When VatiLeaks II exploded, the Hispanic angel with the boundless ambition and wild lifestyle was the first suspect. Highly sensitive documents about the Vatican Bank were published in books by two Italian journalists, Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi. The world was stunned to discover the countless illegal bank accounts, the unlawful money transfers and the opacity of the Vatican Bank, with no shortage of evidence to back them up. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone himself came under scrutiny for having his luxury apartment in the Vatican renovated with money from the Bambino Gesù Paediatric Hospital.
Also at the heart of the affair was a woman – so rare in the Vatican – Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui, an Italian-Egyptian aged 31. A laywoman, charming and communicative, she was liked by the conservatives of the Curia because she was close to Opus Dei; she threw the day-to-day business of the Vatican into confusion with the managerial methods she had adopted at Ernst & Young; most importantly, she drove the few heterosexuals in the Curia mad with her ample bosom and luxuriant hair. Oddly for a woman, she had received excellent references for her post in the Vatican, and was appointed as an expert to the Commission on the Reform of the Finances and Economy of the Holy See. Did this femme fatale have a secret relationship with the prêtre fatal Vallejo Balda? That was the theory implicitly defended by the Vatican.
‘The Vatican invented the story of the relationship between Vallejo Balda and Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui. That storytelling was aimed at making sense of an affair that didn’t really make sense, unless Balda had other relationships that had to be covered up,’ a Curia priest explains to me.
A confessor at St Peter’s confirms: ‘When he was arrested, Vallejo Balda was placed in residence in our house, here, between the Palace of Justice and the gendarmeria, on Piazza Santa Marta. He was able to get hold of a telephone and a computer, and he lunched with us every day. I know for a fact that he was never Chaouqui’s lover.’
In all likelihood, the ambition of VatiLeaks was to destabilize Francis, just as VatiLeaks had been intended to dethrone Benedict XVI. The operation may have been organized by cardinals from Ratzinger’s Curia who were opposed to the political line of the new pope, and put into action by Balda.
One of them, rigid and living a double life, is central to this affair: he was in charge of one of the ‘ministries’ of the Vatican. The priest Don Julius, who associated with him inside the Vatican, talks of him as an ‘old-fashioned old-school gay lady’ who lived only to denigrate others. The Vaticanologist Robert Carl Mickens said of him: ‘He’s a nasty queen’.
Benedict XVI was naturally aware of the unnatural sexuality of the cardinal and his unusual extravagances. But according to several witnesses, he liked him, because he thought for a long time that his homosexuality was non-practising, but chaste or ‘questioning’. On the other hand, Francis, who is not good at spotting the nuances of ‘gayness’, but was well informed about the ‘case’, removed him from the Curia. A felon, a homophobe and ultra-gay, this cardinal is in any case the link between the two VatiLeaks. Without the homosexual key, these affairs would remain opaque; with that key, they start to become clear.
During the trial, five people were accused by the Vatican of criminal association: Vallejo Balda, his private secretary, the consultant Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui and the two journalists who divulged the documents. Balda would be sentenced to 18 months in prison; after serving only half of his sentence, he would be given a conditional release and sent back to his original diocese in north-west Spain, where he remains today. The cardinals who may have been behind the affair or accomplices of Balda have not been troubled by the Vatican courts.
The two VatiLeaks affairs are like episodes one and two of a single television series to which Catholic Italy knows the secret. They both revolve around the question of homosexuality, so much so that a well-informed Vaticanologist describes them ironically as ‘the affair of the butler and the hustler’, although the tangle of motivations behind these two cases is so intricate that it is difficult to tell who is meant by these less than flattering terms.
One mystery remains to be solved. Among the motives that might explain why a man would turn against his own side, what was the one that led Paolo Gabriele and Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda to speak? If we believe the code MICE, the famous expression used by secret services all over the world, there are essentially four reasons that can lead somebody to turn against his own people: Money; Ideology; Corruption (particularly sexual blackmail); and Ego. Given the extent of the betrayal and the degree of felony, we might think that the different perpetrators of these two psychodramas were inspired by the four MICE codes simultaneously.
On the desk of Cardinal Jozef Tomko: the book by Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui. The Slovakian cardinal picks up the book, which he is clearly reading, and shows it to me.
The old man, cheerful and sympathetic, receives Daniele and me in his private apartment. We talk about his career as ‘red pope’, the name given to the cardinal in charge of the evangelization of peoples; we talk about his reading, apart from Chaouqui: Jean Daniélou, Jacques Maritain and Verlaine, about whom the perfectly francophone cardinal talks to me passionately. On the shelves of the drawing room where he receives us, I see a fine photograph of Pope Benedict XVI, enveloped in his red cloak, affectionately holding Jozef Tomko’s hands in his.
This proximity to Joseph Ratzinger made Tomko one of the three cardinals with the task of investigating the Roman Curia after VatiLeaks. Along with his colleagues, the Spaniard Julián Herranz and the Italian Salvatore De Giorgi, he was put in charge of a top-secret internal inquiry. The result – a very closely guarded report, two volumes of 300 pages – was an explosive document about wrongdoing in the Curia and the financial and homosexual scandals of the Vatican. Some commentators and journalists even thought that the report might ultimately have led to the pope’s resignation.
‘Herranz, De Giorgi and I listened to everyone. We tried to understand. It wasn’t a trial at all, as some people tried to say afterwards,’ Jozef Tomko tells me.
And the old cardinal adds, about the report, in a sibylline observation: ‘We don’t understand the Curia. No one understand the Curia.’
The three cardinals, then aged 87, 88 and 94 respectively, were conservatives. They had spent most of their careers in Rome and knew the Vatican inside out. De Giorgi was the only Italian who had been bishop and archbishop in several cities in the country – he was the most conservative of all. Tomko was a more ‘friendly’ missionary, who had travelled all over the world. The third, Herranz, was a member of Opus Dei. He was in charge of the coordination and running of the mission.
When I visit Herranz in his apartment, near St Peter’s Square, he shows me an old photograph of himself as a young Spanish priest standing beside the founder of the Order, Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, arm in arm.
In the photograph, at the age of 27, the young Herranz is astonishingly alluring; the old man looks at this picture, which speaks of a time very far away, irretrievable, as if the young soldier for Opus Dei had become a stranger to him. He pauses. How sad it is! The photograph has stayed eternally young, and he has aged terribly. Herranz is silent for a few seconds, and perhaps he begins to dream of another world, reversed – as if, though this photograph has aged, he has remained eternally young?
According to the testimony of priests or assistants who worked with Tomko, Herranz and de Giorgi, the three cardinals were literally ‘obsessed’ by the homosexual question. De Giorgi was known for observing power relations within the Curia through the prism of gay networks, and he is accused, like Herranz, of often confusing paedophilia and homosexuality.
‘De Giorgi is orthodox. He’s also a flirt who likes to be talked about. His aim in life seemed to be for the Osservatore Romano to write positively about him! He kept begging us to do so,’ a journalist on the Vatican’s official organ tells me. (In spite of several requests, De Giorgi is the only one of the three cardinals who refused to see me, a refusal that he expres
sed in complicated terms, full of animosity and reproach.)
It took Herranz, Tomko and De Giorgi eight months to carry out their inquiry. A hundred priests working in the Vatican were interviewed. Only five people had official access to the report, which was so delicate that a copy was even supposed to have been locked in Pope Francis’s safe.
What the three reporters discovered was the extent of corruption in the Vatican. Two people who have read this report – among the cardinals, their assistants, the entourage of Benedict XVI and other cardinals or prelates from the Curia – described it in broad outline, as well as certain passages in greater detail. Pope Benedict XVI himself, in his Last Testament, revealed the elements of the report, which concerned, he suggested, a ‘homosexual coterie’ and a ‘gay lobby’.
‘We know that homosexual scandals are one of the central elements in the report by the three cardinals,’ a Curia priest who worked for one of the cardinals tells me under cover of anonymity.
The most striking conclusion in the report, a code that helps us to understand the Vatican, is the connection between financial affairs and homosexuality – the hidden gay life that went hand in hand with financial impropriety. This articulation between sex and money is one of the keys that help us understand the closet of the Vatican.
The report also reveals that a group of gay cardinals, at the highest level of the Curia, wanted to bring down Cardinal Bertone. It also addresses the ‘vice rings’ in the Vatican, and tries to describe the network that made the leak and the scandal of VatiLeaks I possible. Senior prelates were also subjected to blackmail. Although I don’t know everything in detail, I am told that the names of Georg Gänswein and the pope’s brother, Georg Ratzinger, as well as those of James Harvey, Mauro Piacenza and Angelo Sodano appear in the report, although I do not know in what context.
As serious as it seeks to be, this report is, according to a person who had access to it, a ‘masquerade’ and even a ‘tartufferie’. The three homophobic cardinals were claiming to decrypt the reality of the closet, but they missed the overall system because they didn’t understand its reach and its codes. Sometimes, they identify the plotters and settle their own scores. They point the finger at the lost sheep, as always, and draw up some ‘sexual histories’ on the basis of rumours, gossip and hearsay, without subjecting them to the process of analysis that is elementary for any kind of judgement. These prelates are still perfectly happy to act as judge and jury.
The main conclusion of the report is therefore the revelation of a major ‘gay lobby’ in the Vatican (the expression appears several times in the report, according to two sources). But the three cardinals, who were in the end fairly incompetent, struggled to decrypt realities they only touched upon. They over-estimate here, they under-estimate there: the only true problem in the Vatican being its intrinsically homosexual template. In the end, the opacity of the report is all the greater for having failed to understand, or even to try and describe, what the Vatican closet really is.
In any case, Benedict XVI and Francis publicly repeated the most powerful expression in the report, its alleged ‘gay lobby’, confirming in fact that it occupies a central position in the document. At the time of the passing of power from Benedict XVI to Francis, photographs of Castel Gandolfo show a box and well-sealed files on a low table. According to several sources, this is the famous report.
We can understand Benedict XVI’s horrified response when reading this secret document. In the face of such lust, so many double lives, so much hypocrisy, so many closeted homosexuals everywhere, in the very heart of the Vatican, did all this sensitive pope’s beliefs about ‘his’ Church collapse? Some have said as much. I am also told that he wept when he read the report.
For Benedict XVI, it was too much. Would this torment never end? He didn’t want to fight any more. Reading the report by the three cardinals, his decision was taken – he would leave St Peter’s boat.
But the stations of the cross of Benedict XVI, that tragic figure, were not yet over. He had a few more to go before his ‘renunciation’.
Before the writing of the secret report, paedophilia scandals stained the nascent pontificate of Benedict XVI. From 2010, they became endemic. These were not isolated cases or false steps, as he had claimed for a long time, while he was a cardinal, to protect the Church: it was a system. And it was now in the spotlight.
‘Booze, boys or broads?’ – the question arose in English-speaking newspaper offices with each new case, an incessant flood of abuse of all kinds under Ratzinger’s papacy. (Although it was rarely girls!) Tens of thousands of priests (5,948 in the United States, 1,880 in Australia, 1,670 in Germany, 800 in the Netherlands, 500 in Belgium, etc.) were denounced during those years, the biggest series of scandals in the whole history of modern Christianity. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of victims are listed (4,444 in Australia alone, 3,677 minors in Germany …). Dozens of cardinals and hundreds of bishops were implicated. Episcopates were in pieces, dioceses ruined. With the resignation of Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church would be a wasteland. In the meantime, the Ratzinger system would literally have collapsed.
It isn’t the intention of this book to cover these thousands of paedophilia scandals in detail. Instead, it is to understand why Benedict XVI, so prolix and obsessive in his war against legal homosexual acts, seemed powerless in the face of sexual abuse of minors. Certainly, he was very quick to denounce the ‘filth in the Church’ and, addressing the Lord, to declare: ‘the dirty clothes and face of your Church frighten us!’ He also published several texts of great severity.
But between denial and shock, amateurism and panic, and still with little or no empathy for the victims, the response of the pontificate to the subject remains disastrous.
‘The sexual abuses of the Church are not a dark page in the pontificate of Benedict XVI: it is the greatest tragedy, the greatest disaster in the history of Catholicism since the Reformation,’ a French priest tells me.
There were two opposing theories on the subject. The first (the one, for example, of Federico Lombardi, former spokesman of the pope, and of the holy see in general): ‘Benedict XVI acted with dexterity, and he was the first pope to take the question of the sexual abuse of priests seriously.’ During five interviews, Lombardi reminds me that the pope ‘laicized’ – meaning reduced to the state of layman – ‘more than 800 priests’ who were recognized as being guilty of sexual abuse. The figure is impossible to check and, according to other witnesses, it was grossly exaggerated and there were no more than a few dozen (in the preface to Last Testament, an official book by Benedict XVI published in 2016, the figure of 400 is quoted, or half the number). A system of universalized lying in the Vatican having been established, it is at least possible to doubt the reality of these figures.
The second theory (which is generally that espoused in the law courts in the concerned countries, and in the press): the Church of Benedict XVI was responsible for all of these cases. We know, in fact, that from the 1980s onwards, all sexual abuse scandals, at Joseph Ratzinger’s request, were brought before the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, where they were dealt with. Since Joseph Ratzinger was the prefect of this ‘ministry’, and then pope, he was therefore in charge of that file between 1981 and 2013, over a period of more than thirty years. Historians will probably prove very harsh in their assessment of the ambiguities of this pope and his actions: some think that he will consequently never be canonized.
To this we must add the breakdown of justice in the Vatican. At the holy see – a genuine theocracy rather than a state governed by law – there is not, in fact, a separation of powers. According to all the witnesses I have interviewed, including high-ranking cardinals, Vatican justice leaves much to be desired. Canon law is constantly faked, apostolic constitutions are incomplete, magistrates are inexperienced and often incompetent, courts lack procedure and are not treated seriously. I have spoken with Cardinal Dominique Mamberti, prefect of the Supreme Court of the Apostolic
Signature, and with Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, and it seemed to me that those prelates could not independently judge cases of this kind.
‘There is no true justice in the Vatican. The procedures aren’t reliable, investigations aren’t credible, there is a serious shortage of funds, people are incompetent. There isn’t even a prison! It’s a parody of justice,’ an archbishop close to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith confirms to me.
Giovanni Maria Vian, director of the Osservatore Romano, who was close to secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone, and a central player in this system, confessed to me during one of our conversations (all recorded with his agreement) that he refused to publish the records of hearings and trials in the official journal of the Vatican, because it risked discrediting the institution …
This parody of Vatican justice is denounced by numerous legal specialists, including a former ambassador to the holy see who, a lawyer himself, confirms: ‘These cases of sexual abuse are of great legal and technical complexity: they need inquiries over several months, a large number of hearings, as is apparent at present from the trial of Cardinal George Pell in Australia, which mobilized dozens of magistrates and lawyers and thousands of hours of legal process. Imagining that the Vatican can judge one of these cases is nonsense. It isn’t prepared for that: it doesn’t have the texts, or the procedures, or the lawyers, or the magistrates, or the means of investigation, or the right to deal with it. There is no other solution for the Vatican but to acknowledge its fundamental incompetence, and let the national legal systems deal with the issues.’
This severe judgement might be nuanced by the serious work carried out by certain cardinals or bishops, for example the work done by Charles Scicluna, Archbishop of Malta, on the cases of Marcial Maciel in Mexico and Fernando Karadima in Chile. However, even the Vatican’s anti-paedophile commission, created by Pope Francis, has prompted criticisms: in spite of the good will of Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston, who presided over it, three of its members resigned to protest against the slowness of procedures and the double game of the dicasteries involved. (At the age of 74, O’Malley is from another era, and seems barely capable of dealing with cases of this kind: in his ‘Testimonianza’, Mgr Viganò challenges his impartiality; and during a stay in the United States in the summer of 2018, when I asked the cardinal for an interview, his secretary, embarrassed, admitted that ‘he doesn’t read his emails, he doesn’t know how to use the internet and he has no mobile phone’. She suggested sending him a fax.)
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 62
