In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  For 30 years, Joseph Ratzinger was the grand inquisitor. As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then as pontiff, he put in place a sophisticated system of sanctions, seconded for a long time by his bad genie Tarcisio Bertone. What is striking is not so much the violence or the excommunications, which were rare in the end, as the perversity of Ratzinger and his liking for ‘martyric’ humiliations. No autos-da-fé: examinations of conscience! Ratzinger used and abused a whole palette of gradual punishments. And he used such imagination in his sanctions!

  His opponents, often homosexual or gay-friendly, were marginalized or banished, blamed or mortified, reduced to the state of laymen, ‘placed under examination’, forced into ‘penitential silence’ or stripped of their mission canonical (meaning that their work no longer had any value in the eyes of the Church). The famous theologian Eugen Drewermann, who put dynamite under the Vatican ideology of John Paul II, was severely punished. The list of those excluded, sanctioned or turned into pariahs is a long one: Father Charles E. Curran (an American who was too open to divorce, the pill and homosexuality); Father Matthew Fox (a heterosexual Dominican who aspired to marry); the American priest Robert Nugent (favourable towards gays); the Belgian Jesuit Jacques Dupuis (a specialist in religion in India); the nun and theologian Lavinia Byrne (an Englishwoman in favour of women’s ordination); the Brazilian nun and theologian Ivone Gebara (considered too liberal on sexual morality and abortion); or indeed the Italian Father Franco Barbero (who, in a book written with the journalist Pasquale Quaranta, defended the idea that love between persons of the same sex did not contradict the Gospels). Even the dead weren’t spared: ten years after his death, attention was paid to the writings of the Indian Jesuit Anthony de Mello, famous for his pro-gay teachings of the Bible, which encouraged manifestations of affection between members of religious orders according to a ‘third way’ that was neither sexuality nor celibacy – and he was declared non-compliant.

  Demonstrating a kind of individual fanaticism, Benedict XVI also suspended priests or nuns who distributed condoms in Africa. Not to forget the unusual treatment by John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger of the French bishop Jacques Gaillot, who defended homosexuals and condoms as a means of fighting AIDS: he was in the end appointed Bishop in partibus of Parténia, an episcopal seat in the Algerian desert, with no parish or congregations, since the town disappeared under the sand at the end of the fifth century.

  Joseph Ratzinger summoned recalcitrant clerics countless times to make them justify themselves for whole days, he made them confess, comment repeatedly on a failing, describe an error, justify a simple ‘tone’. Convinced that the Church itself escaped his criticism because it embodied morality within itself, this doctrinaire pope often used arguments of authority. His positions are described by his detractors as arbitrary and peremptory, ‘justified by the absence of justification’ (in the phrase of Albert Camus in The Rebel). A rigidity that is all the more artificial since Pope Francis would have no difficulty altering or reversing most of his diktats.

  All of those who were excluded, punished or reduced to silence suffered severe after-effects and stigmas: deracination; the idea of losing a family; financial stalemate because it was difficult for them to find work; the feeling of failure after the end of ‘voluntary servitude’; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, the indefinable lack of what I would call ‘fraternity’.

  Whether they were excluded or left voluntarily, defrocked priests only accelerated the great crisis in vocations, a silent and lasting movement that began in the 1970s. Some lost their faith after Paul VI’s rigid encyclical on sexual morality, Humanae vitae; thousands of priests threw their cassocks to the winds to marry in the 1970s and 1980s; others left the Church during the systematic liquidation of the advances of Vatican II under John Paul II; others finally abandoned their parishes as right-wing theologians and homophobia came to dominate the Roman Curia.

  At the same time, tens of millions of the faithful moved away from the Church because of its distance from the spirit of the age, its ultra-conservative positions on marriage, women’s rights, the rights of homosexuals, or condoms and AIDS; many believers were also shocked by revelations of sexual abuse and the protection enjoyed by predatory priests. Cardinal Ratzinger’s insistence on putting books in the Index cut the Church off from its intellectuals; finally, artists also moved away from a Church that had lost a taste for the beauty of things.

  ‘Joseph Ratzinger created a theological desert around him. He silenced everyone. He was the only theologian who was allowed to speak. He would not tolerate contradiction. Ratzinger was responsible for the suffocation of freedom of thought and the spectacular impoverishment of Catholic theological thought over the last four years,’ Father Bento Domingues tells me.

  This renowned Dominican theologian, whom I interviewed in Lisbon, has greater freedom to speak since, at the age of 84, he is no longer intimidated by authoritarianism. He adds angrily: ‘Ratzinger was unimaginably cruel towards his opponents. He even held a canonical trial against a theologian who he knew was dying of cancer.’

  During this investigation, everywhere in the world – in Portugal and Japan, in the United States and Hong Kong, or in the missions of Africa and Asia – I have met liberal or gay-friendly priests who are trying to move their Church to focus on those at its ‘periphery’. They have all been at war with Joseph Ratzinger or his local conservative representative.

  Strangely, one of the places where that opposition to Joseph Ratzinger was the most powerful as well as the most intransigent was the Middle East. During my stays in eight Arab countries for this inquiry, I met ‘Eastern Christians’ as well as European missionaries who are, in many cases, still ‘evangelizing’ the Middle East, sometimes forgetting that colonialism belongs in the past.

  In Rome, the ‘brain’ of the Vatican in charge of the Eastern Christians is Cardinal Leonardo Sandri. We have already met this prelate: he is a figure of the kind that rarely exists outside of the pages of the Old Testament, which is populated by eminent figures of similar calibre, colourful and seemingly, at times, considering themselves to be above good and evil, which makes them more interesting, with their diabolical contradictions and their long beards, than the smooth characters of the aseptic blockbusters that are the Gospels.

  The Argentinian, as we know, was John Paul II’s ‘minister’ of the interior; ostracized under Benedict XVI, he was given a consolation prize: the Congregation for the Eastern Christians. When I visited this ‘minister’ in his spectacular office on Via della Conciliazione in Rome, I first of all came across a crazed camarilla of assistants, secretaries, second-in-commands, ushers and butlers, who took care of me and left me hugely impressed. Some of them could have been André Gide’s travelling companions in the East!

  Here, more than elsewhere, protocol remains a serious matter. And I discover the importance for the Italians of the ‘ante-room’. Waiting for Cardinal Sandri, I am asked to sit first in a huge waiting room; eventually, from this large room, an usher guides me towards a little vestibule, then from that ante-room a butler leads me towards a sort of boudoir, his Eminence’s private secretary, before at last I am delicately introduced, perhaps so as not to wake the beast, into the big office of the bogeyman, which I finally enter.

  Cardinal Sandri is imposing: he has a large, stubborn-looking forehead and a rugged style. Contrary to the official Vatican instructions that oblige all prelates to receive visitors, for reasons of confidentiality, in private drawing rooms, he receives them in his office. Rebellious and scornful of the norms, Sandri invites me to take a seat on his sofa. He speaks impeccable French, like many cardinals, and he is both charming and sympathetic towards me. He takes my hand to show me, from his window, the office of the ‘Equestrian Order of the Knights of Jerusalem’ (you couldn’t make this up), and gives me a welcome present: a gold (or gold-plate) medal with a picture of Pope Francis.

  ‘Are you a believer?’ Sandri asks me during our inter
view (which is recorded, with the cardinal’s agreement).

  I reply that, after the Enlightenment, after Spinoza, Nietzsche and Darwin, after Voltaire and Rousseau, after Rimbaud, it has become difficult, particularly for a Frenchman …

  ‘Ah yes, secularization! I know!’ Sandri says, with a penetrating look, his voice exaggeratedly loud, and with a wide, grouchy gesture.

  Like many people in the Vatican, and in the Catholic world, Leonardo Sandri has a passion for the East. This Latin with the Leonardo smile likes long caravan trails and the clear separation of the sexes.

  Thanks to his new post, Sandri has discovered a new direction for his life, about which he talks to me at length: a connoisseur of the Chaldeans, Syriacs and Melkites, he describes to me the Byzantine subtleties of the Eastern Churches. He gives me addresses for a trip that I’m taking to Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, and recommends contacts who I can go and see on his behalf. Sandri knows the area like the pockets of his cassock. A cardinal, a former diplomat, a nuncio, he is one of the greatest Vatican specialists in the subtleties of the Middle East, with its Aladdins, its whirling dervishes with their Qamar, its Ali Baba and 40 thieves.

  He and I share this passion for the East. It is that of the Crusades and the Catholicism of conquest, of the Mount of Olives, of St Louis and Napoleon. But the ‘journey to the East’ was also a genre very popular among homosexual writers (Rimbaud in Aden, Lawrence in Arabia, André Gide in Tunisia, Oscar Wilde in the Maghreb, Pierre Herbart in Africa, Henry de Montherlant in Algeria and Morocco, Pierre Loti in Galilee, Jean Genet in Palestine, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in Tangier …). The Poet writes: ‘The East, the primitive homeland’.

  ‘Several of the writers who wanted to take that “journey to the East”, a great literary motif, were homosexual. The name of Sodom has always contained a formidable symbolic charge,’ observes Benny Ziffer, the chief literary editor of Haaretz, over dinner in Tel Aviv.

  So the East is also a gay passion! A great myth: the primitive homeland for Catholics; a new Sodom for gays. An escape that proves to be a trick, a market for fools; only sexual miseries are acquired there.

  In the Near East and the Middle East, in the Levant or the Maghreb, I have come across ‘hummus queens’, as they are known in the Lebanon: those who, unable to satisfy their inclinations in the Roman Curia, their diocese or their monastery, go to the lands of their Christian ancestors and their lovers. How fascinated I was by those Knights of the Equestrian Order of Jerusalem, those Knights of the Order of Malta, those missionary-philanthropists of l’Œuvre d’Orient who sometimes show a double allegiance to the Church and to the beauties of Arabia. How strange are those pilgrims who are terrified by Islam, but are unafraid in the arms of a Muslim. In Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, where I have often encountered them, those priests who like to be whistled at in the street, as if they were princesses, have told me guardedly about the gay-friendly places they went to, the ‘obliging’ hotels and the luxury riads. For example, European Catholic clergy once frequented the former Benedictine monastery of Toumliline in the Atlas Mountains (according to the testimony of diplomats, senior military officers and people close to the royal family whom I interviewed in Morocco). In Egypt, I was also told of the gay-friendly atmosphere of the Dominican Institute of Oriental Studies in Cairo.

  This passion for the East has ramifications even inside the Vatican. According to the testimony of a Curia priest and a confessor at St Peter’s, there is considerable consumption of Arab porn videos on YouPorn, as well as of the Italian version of the video platform citebeur.com and a website that offers Arab escorts in Rome.

  In Lebanon, on the kind recommendation of Cardinal Sandri, I meet the apostolic nuncio Gabriele Caccia. This diplomat was Sandri’s young deputy under Ratzinger, in the post of ‘assessor’, or a kind of number two to the ‘minister’ of the interior at the Vatican. Removed from office by Tarcisio Bertone, he was exiled to Beirut, where he agreed to see me. One of the heads that rolled under Ratzinger, he has the manners of an angel and tells me that he adores Lebanon. (Francis recently moved him to the Philippines.)

  The nunciature is far from the centre of Beirut, in Bkerké, north of the Lebanese capital. It is a bastion of Christianity: Our Lady of Lebanon is a stone’s throw away, as is the headquarters of the Patriarchate of the Maronites, one of the main Eastern-rite Catholic communities. Caccia lives and works there, protected by the soldiers of the Lebanese army, in a small house below the nunciature (which was being restored when I visited). The view of Beirut and the surrounding valley is spectacular.

  Like all Vatican diplomats, Caccia is not allowed to speak without authorization, so our conversation is off the record. But I’m impressed by his knowledge of the country and his courage: he goes everywhere, at his own risk wearing his archbishop’s robes and the scarlet moiré silk biretta of apostolic nuncios. Here, war is not far away: there is no gender theory, no racy parties. Caccia doesn’t give me a jewel by way of a welcome present: but the Gospel of St Luke, translated into Arabic.

  The Eastern-rite Catholic Churches are faithful to Rome, but their priests can be ordained when they are married. Here we are at the heart of the great contradiction of the Vatican, which has been obliged to recognize such practising heterosexuality, whatever the cost.

  ‘Priestly celibacy is a relatively recent decision. Even in Rome, priests got married into the eleventh century! Here we are faithful to tradition: priests are often married. On the other hand, once one has been ordained, marriage is no longer possible, and bishops are always chosen from among celibate priests,’ I am told by Bishop Samir Mazloum, the spokesman for the Maronite patriarch, when I interview him in Beirut.

  Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were very angry about this Eastern exception, which they considered abnormal, and did everything they could to hold it back. So, for a long time, they were opposed to Eastern Catholic priests being able to serve in European churches when they were married – a solution that would, on the other hand, have eased the crisis of vocations in Europe. But the precedent of Anglican or Lutheran converts led them to tolerate exceptions, later universalized by Pope Francis: now many Catholic priests serving in French, Spanish or Italian churches are married. On the subject of the celibacy and marriage of priests, the Eastern Christians therefore represent an opposition to the rules issued by the Vatican.

  The Maronite priest Fadi Daou, a professor of theology and president of the important Adyan Foundation, whom I interviewed in Beirut with my Arab researcher Hady elHady, sums up the situation like this: ‘We are Eastern Christians affiliated to Rome, but independent. An estimated 55 per cent of Maronite priests are married; we choose our bishops freely. We are more liberal on certain subjects, like the celibacy of the priesthood; and more conservative on others, like the status of women or homosexuality. Pope Francis recognized the uniqueness of our churches, authorizing our married priests to serve in Western Europe.’ (With the same prudence, Mgr Pascal Gollnish of the Œuvre d’Orient and Cardinal Raphael Sako, the so-called Patriarch of Babylon, who represents the Catholic Chaldean Church, confirmed this information during interviews in Paris.)

  Some priests, journalists or academics who I met in the region told me that ‘Catholics were very much under threat in the East, like homosexuals’. These two ‘minorities’ even had the same enemies in the Arab world. A Lebanese priest confirms: ‘The list of persecutions of Catholics matches up strangely, and almost perfectly, with the list of persecutions against homosexuals.’

  In the Far East – far beyond the ‘Near East’ favoured by the French and the ‘Middle East’ of the English – the situation is also very different. The most distant ‘peripheries’ experience a more liberal form of Catholicism, dissidents in their own way. The Church of Rome is usually very much in the minority there, except in the Philippines and East Timor, and, to a lesser extent, in South Korea and Vietnam.

  In the holy see, the man in charge of the ‘evangelization’ of As
ia and Africa is Cardinal Fernando Filoni. Nicknamed the ‘red’ pope, he is at the head of one of the strategic ministries for the future of Catholicism. Himself a nuncio, close to Cardinal Sodano, Filoni was in office in Iraq in the early 2000s, when he showed true courage at a time when most Western diplomats had fled the country even before the American military intervention against Saddam Hussein.

  I meet him in the historic office of Propaganda Fide, the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, a famous building designed by Bernini, on the Piazza di Spagna in Rome.

  ‘The name “red pope” is a deliberate contrast to the name of the holy father, who is the “white pope”, or the superior of the Jesuits, who is the “black pope”,’ Filoni explains to me in perfect French.

  During about twenty trips to around ten countries in Asia, particularly Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and China, I was able to gauge the extent to which Asian Catholicism tends to soften some of the rigidities imposed by Rome. In contact with local churches and Foreign Missions, I observed a great contrast between rules and practices: the celibacy of heterosexual priests, contrary to the local culture, is not generally respected to any great extent, and there is a particularly large number of homosexual Catholic European missionaries.

  In China, where Roman Catholicism is clandestine, the private lives of Catholic priests and bishops is subjected to active surveillance on the part of the regime, which has no hesitation in ‘using’ the possible double lives of clerics (often actively heterosexual) to control them or to ‘buy’ their cooperation (according to several first-hand testimonies I collected in Beijing, Shanghai, Canton, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Taiwan). The work of local priests in China, such as the Jesuit Father Benoît Vermander, whom I met, is no less exemplary in view of the risks involved; that of the foreign missionaries, called ‘parachutists’ here, because they land in foreign parts to spread the word and remain isolated for a long time, is in many cases courageous.