A Guest at the Feast, page 16
Before Bergoglio arrived in Rome, the terms of the debate were set by two Germans, Cardinal Kasper and Ratzinger himself. Kasper insisted that he wasn’t asking the church to change its position on the sanctity of marriage, but to change pastoral practice on who should receive communion. ‘To say we will not admit divorced and remarried people to Holy Communion? That’s not a dogma. That’s an application of a dogma in a concrete pastoral practice. This can be changed.’ The other side took the view, Vallely writes, that ‘this was exactly the wrong time for the debate on communion for the remarried . . . because it would weaken the church’s defence of the sanctity of marriage at a time when it was under attack from campaigners for gay marriage’.
For many, there was an obvious and simple solution. Anyone at all can walk into a church and, at the appointed time, march up and receive communion. And if the priest in one church recognizes the putative communicant as divorced and remarried and refuses communion, then this recalcitrant person can move his or her business to another church in another part of town. Bergoglio, in his new lightness of spirit, often phoned people out of the blue. One day in 2014 he got a letter from a woman in Argentina who had been refused communion by her parish priest because she had married a divorced man. Bergoglio called her and suggested that she find another priest who would give her the Eucharist. ‘That had caused a furore,’ Vallely writes, ‘with conservatives saying that the pope was undermining church teaching on marriage and also that he should have consulted the woman’s priest and bishop before calling her.’
Bergoglio could play the anarchist one moment and the next revert to his role as authoritarian. Reforming the governance of the Vatican interested him, as did reining in or retiring the more vocal and inflexible and right-wing cardinals, as did replacing an emphasis on sex with an emphasis on economic justice, as did protesting against the treatment of immigrants, but, Vallely writes, Bergoglio ‘did not appear to put the same effort or urgency behind the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors that he showed on the Vatican finances. The issue of how to hold bishops to account for their failures in reporting seemed difficult for him to push through a wilfully obstructive curial bureaucracy.’
In 2015 Bergoglio showed his inflexible side when he promoted Juan Barros, a Chilean bishop who was accused of covering up a sex abuse scandal and being present while abuse occurred. Barros was to be promoted from the armed forces to the small southern diocese of Osorno. Four lay members of the Commission for the Protection of Minors made their alarm public, one of them, an abuse survivor, saying: ‘The pope cannot say one thing and then do another.’ Half of the Chilean parliament, thirty priests and more than a thousand lay people wrote to Bergoglio to condemn the appointment. The cardinal archbishop of Santiago warned Bergoglio against it. At the installation mass, only twelve of the fifty Chilean bishops were in attendance. The ceremony had to be cut short because heckling protesters knocked Barros’s mitre. ‘The decision to proceed with the nomination bewildered the Chilean church,’ Ivereigh writes, ‘and seemed to contradict two priorities of Francis’s pontificate: to give voice to the victims, and to respect the wishes of the local church.’ Some were unable to believe that Bergoglio was behind the decision but, Ivereigh says, he ‘was wholly informed . . . The Barros nomination was a reminder that, for all his winning ways, Francis is not a politician weighing a decision in terms of its impact to his standing.’
Bergoglio’s winning ways were on display again during his visit to Chile in 2018, when he said that the allegations against Barros were ‘all a calumny’ and that ‘The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I’ll speak.’ One of the victims, who alleged he was abused by a priest called Fernando Karadima in the presence of Barros, responded: ‘As if I could have taken a selfie or picture while Karadima abused me or others and Juan Barros stood there watching it all.’
It didn’t help that Barros, as a military priest, had presided at Pinochet’s funeral in 2006. Nor did it help when it was discovered that Bergoglio, in speaking of the Chilean opposition to Barros, had used the word ‘zurdos’, a term used by Pinochet’s regime to describe the left. Nor did it help when emails from two Chilean cardinals were released calling one of the victims ‘a liar’ and ‘a serpent’. In Chile, Bergoglio deplored clerical sex abuse and pledged to support victims, agreeing to a private meeting with some of them. But at the huge papal mass in Santiago he was seen greeting Barros affectionately. The local cardinal noted that Barros’s presence was ‘an undesirable and parallel focus to the Holy Father’s visit’.
Bergoglio finally realized he was wrong after receiving a devastating report on clerical abuse from his envoy to Chile. His apology was, Ivereigh writes in his second book on Bergoglio, Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (2019), ‘unprecedented in the depth of its personal contrition’. In June 2018, when Ivereigh interviewed him, Bergoglio described the last day of his visit to Chile – the day when he had used the word ‘calumny’ – as ‘the lowest moment’ of his pontificate.
Bergoglio’s first foreign trip as pope was to Brazil in July 2013. On the journey back to Rome, in a press conference on the plane, Bergoglio, in what might have been seen as his free spirit mode, responded to a question about homosexuality by saying: ‘If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?’ He spoke in Italian, but used the English word ‘gay’.
This might have seemed like a big moment of change for the church, but it’s important to look at the context. Towards the end of the press conference, for which neither the pope nor his handlers were given the questions in advance, a Brazilian journalist asked about a priest called Battista Ricca. Ricca was director of the Casa Santa Marta, where Bergoglio was lodging as pope, and served as his clerical representative at the Vatican Bank. An article in L’Espresso, written by a veteran Vatican reporter, had claimed that when Ricca was abroad as a diplomat he had been accompanied by his lover, a Swiss army captain. Also, in Montevideo, as Burns writes, Ricca had ‘been found trapped in the elevator of the nunciature with a gay rent boy known to the police’.
‘I would like permission to ask a delicate question,’ the reporter said. ‘Another image that has been going around the world is that of Monsignor Ricca and the news about his private life. I would like to know, Your Holiness, what you intend to do about this? How are you confronting this issue and how does Your Holiness intend to confront the whole question of the gay lobby?’ Bergoglio began by defending his friend: ‘About Monsignor Ricca: I did what canon law calls for, that is a preliminary investigation. And from this investigation, there was nothing of what had been alleged. We did not find anything of that. This is the response.’ He then spoke about the need to forgive sin before addressing the final question:
So much is written about the gay lobby. I still haven’t found anyone with an identity card in the Vatican with ‘gay’ on it. They say there are some there. I believe that when you are dealing with such a person, you must distinguish between the fact of a person being gay and the fact of someone forming a lobby, because not all lobbies are good. This one is not good. If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?
These remarks are not a new way of formulating church teaching so much as Bergoglio’s way of trying to please as many people as possible, including the journalists on the plane, his friend Ricca and gay people generally. This could be seen as an aspect of his new-found geniality once he arrived in Rome, but there’s another way of looking at it. Bergoglio is a Peronist, and the whole point of Peronism is that it can’t be pinned down. The Montoneros, who ran the terrorism campaign in Argentina in the 1970s, were Peronists, as were the Iron Guard, the right-wing group with whom Bergoglio was associated. Carlos Menem was a Peronist, as were the Kirchners. Being a Peronist means nothing and everything. It means that you can at times be in agreement with the very things that in other circumstances you don’t really favour. You can be both reformer and conservative.
In The Dictator Pope, Marcantonio Colonna, who is hostile to Bergoglio, claims that his efforts to please are ‘classic Peronism . . . the church has been taken by surprise by Francis because it has not had the key to him: he is Juan Perón in ecclesiastical translation. Those who seek to interpret him otherwise are missing the only relevant criterion.’ There is another explanation for Bergoglio’s remarks. He was defending Ricca because Ricca was known to be close to him. It was possible that the attack on Ricca was a veiled way of attacking him. In that case, what emerged on the plane from Rio was Bergoglio not as soft-hearted old pontiff, but as old-fashioned Peronist street fighter.
Anyone who has spent time in the Vatican will smile wearily at Bergoglio’s statement about gay people within its walls: ‘They say there are some there.’ Two years ago, Frédéric Martel, a French journalist, published In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy. (In French, and indeed Polish, the book’s title is Sodoma.) The many people Martel interviewed for the book in thirty countries included forty-one cardinals, fifty-two bishops and monsignori, and forty-five apostolic nuncios. Christopher Lamb, The Tablet’s Rome correspondent, called it ‘a huge operation, funded by a consortium of publishers, and aimed at revealing church hypocrisy on gay issues . . . The publishers decided to release the book on 21 February 2019, the day of the Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse, thus seeking to capitalize on media attention on the church and sex.’ Ivereigh called the book ‘gossipy, rambling, cavalier with sources, and because of Martel’s off-the-scale “gaydar” and his scorn for celibacy, easy for Vatican officials to dismiss. Yet many of his eye-popping stories could not be disputed.’ Martel, Ivereigh concludes, ‘showed what many knew, that “lace by day, leather by night” was part of clerical culture . . . The hypocrisy had mushroomed above all under John Paul II, whom conservative Catholics lionized for his moral clarity.’ Among the book’s early admirers was Steve Bannon, who wanted to acquire movie rights.
The book sets out to establish that almost everyone who lives in the Vatican is gay. Martel interviews the rent boys of Rome about their experience with priests, bishops and cardinals. He also interviews many princes of the church, and when possible and appropriate he describes their bathrooms and the high tone of the décor in their apartments. Some are celibate; some line up handsome seminarians for their pleasure; some live with their so-called secretaries or chauffeurs or valets; others pester the Swiss Guard. The Vatican, in Martel’s version of things, is a hotbed of sexual joy and intrigue. ‘The Vatican has one of the biggest gay communities in the world, and I doubt whether, even in San Francisco’s Castro . . . there are quite as many gays!’
His book, which is long, is often infuriating. There are many exclamation marks. Martel can’t stop praising himself and his work and the number of interviews he has done and journeys he has undertaken. But he can sober up. He interviews the former priest Francesco Lepore about Casa Santa Marta, where Lepore spent a year. ‘Nicknames were given to the gay cardinals, feminizing them, and that made the whole table laugh . . . A lot of them led a double life: priest at the Vatican by day; homosexual in bars and clubs at night.’ When Martel asked Lepore to estimate the size of the male homosexual population of the Vatican, he said he believed it to be ‘around 80 per cent’. Martel creates categories of the closet based on rules. One is: ‘The more pro-gay a cleric is, the less likely he is to be gay; the more homophobic a cleric is, the more likely he is to be homosexual.’ He quotes a Mexican journalist:
I would say that 50 per cent of priests are gay in Mexico, if you want a minimum figure, and 75 per cent if one is being more realistic . . . There is a lot of tolerance within the church, so much so that it is not expressed outside it. And, of course, to protect this secret, clerics must attack gays by appearing very homophobic in public. That’s the key. Or the trick.
Martel looks into Argentinian political intrigue too. Pio Laghi, the papal nuncio who played tennis with Massera in the 1970s, and who died in 2009, comes up in declassified CIA documents as pleading the case of the dictators to the American ambassador, saying that they were ‘good men’ who wanted to ‘correct the abuses’ of the dictatorship. ‘According to my sources,’ Martel writes, ‘Pio Laghi’s homosexuality . . . might have played a part in his closeness to the dictators . . . by making him vulnerable in the eyes of the military, who knew his predilections.’
This idea that there are homosexuals in high positions in the church who are afraid of being exposed gives Martel another of his rules of the Catholic closet: ‘Behind the majority of cases of sexual abuse there are priests and bishops who have protected the aggressors because of their own homosexuality and out of fear that it might be revealed in the event of a scandal.’ Martel notes that Bergoglio is not popular among many factions of Vatican homosexuals. He interviews Luigi Gioia, a Benedictine monk in Rome:
For a homosexual, the church appears to be a stable structure . . . when you need to hide, to feel secure, you need to feel that your context doesn’t move. You want the structure in which you have taken refuge to be stable and protective, and afterwards you can navigate freely within it. Yet Francis, by wanting to reform it, made the structure unstable for closeted homosexual priests. That’s what explains their violent reaction and their hatred of him. They’re scared.
He also talks to Francesco Mangiacapra, a male prostitute in Naples, who in 2017 released a dossier on his clerical clients: ‘Priests are the ideal clientele. They are loyal and they pay well. If I could, I would only work for priests. I always give them priority . . . There are two kinds of client . . . the ones who feel infallible and very strong in their position. Those clients are arrogant and stingy.’ The second group ‘are very uncomfortable in their skin. They’re very attached to affection, to caresses; they want to kiss you all the time . . . They’re like children.’ Mangiacapra’s dossier included the names of thirty-four priests, with photographs, audio recordings and screenshots, and he sent it all to the archbishop of Naples. ‘I think it’s sad for them,’ Mangiacapra told Martel. ‘I’m not judging anybody. But what I’m doing is better than what priests do, isn’t it? It’s morally better, isn’t it?’
Martel has a marvellous time being received by various cardinals. At the door of one, he is met by a young man, ‘the quintessence of Asian beauty’; in the drawing room, he notes all the portraits of the cardinal himself. He understands why the cardinal holds himself in such esteem. ‘After all, he fought like the very devil to impede the battle against AIDS on five continents, with a certain degree of success, and not everybody can say that.’ The cardinal is foolish enough to give Martel a tour of his apartment, ‘his private chapel, his interminable corridor, his ten or so rooms, and even a panoramic terrace with a wonderful view over Catholic Rome. His apartment is at least ten times as big as Pope Francis’s.’ Many photographs of the cardinal are on display: in one he is ‘on the back of an elephant with a handsome young man’; in another ‘he is posing insouciantly with a Thai companion’.
The sexuality of many senior clergy leaves them open to blackmail. Martel alleges that during the debate about civil unions for gay people in Italy, one cardinal, now dead, with his ‘legendary homophobia’, was vociferously against the change. ‘He was told, at a tense meeting, that rumours were circulating about his double life and his gay entourage, and that if he mobilized against civil unions, it was likely that gay activists would spread their information this time.’ Another cardinal known ‘for the cleverness of his gossip, the gaiety of his heart and his love of lace’ similarly calmed down under pressure.
The revelations in Martel’s book aren’t new to anyone who spends time in the Vatican. They are part of the life there, the air of intrigue that makes clergy who have to go back to their own countries long for Rome. Knowing the codes, reading the signs and being in on the gossip are deeply nourishing for men who are otherwise isolated. Taking Martel’s revelations for granted, sighing wearily at the sheer dullness of his breathlessness, or pointing out some errors of fact in the book, is evidence that you are an insider.
The fact that Bergoglio had spent so little time in Rome before he became pope had its advantages. He didn’t climb the Vatican ladder while picking up lurid information about the private lives of cardinals. He didn’t become part of a whispering circle or feed on innuendo. But his distance from all this also meant that he seemed to believe, at the beginning of his papacy, that there could actually be robust and sincere debate among cardinals and bishops about the private sexual lives of others, including divorced people and homosexuals. All that winking, nodding, subterfuge and underhand knowledge, all those interlocking networks and double lives, are hardly in line with the transparency and clarity of purpose required by the Heavenly Father, who is invoked regularly by even the most reprobate prelates.
Bergoglio’s power comes from the fact that he doesn’t belong to this world. In April 2019, when a gay man told him that he didn’t feel accepted by the church, the pope replied: ‘Giving more importance to the adjective than the noun – this is not good. We are all human beings and have dignity. There are people that prefer to select or discard people because of an adjective; these people do not have a human heart.’ Some of these people are members of the Curia. Having read Martel’s book, Ivereigh concludes: ‘Suddenly it was easier to understand Francis’s Christmas speeches to the Curia, his tongue-lashing of “the hypocrites” who “hide the truth from God, from others, and from themselves”, and his warnings against “the rigid” who “present themselves to you as perfect” but who “lack the spirit of God”.’
