The boy was very unsocialized, very insecure: the path of the relationship was therefore strewn with pitfalls, drug addiction not being the least of them. He too had been legalized after countless administrative obstructions, which the priest described to me during several interviews at their shared home. He supports his young friend; he is teaching him his new language and helping him get his foot on the ladder to get some training that might help him get a job. A crazy dream, wanting to offer a better life to a stranger!
Luckily, the former sex worker, who owns nothing but the story of his life, is busy changing for the good. Rather than a ‘coming out’, the priest is offering his protégé a ‘coming of age’. The priest takes his time; he exerts no pressure on his friend, even though the latter has caused all sorts of trouble, even threatening to burn down their shared apartment. Both know that he will never abandon his son, whose love-turned-friendship is the product not of blood ties but of elective fatherhood.
This generous and inventive relationship is based on sacrifices and a genuine love that one can’t help but admire.
‘Even my sister had difficulties, at first, imagining that this was a real father–son relationship, but her daughters had no trouble welcoming their new cousin,’ the priest tells me.
And he adds that he has learned a lot and changed for the better in contact with his friend – and I can tell from his expression, from the look in his beautiful eyes when he talks about his companion, that this relationship has given a meaning to the priest’s life which it hadn’t had before.
These post-gay friendships elude all classification. In a way they correspond to what Michel Foucault recognized in his famous essay ‘Of friendship as a Way of Life’. And the homosexual philosopher wondered: ‘How is it possible for men to be together? To live together, to share their time, their meals, their bedroom, their leisure, their sorrows, their knowledge, their confidences? What does it mean to be among men, “laid bare” outside of institutional relationships, outside of family, profession, forced camaraderie?’ As surprising as it might seem, priests and clerics are busy inventing these new ways of life, these new families, these new forms of post-gay love, as imagined by the homosexual philosopher who died of AIDS over thirty years ago.
Priests who generally, and prematurely, leave their parents must learn to live among men from adolescence onwards: in that way, they create a new ‘family’ for themselves. Without relatives, without children, these new structures of reconstituted solidarity are an unusual mixture of friends, protégés, lovers, colleagues, ex-lovers, to which we might add an elderly mother or a passing sister; here loves and friendships are mixed in a way that is not lacking in originality.
One priest told me his own story when I met him in a city on the Atlantic Ocean. Italian Catholics know him well because he was the anonymous character in La Confessione (republished under the title Io, prete gay), the story of the life of a homosexual in the Vatican published in 2000 by the journalist Marco Politi.
Now 74, this priest wanted to speak again for the first time since La Confessione. His simplicity, his faith, his generosity, his love of life all touched me. When he tells me about the men he has loved – and not only desired – I don’t feel at any point that his faith is diminished. On the contrary, I find him loyal to his commitments and, at any rate, more sincere than many Roman monsignori and cardinals who preach chastity by day and cavort with rent boys at night.
The priest had some fine relationships, and he talks to me about the three men who mattered to him, in particular Rodolfo, an Argentinian architect. ‘Rodolfo changed the course of my life,’ the priest tells me simply.
The two men lived together in Rome for five years, while the priest had put his priesthood in parentheses so as not to betray his vow of chastity, after asking for a kind of extended leave, even though he went on working in the Vatican every day. Their relationship was based not so much on sexuality, as one might have thought, as on intellectual and cultural dialogue, generosity and tenderness, their harmonizing characters – all of that mattered as much as the physical dimension.
‘I thank God for letting me meet Rodolfo. With him, I really learned what it means to love. I learned to let go of all those fine words that have nothing to do with the facts,’ the priest tells me.
And he also confirms that while he lived that long relationship discreetly, he didn’t hide it: he talked about it to his confessors and his spiritual director. He chose honesty, which is rare in the Vatican, and rejected ‘dishonest loves’. His career, of course, suffered; but that made him a better person, and a more confident one.
We walk together along a stretch of sea, near the Atlantic, and the priest, who took the afternoon to show me around the city where he lives, talks endlessly to me about Rodolfo, the love of his life, fragile and distant, and I gauge the extent of the feelings which the priest attributes to the relationship. He will later write me long letters explaining points that he didn’t have time to communicate to me, to correct a particular impression, to add a particular element. He is so worried about being misunderstood.
When Rodolfo died in Rome, after a long illness, the priest went to his funeral. On the plane carrying him towards his ex-lover, he was tormented, even paralysed, by the question of knowing whether he would ‘have to’ or ‘be able to’ or ‘want to’ celebrate the ceremony.
‘At the appointed hour, the priest in charge of the funeral didn’t turn up,’ he remembers. ‘It was a sign from heaven. As time was passing, I was asked to replace him. And that was how a little text that I had scribbled down on the journey taking me to Rodolfo became the homily at his funeral.’
I will keep the text that the priest sent me confidential, because it is so simple and so touching that it would inevitably misrepresent this beautiful loving relationship. An intimacy that was for a long time inexpressible and yet revealed, and even hailed in the open, in front of everyone, in the very heart of this church in Rome, at the funeral mass.
In the very heart of the Vatican, two legendary homosexual couples still shine in the memory of those who knew them, and I would like to end this book with them. They both worked at Vatican Radio, the central media organization of the holy see, and the pope’s broadcaster.
‘Bernard Decottignies was a journalist at Vatican Radio. Almost all of his colleagues were aware of his relationship with Dominique Lomré, who was a painter. They were both Belgian. They were incredibly close. Bernard helped Dominique with all his exhibitions; he was always there to reassure him, help him and love him. He always gave priority to Dominique. He had dedicated his life to him,’ Romilda Ferrauto, the former editor of the French section at Vatican Radio, tells me.
Father José Maria Pacheco, who was also a friend of the couple, and for a long time a journalist in the Portuguese section of the station, confirmed the beauty of this relationship during a conversation in Portugal: ‘I remember Bernard’s serenity and professionalism. What strikes me even today is the “normality” with which he lived out, day by day, his professional life and his emotional relationship with Dominique. I remember Bernard as someone who experienced his homosexual condition and his life as a couple without anxiety or militancy. He didn’t need to tell people he was gay, or hide it – just because there was nothing to hide. It was simple and, in a way, “normal”. He lived out his homosexuality peacefully, calmly, in the dignity and beauty of a stable loving relationship.’
In 2014, Dominique died, apparently of a respiratory illness.
‘From that moment,’ Romilda Ferrauto tells me, ‘Bernard wasn’t the same. His life lost its meaning. He was on sick leave, but he remained depressed. One day he came to see me and said, “You don’t understand: my life stopped with the death of Dominique.”’
‘With the loss of Dominique,’ Father José Maria Pacheco tells me, ‘something irreversible happened. For example, Bernard stopped shaving and his long beard was in a way a sign of his distress. When I bumped into him, Bernard was broken, inwardly d
evoured by pain.’
In November 2015 Bernard committed suicide, plunging the Vatican once again into a state of sorrow and alarm.
‘We were all devastated. Their love was so strong. Bernard committed suicide because he couldn’t live without Dominique,’ Ferrauto adds.
The American journalist Robert Carl Mickens, who worked at Vatican Radio for a long time, also remembers Dominique’s death: ‘Father Federico Lombardi, the pope’s spokesman wanted to celebrate Bernard’s funeral in the Church of Santa Maria in Traspontina. At the end of the ceremony, he came to hug me because I was very close to Bernard. That very powerful homosexual loving relationship was well known to everybody, including Father Lombardi.’
Romilda Ferrauto adds: ‘Bernard tried as much as possible not to hide his homosexuality. In that he was honest and brave. Most of the people who knew accepted his homosexuality and, at the French office, we knew his partner.’
Another male couple, Henry McConnachie and Speer Brian Ogle, were also well known in Vatican Radio. They both worked in the English service of the station. When they died of old age, the Vatican paid tribute to them.
‘Henry and Speer had lived together in Rome since the 1960s,’ Mickens, who was a close friend of Henry’s, tells me. ‘As a couple they were very “colourful”, but not openly gay. They belonged to a different generation for which a certain discretion prevailed. They were, let’s say, “gentlemen”.’
Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran wanted to celebrate, in person, the funeral of Henry McConnachie, whom he had known for a long time, just as he had known about his sexuality.
‘Almost everyone was aware of the homosexuality of those two couples and they had lots of friends at Vatican Radio. And they are still remembered with great tenderness,’ Romilda Ferrauto concludes.
*
The world that I have described in this book isn’t mine. I’m not Catholic. I’m not even a believer, although I measure the importance of Catholic culture in my life and in the history of my country, a little as Chateaubriand talks about the ‘genius of Christianity’. Neither am I anti-clerical, and this book isn’t opposed to Catholicism but primarily, whatever one might think, it is a critique of a very special gay community – a critique of my own community.
That is why I think it’s useful to mention, by way of epilogue, the story of a priest who had an important influence on me during my youth. I don’t often talk about my own life in my books, but here, given the subject, everyone will understand why it’s necessary. I owe this truth to the reader.
To tell the truth, I was a Christian until the age of 13. At that time, in France, Catholicism was, as they say, ‘everyone’s religion’. It was an almost banal cultural fact. My priest’s name was Louis. He was called, quite simply, ‘Abbot Louis’ or ‘Father Louis’. Like a figure by El Greco, exaggeratedly bearded, he turned up one morning in our parish near Avignon, in the South of France. Where did he come from? I didn’t know at the time. Like all the inhabitants of our town, we welcomed this ‘missionary’ to Provence; we adopted him and we loved him. He was a simple priest, not a curé – a vicar, not a prelate. He was young and likeable. He presented a fine image of the Church.
He was also paradoxical. An aristocrat, originally from Belgium – as far as we could tell – an intellectual, but one who also spoke the simple language of the poor. He called us by our first names, smoking his pipe. He saw us in a way as his family.
I didn’t have a Catholic education: I went to secular public schools which, luckily in France, keep religion at a distance; for which I thank my parents. We seldom went to mass, which seemed incredibly tedious to us. Between my first communion and my second, I became one of the favourite pupils of Father Louis, perhaps his absolute favourite, so much so that my parents asked him to become my confirmation sponsor. Becoming the friend of a priest, which is an unusual kind of friendship, was a significant experience, when my natural bent would have been towards the criticism of religion, along the lines of the young Poet: ‘How stupid they are, those village churches’, where the children listen to ‘the divine babble’.
I was Catholic by tradition. I was never ‘a slave of my baptism’. But Father Louis was brilliant. I was too unruly to be a choirboy, and I think I was expelled from Sunday school for lack of discipline. My priest wasn’t offended – on the contrary. Teaching the Catechism to the children of the parish? Living around the sacristy and hosting the village fair? I was a young Rimbaud, seeking new horizons! The abbot, like us, aspired to wide spaces. He encouraged me to join the chaplaincy that he ran, and we went on field trips for five or six years. It was a popular chaplaincy – not a movement of pioneers or scouts, more bourgeois than that. He gave me a passion for travelling and he taught me rock-climbing, roped to him. Under the pretext of ‘spiritual retreats’, we left for a youth camp, by bike or on foot, in the Provençal Alpilles, in the Calanques range in Marseille, near the mountain of Lure in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, or in the high mountains, with our tents and tent-pegs, sleeping in refuges, climbing the Dôme de Neige des Écrins. And in the evening, on trips far away from my family, I started reading books which, sometimes, without pressing the point, this widely read priest recommended to us, perhaps for evangelizing purposes.
Why did he become a priest? At the time we didn’t know much about Louis’, life ‘before’. What had he done before reaching our parish near Avignon? Writing this book, with the help of his closest friends, I tried to find his traces. I researched in the archives of the diocese, and I was able to reconstruct his itinerary quite precisely from Lusambo, in Zaire (then the Belgian Congo), where he was born in 1941, to Avignon.
I remember the cultural proselytism and ‘leisure catechism’ of Abbé Louis. In this respect, he was both modern and traditional. A man of art and literature, he liked Gregorian chant and art cinema. He took us to see ‘issue’ movies to engage with us in tendentious discussions of suicide, abortion, the death penalty or world peace (never, that I can remember, homosexuality). As far as he was concerned, everything was up for discussion, without taboos, without prejudices. But as a graduate in philosophy and theology – Louis topped off his religious education with a degree in canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome – he was a formidable debater. He was both a product of Vatican II, of its modernity, and the inheritor of a conservative conception of the Church that made him nostalgic for Latin and for traditional robes. He was a passionate admirer of Paul VI, less so of John Paul II. He was in favour of a renewed catechism, shaking up tradition, but he also insisted on the unshakeable links of marriage, so much so that he rejected communion for certain divorced couples. In fact, in Avignon, with his contradictions and his free spirit, he baffled his parishioners.
Worker-priest for some (irritated, the local bourgeoisie accused him of being a communist); a country priest for others, who revered him; he was a literate priest for yet others, both admired and envied, because rural people are always suspicious of city-dwellers who read books.
He was reproached for being ‘haughty’, meaning intelligent. His ironic joie de vivre worried people. His anti-bourgeois culture, which made him despise money, vanity and ostentation, didn’t sit well with the practising Catholics who, not knowing what to think, found him too ‘spiritual’ for their tastes. They were suspicious of the (excessively numerous) travels he had taken, and the new ideas he had brought back. They said he was ‘ambitious’; it was predicted that he would one day be a bishop or even a cardinal, and, in our parish, this character out of Balzac – Lucien de Rubempré more than Rastignac – was mistaken for a social climber. I remember that, unlike many priests, he wasn’t a misogynist and he enjoyed the company of women. For that reason, he was rumoured to have a mistress in the person of a local militant socialist. I interviewed her for this book and the story still makes her laugh. He was also reproached – why would you do such a thing? – for his hospitality, which was his main business, because he provided lodging for the poor, young people on the ma
rgins and passing strangers in the parish. There were also rumours, although I didn’t know it at the time, of unnatural encounters with the sailors in the port of Toulon; they said that he travelled the world in search of adventures. He laughed all of this off, and greeted his supposed mother-in-law in the parish with a thunderous: ‘Belle Maman’ (Lovely Mum).
To paraphrase Chateaubriand, in his fine portrait of the Abbé de Rancé, I would write that ‘this whole family of religion around [Father Louis] had the tenderness of the natural family and something more’.
For me, the dialogue with God – and with Father Louis – stopped at the door of my lycée in Avignon. I never hated Catholicism, I just forgot about it. The pages of the gospel, which I had never really read, were replaced by Rimbaud, Rousseau and Voltaire (less the Voltaire of Écrasez l’infâme than that of Candide, in which the Jesuits are all gay). I believe less in the Bible than in literature – it strikes me as more trustworthy, its pages are infinitely more beautiful and in the end less fantastical.
So in Avignon I went on assiduously attending the Chapelle des Pénitents Gris, the Cloître des Carmes, the Chapelle des Pénitents Blancs, the Jardin Urbain V, the Cloître des Célestins and, most importantly, the Cour d’Honneur at the Palais des Papes, but not to take Christian instruction: I had seen pagan spectacles there. Avignon was, as we know, the capital of Christendom and the seat of the papacy in the fourteenth century, with nine popes living there (and my second Christian name, according to a popular tradition in Avignon, is Clément, like three of those popes, including an anti-pope!). However, for most French people today, Avignon represents something else: the capital of public secular theatre. Henceforth, my gospels were called Hamlet and Angels in America, and I am not afraid to write that Molière’s Dom Juan means more to me than the Gospel of John. I would even give the whole of the Bible in exchange for the whole of Shakespeare, and one single page of Rimbaud means more to me than the complete works of Joseph Ratzinger! And besides, I have never put a Bible in the drawer of my bedside table, but instead A Season in Hell, in the Pléiade edition which, with its Bible-like paper, looks like a prayer book. I have only a few books in this lovely collection but the Complete Works of Rimbaud are always within reach, placed near my bed, in case of insomnia or bad dreams. It’s a rule in my life.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 66
