology towards feminism, towards minorities, towards gays,’ Timothy Radcliffe confirms.

  In this somewhat unexpected intellectual evolution, liberation theology began thinking of poverty and exclusion no longer in terms of social class and groups, but in terms of individuals. This idea was summed up by the German theologian Michael Brinkschröder when I met him in Munich: ‘We developed an interest in the individual, with his or her origins, race, sex, sexual orientation. Marxist references were increasingly ineffective. Instead, we turned to “French theory” (the philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida) and radical feminist thought (Judith Butler). That’s how we moved from liberation theology to “gay theology” and soon to “queer theology”.’

  Theologians like the American Robert Goss (an openly gay former Jesuit), the radical feminist Marcela Althaus Reid in Argentina, the Brazilians Paulo Suess and André Musskopf (a Lutheran), or even the Dominican friar Carlos Mendoza-Alvarez in Mexico, helped to define or feed this ‘queer theology’. We might also cite the name of the Brazilian Luiz Carlos Susin, a Capuchin friar who was, he told me, ‘the organizer of a “side event” on liberation theology, in 2005, during one of the first meetings of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre’. This workshop on questions of gender contributed to the expansion of ‘queer theology’ in Latin America.

  Today, many ‘queer’ Bible reading groups still keep this current alive, even though it has tended to run out of steam for lack of academic recognition, or because it has broken down into various chapels and LGBTIQ+ undercurrents, the natural direction of ‘deconstruction’ a little ‘in the style of Protestantism’ (in Michael Brinkschröder’s phrase).

  It is no surprise that ‘queer theology’ also came under violent criticism from the Vatican under Benedict XVI. Some priests suffered sanctions; some theologians lost their accreditation. In Mexico, Angel Méndez of the Jesuit Universidad Iberoamericana was even punished severely for teaching ‘queer theology’. ‘Openly gay, HIV positive and living with my boyfriend’, as he confirmed to me, Méndez was fired in contravention of Mexican law forbidding discrimination in the workplace. He paid a high price for his sincerity and his LGBT theological teachings. More recently, the new rector, a gay-friendly Jesuit, David Fernández Dávalos, gave him his job back.

  The same logic inspires priests as different as Timothy Radcliffe, Paulo Evaristo Arns, James Alison, Carlos Mendoza-Alvarez, Angel Méndez or Luiz Carlos Susin, and many other ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ theologians: sincerity, authenticity and the rejection of hypocrisy on homosexuality. Without necessarily being gay themselves, they know that the percentage of homosexuals in the Church is very high.

  A down-to-earth man who has travelled widely in Latin America, James Alison has observed that most priests there lead a double life. ‘In Bolivia and Peru, for example, priests generally have a female concubine. The ones who are celibate are often homosexual. Basically, I would say that the rural diocesan clergy are largely practising and straight, and the urban religious clergy tend to be practising homosexuals,’ Alison tells me.

/>   As for the war waged against gays under John Paul II, of which Father Alison himself was a victim, because he has been stripped of any official title, many think that it was very counter-productive.

  ‘For the Church, it’s a desperate waste of energy,’ Alison adds.

  But times are changing. Most liberation theologians and pro-gay priests now have peaceful relations with the holy see. Pope Francis has good relations with Gustavo Gutiérrezand Frei Betto whom he received at the Vatican, and Leonardo Boff, who is now one of its key intellectuals. As for James Alison, the priest without a parish who was subjected to an irregular trial under canon law, he has just had a call from the Vatican, in which the man at the other end wanted to know how he was. He still hasn’t got over it! Alison refused to comment on that private conversation, or to tell me the identity of the person who called him. But information circulated at the Curia, and I learned the name of the person who called Alison from the Vatican switchboard: it was Pope Francis.

  During the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI didn’t pick up the phone: they sent their guard dogs. The Secretariat of State, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Religious were put in charge of these inquisitions. Files were drawn up on Timothy Radcliffe and James Alison, among many others. There was no shortage of calls to order, bullying, punishments and ‘examinations’.