In Japan, in the entourage of an influential bishop, I am told that the Japanese Church is very liberal and that its bishops, for that specific reason, have had their disagreements with Benedict XVI. ‘The episcopate prefers to avoid conflicts. We are loyal to the principles of tolerance, equanimity and consensus that prevail on the island. We receive injunctions from Rome with good will; but we still go on doing what we think is right for Japan, without worrying too much about the Vatican,’ a priest close to the Japanese Episcopal Conference explains.
During the 2014 synod, the Japanese Catholic Church also produced, as Father Pierre Charignon confirmed, a chaplain sent to Tokyo by the Foreign Missions in Paris, a 15-page official document deploring the positions of Rome: they criticized its ‘lack of hospitality’ and its ‘artificial’ standards on contraception, condoms or divorced couples.
‘We prefer Francis,’ Noriko Hiruma, one of the directors of the Justice and Peace committee of the Japanese Bishops Conference, tells me.
During my stay, I visit a Catholic pro-LGBT church in the gay quarter of Shinjuku Ni-chome. There, a priest openly campaigns in favour of same-sex couples, and distributes condoms to the young people in the gaybourhood.
The opposition to Joseph Ratzinger is less discreet in the spiritual ‘peripheries’ of Western Europe. In Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, but also in the Scandinavian countries and Ireland, the pope’s rigidity is universally denounced.
‘Here, you are in a Catholic parish like any other,’ Monica Schmid tells me.
And in fact I go with her to visit the stripped-down modern church of Effretikon in Switzerland, where everything seems to be in line with Catholic doctrine. Except that this generous woman, Monica Schmid, is the curé here.
Schmid describes her church to me at length and with passion, the great panoply of sacraments and rituals available, and I guess that she is much better versed in theology and liturgy than most priests. ‘Her’ church is modern and open: many parishioners are faithful to it (according to Meinrad Furrer, a Catholic pastoral assistant who comes with me on several trips to Switzerland).
On a number of stays in Illnau-Effretikon, Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne, Coire, St Gallen, Lucerne and Basel, I can see that more and more women and laypeople are officiating in Switzerland. Many members of religious orders are publicly accepting their homosexuality and getting organized. Some, in a grey area, are still authorized to celebrate mass; others are limited to preaching without consecration. There are associations, like Network in Zurich, which brings together LGBT Catholics. Sometimes, priests that I have met celebrate blessings of homosexual couples. They were all openly in rebellion against Joseph Ratzinger and now demand that the ‘Kirche von Unten’ (Church from below) be listened to.
Of course, Rome and, in particular, the former Pope Benedict XVI, did all they could to bring these dissident parishes into line, asking the Swiss bishops to sanction them. The latter, who are sometimes zealots, tried to apply the ‘unfriendly’ rule of Rome – often before being ‘outed’ by the press for their double lives! With the result that a ceasefire was decreed. And the pro-gay Swiss dissidents are now left in peace.
In Germany, opposition was even more head-on. Within the heart of the Church, the German episcopate had been overtaken by the people, in deep rebellion against the Vatican. While the Germans had at first welcomed his election, Benedict XVI quickly disappointed them. His pontificate soon started an unprecedented wave of protest, Benedict becoming persona non grata in his own country. His moral positions, which were held to be reactionary, were rejected even by Catholics: during his trip to Berlin, dozens of family, feminist, lay or homosexual associations demonstrated in the streets. At the same time, over a hundred MPs announced that they were boycotting his speech to the Bundestag, while even the president of the parliament asked the pope to change his line on the celibacy of the priesthood. In the end, the president of the Republic of Germany, himself remarried, publicly criticized the moral position of the holy father on divorced couples.
‘Here, the majority of German theologians are hostile to Ratzinger,’ I am told in Berlin by the former member of parliament Volker Beck, who was one of those who boycotted the pope.
In his own country Joseph Ratzinger’s point of view has become inaudible. Almost 90 per cent of Germans are questioning the celibacy of the priesthood and the prohibition on the ordination of women. Movements of homosexual priests and associations of LGBT believers have also proliferated to the extent that they can seem like one of the most dynamic components of the Church, and are sometimes supported by the local clergy. Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich and president of the German Episcopal Conference, is one of the few Ratzingerians who have been open on the gay question: in 2018, weighing his words carefully, he let it be understood that Catholic priests could in certain cases organize ‘blessing ceremonies for homosexual couples’. Better than anyone else, this prelate knows that whole sections of German-speaking Catholicism are in disagreement with the Vatican, that gay priests are in the majority in churches in German-speaking Europe, and even more numerous among German Jesuits, Franciscans or Dominicans.
The case of the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Hans Groër, helped to open people’s minds: rigid, homophobic and a practising homosexual, the cardinal led a double life until his old demons caught up with him. Accused by young priests of unwanted touching and sexual abuse, he was subject to numerous complaints. And as the list of victims lengthened – more than a thousand among the boys and young men of the diocese – the Groër affair became a scandal throughout the German-speaking world.
During the trial, the protections that the cardinal enjoyed at a high level exploded into broad daylight. In the case file, the new Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn, bravely criticized the role of Pope John Paul II and his deputy Angelo Sodano who, according to him, protected the paedophile cardinal.
Let’s pause for a moment on the figure of Schönborn. The successor to Groër in Vienna is one of the most gay-friendly cardinals in the present-day Church. An enthusiastic reader of Jacques Maritain and Julien Green (who is buried in Austria), a lover of the East and a regular visitor to the Austrian Hospice in Jerusalem, Schönborn privately claims to be attentive to the concerns of homosexuals. At the end of the 1990s, for example, the Archbishop of Vienna encouraged the creation of the journal Dialog, published by the diocese, and distributed in several hundred thousands of copies to Austrian Catholics. The debate on the celibacy of the priesthood or the granting of the sacraments to divorced couples was played out in its pages.
‘We launched that journal under the auspices of and with funding from the diocese, with the constant support of Archbishop Schönborn and his vicar general, Helmut Schüller. We were loyal to the Church, but at the same time, the debate was opened up more and more …’ Martin Zimper, its editor-in-chief, tells me during several meetings in Lucerne, where he now lives with his partner Peter.
Openness has its limits: Schönborn put an end to the experiment when the homosexual prism of the magazine became too much of a presence, but the impact of the publication on Austrian Catholicism has been impressive.
It was also in the immediate entourage of the Archbishop of Vienna that the Pfarrer Initiative (Pastors’ Initiative), co-founded by Father Helmut Schüller, was launched in 2006. This very influential movement sought to give a structure to groups of priests who were in a state of rupture with the Church. In 2011, Schüller issued an ‘appeal to disobedience’, signed by almost four hundred priests and deacons, to demand an end to celibacy and the ordination of women. Meanwhile the group ‘Wir sind Kirche’ (We are Church), born in the time of Groër scandal, was also intended to reform the Austrian Church, collecting over five hundred thousand signatures in support of this liberal line.
Most of these movements and groups were severely rebuked by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and then by Benedict XVI.
‘The pope was much more critical about pro-g
ay Catholic associations than about the multi-recidivist paedophile cardinal Hans Groër. He wasn’t even reduced to layman status!’ I am told by a German-speaking theologian.
In this context, Christoph Schönborn navigates cautiously, in a kind of benevolently unspoken response, to the many gay priests and bishops in his country: a kind of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’, which is very much his style according to one of his former colleagues. He resists asking questions of his entourage, for fear of the answers they might give him. That way he continues to involve gays in initiatives by the archbishopric of Vienna, and he says he was impressed by the solidarity that he has witnessed among homosexual couples in the face of the AIDS crisis: ‘It was exemplary. Full stop,’ he said. On many stays in France, the travelling cardinal meets up with his gay-friendly co-religionists, particularly at the Dominican convent in Toulouse, where I met them. Schönborn also wrote a highly complimentary letter, which I have been able to consult, to a gay Austrian couple who had just entered into a civil partnership. And on 1 December 2017, Schönborn even celebrated a gay-friendly mass in Vienna in the course of which he paid tribute to people with AIDS. Of course, today, Schönborn is close to Pope Francis.
22
VatiLeaks
An overly curious butler: that is more or less the official explanation given for the affair known today under the name of ‘VatiLeaks’. This thesis, concocted by the holy see, has been repeated by the more naïve Vaticanologists. The expression ‘VatiLeaks’ was also dreamed up by the pope’s immediate entourage (Federico Lombardi claimed paternity when I interviewed him). Clearly, the reality is a little more complex.
The guilty party, who of course acted ‘on his own’, is called Paolo Gabriele: he was the pope’s ‘butler’. This rascal is said to have photocopied hundreds of confidential documents, several thousands of pages, at the private secretariat of Pope Benedict XVI, and they made their way into the press in 2012. The scandal was clearly a huge one. Handwritten internal letters meant for the pope, secret notes that had been handed to Georg Gänswein in person, and even the copies of coded diplomatic cables between the nunciatures and the Vatican, suddenly found themselves in the public eye. The culprit was a layman, 48 years old, married and the father of three children: an Italian charmer, a handsome man with a liking for secret networks. A chamberlain! A butler! A mole!
In fact, nobody could believe that the butler had acted on his own: the affair was a campaign, if not a plot, organized at the highest level of the Vatican. It was designed to destabilize the secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone and, through him, pope Benedict XVI. A computer expert was even accused of involvement in VatiLeaks, which confirms that the butler had at least one accomplice. The main victim of VatiLeaks, Cardinal Bertone, spoke of a ‘nest of vipers and secret letter-writers’: the phrase is in the plural. A lot more than just one butler.
Once the official version is eliminated, the case that shook the pontificate of Benedict XVI and led to his fall remains very opaque. A lot of questions are still unanswered even today: who were the people who first recruited Paolo Gabriele to this strategic post with the pope? To which cardinals was ‘Paoletto’, to give him his nickname, secretly close? Why did Gänswein leave Paolo Gabriele a lot of room for manoeuvre in his own office, where the documents were pilfered? What was the role of the former private secretary to Joseph Ratzinger, Josef Clemens, who notoriously had a tenacious hostility to Gänswein and was in contact with Paolo Gabriele? Finally, why did the Vatican cover up for most of the high-level protagonists of this plot, charging only the butler, which made him look like the classic scapegoat?
One thing is certain: VatiLeaks would lead to the fall of Benedict XVI and bring to light a degree of unimagined viciousness within the Vatican. Most importantly, a second affair, perhaps best called VatiLeaks II, would soon follow.
Several senior dignitaries in the Church had been linked in the first episode of VatiLeaks: the American cardinal James Harvey, who was among those who had recruited the butler, and seemed to be close to him; the Italian cardinal Mauro Piacenza, who also played Pygmalion with Paolo Gabriele; Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was secretary general to the governorate of the Vatican City; Archbishop Paolo Romeo, the future nuncio Ettore Balestrero, or even the former private secretary to Cardinal Ratzinger, Josef Clemens. All of these prelates were suspected (in the press and several books) of involvement in the affair one way or another, and, even though their role has not been established, the very fact that they were silenced, marginalized or dismissed by Benedict XVI or Francis might suggest a link with the case.
As for the butler, if he did not name possible backers in his speedy trial, he repeated that he acted out of duty: ‘What I feel most strongly is the conviction that I acted out of exclusive, I would even say visceral, love of the Church of Christ and for [the pope] … I don’t consider myself a thief,’ Gabriele insisted. He believed that the Vatican was the ‘kingdom of hypocrisy’, that there was an ‘omertà’ about the reality of what happened there. So he acted as he did to bring the truth to light, and to protect ‘the holy father, who had not been correctly informed’. In an interview conducted by the television channel La Sette, Paolo Gabriele added: ‘Seeing evil and corruption everywhere in the Church, I had reached a point of no return, my brakes had failed. I was convinced that a shock, even one that happened through the media, would help to put the Church back on the rails’. Gabriele, surrounded by hypocrisy and gay corruption, never accepted full responsibility for the crime, and still refuses to express remorse.
So it is likely that Paolo Gabriele acted under instructions, even though he was the only one to be sentenced to 18 months in prison for aggravated theft. Finally, Pope Benedict XVI, who considered the butler ‘his own son’, pardoned Gabriele. The pope, who met him before giving clemence, even suggested that he might have been manipulated: ‘I don’t want to analyse his personality. It’s a curious mixture of things, by which someone convinced him or he convinced himself. He has understood that he shouldn’t have done it,’ Benedict XVI said in his Last Testament.
‘Most of those involved in VatiLeaks I and II are homosexuals,’ an archbishop in the Roman Curia confirms to me. ‘This point explains both affairs, but it was systematically concealed by the Vatican and played down by the press. It isn’t a lobby, as one might say. It is simply a matter of gay relationships and the interpersonal acts of revenge that followed on from it. Francis, who knew the file intimately, punished the culprits.’
The second VatiLeaks affair began in Madrid. While it erupted under Francis, it started under Ratzinger. This time the villain of the story is called Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda, a very different kettle of fish from Paolo Gabriele.
During an in-depth investigation that I carried out in Spain, Vallejo Balda’s career appeared as crystal-clear as his actions would be opaque. The journalist José Manuel Vidal, himself a former priest, described this character to me over several interviews in Madrid: ‘Vallejo Balda’s is the story of a little country pastor who got too big for his boots. He is handsome and attractive, he has climbed swiftly through the ranks of the Spanish episcopate. He is close to Opus Dei, so he is rewarded by ultra-conservative circles. Here, in Madrid, he has become close to Cardinal Rouco Varela, a homophobe who likes to be surrounded by boys like this, both uptight and louche, that move in gay-friendly Spanish Catholic circles.’
When Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Bertone asked Rouco to recommend a reliable priest to look after financial matters, the Spanish cardinal sent them Balda. The young priest’s financial competence and morals were questionable at best, but for Rouco it was an unexpected opportunity to place one of his own pawns within the pope’s entourage. Except that Balda turned out to be a disturbing character, resembling the hero of Pasolini’s film Theorem or the Christ-like character in Dostoyevsky’s Idiot: he would turn heads, and explode like a bomb inside the Vatican.
Ordained a priest at 26, Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda, a ‘small-town boy’ who
had become a Madrileño, was ‘irresistible’, I am told by people who knew him at the time. Now 55, and back serving in the countryside once more, he is still a handsome man.
‘He was a provincial who had just fetched up from the sticks. He was an angel, as his first name suggests. He had a charm that was both rural and arriviste. He quickly made a big impression on Cardinal Rouco Varela, all the more so since he was close to Opus Dei,’ another priest I meet in Madrid tells me.
His promotion, which was desired by his inventor Rouco, and his spectacular ascent through Rome, notably with the support of the Spanish cardinal Antonio Cañizarès, were treated with some reservation in Spain, within the Bishops Conference. Now that tongues have loosened, I learn that certain Spanish bishops and cardinals publicly criticized the appointment of Balda to Rome, seeing him as a ‘little guapo’ leading a ‘dissolute’ life of ‘a bad kind’.
‘The directors of the Spanish Bishops Conference [CEE] considered this choice illegitimate and dangerous to the pope. There was even a minor revolt against Rouco on the subject, here in Madrid,’ another priest close to the CEE tells me.
Still, Balda, who came from a poor rural family, found himself in the fleshpots of Rome, where this exiled angel began to lead la dolce vita: luxury hotels, smart restaurants, boys’ nights out and the VIP lifestyle. He made something of a name for himself on the other side of the Tiber.
‘In Rome the young man went berserk,’ a Roman priest who knew him well tells me.
Without any particular intelligence, but with the kind of daring that can accomplish anything, Vallejo Balda became number two at APSA, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, which looks after the properties and the money of the Vatican. Also placed in charge of the bank of the holy see, the young Spaniard now knew everything. He had access to their eminences, to contacts and to money. Bertone trusted him so blindly that he inadvertently created a free-for-all.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 61
