In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Francis knows that he has to move on the Church’s stance, and that he will only be able to do this at the cost of a ruthless battle against all those who use sexual morality and homophobia to conceal their own hypocrisies and double lives. But there we have it: these secret homosexuals are in the majority, powerful and influential and, in terms of the most ‘rigid’ among them, very noisy in their homophobic utterances.

  Here is the pope: threatened and attacked on all sides and generally criticized, Francis is said to be ‘among the wolves’.

  It’s not quite true: he’s among the queens.

  Part I

  Francis

  1

  Domus Sanctae Marthae

  ‘Good evening,’ the voice says. ‘I wanted to thank you.’

  With thumb and little finger brought close to his ear, Francesco Lepore mimes the telephone conversation for me. He has just picked up, and his body language now seems as important as the words that his mysterious interlocutor is saying in Italian, with a strong accent. Lepore remembers the tiniest details of the call.

  ‘It was 15 October 2015, about a quarter to five, I remember very clearly. My father had just died, a few days earlier, and I felt alone and abandoned. That was when my mobile phone rang. No number came up. I answered a bit mechanically.

  ‘Pronto.’

  The voice goes on: ‘Buona sera! Pope Francis here. I received your letter. Cardinal Farina passed it on to me and I’m calling you to tell you that I’m very touched by your courage and the coherence and sincerity of your letter.

  ‘Holy father, it’s me who is touched by your call, and that you made the effort to call me. It wasn’t necessary. I just felt a need to write to you.’

  ‘No, really, I was touched by your sincerity, by your courage. I don’t know what I can do to help you now, but I’d like to do something.’

  The trembling voice, that of Francesco Lepore, startled by such an unexpected message, hesitates. After a moment’s silence, the pope resumes.

  ‘Can I ask you a favour?’

  ‘What favour?’

  ‘Would you pray for me?’

  Francesco Lepore says nothing.

  ‘In the end I told him I’d stopped praying. But if the pope wanted to, he could pray for me,’ he says to me.

  Francis explained to him that he was ‘already praying’ for him, before asking him: ‘Can I bless you?’

  ‘I answered in the affirmative to this question from Pope Francis, of course. There was a certain silence, he thanked me again and the conversation ended like that.’

  After a moment Francesco Lepore says to me: ‘You know, I’m not very much in favour of this pope. I don’t defend Francis a lot, but I was very touched by his gesture. I’ve never spoken about it, I’ve kept it to myself, like a personal secret. It’s the first time I’ve told anybody that.’ (Cardinal Farina, whom I interviewed twice in his Vatican apartment, confirmed to me that he had passed on Lepore’s letter to the pope, and the authenticity of Francis’s phone call.)

  When he received the call, Francesco Lepore was at odds with the Church. He had just resigned and was now, in the time-honoured phrase, ‘reduced to the state of a layman’. The intellectual priest who was the pride of the cardinals in the Vatican had hung up his cassock. He had just written a letter to Pope Francis, a message in a bottle hurled into the sea with the force that comes from grief, an epistle in which he set out his story as a homosexual priest who had become the pope’s Latin translator. To get it over with. To regain his coherence and leave hypocrisy behind. With his gesture, Lepore was burning his boats.

  But that blessed call returned him inexorably to a past that he wanted to forget, a page he had wanted to turn: his love of Latin and the priesthood; his religious conversion; his ordination as a priest; his life in the residence at Santa Marta; his special friendships with so many bishops and cardinals; his interminable conversations about Christ and homosexuality, under the cassock, often in Latin.

  Lost illusions? Yes, of course. His rise was swift: a young priest attached to the most prestigious cardinals, and soon to the personal service of three popes. They had ambitions for him; he was promised a career in the apostolic palace, perhaps even the episcopate or, who knows, the scarlet robe and red hat!

  That was before he made his choice. Francesco had had to arbitrate between the Vatican and homosexuality – and, unlike many priests who prefer to lead a double life, he opted for coherence and freedom. Pope Francis didn’t address the gay issue directly in that brief conversation, but it was clear that it was the priest’s honesty that led him to phone Francesco Lepore personally.

  ‘He seemed touched by my story, and perhaps also by the fact that I had revealed certain Vatican practices to him: how inhumanly my superiors had treated me – there are a lot of protectors, a lot of droits du seigneur in the Vatican – and how they had abandoned me immediately after I’d stopped being a priest,’ he adds.

  More importantly, Pope Francis explicitly thanked Francesco Lepore for privileging ‘discretion’ about his homosexuality, a form of ‘humility’ and ‘secrecy’ rather than a deafening public coming out.

  A short time afterwards, Mgr Krzysztof Charamsa, a priest who was close to Cardinal Ratzinger, would be more vocal, and his highly public coming out would prompt a violent reaction from the Vatican. The pope wouldn’t call him!

  Here we understand the unwritten rule of The Closet. If you want to integrate with the Vatican, adhere to a code, which consists of tolerating the homosexuality of priests and bishops, enjoying it if appropriate, but keeping it secret in all cases. Tolerance went with discretion. And like Al Pacino in The Godfather, you must never criticize or leave your ‘family’. ‘Don’t ever take sides against the family.’

  As I would discover in the course of this long inquiry, being gay in the clergy means being part of a kind of norm. Being homosexual is possible in the Vatican, easy, ordinary, and even encouraged; but the word ‘visibility’ is forbidden. Being discreetly homosexual means being part ‘of the parish’; to be one who brings down scandal upon it is to exclude oneself from the family.

  In line with this ‘code’, Pope Francis’s call to Francesco Lepore now assumes its full significance.

  I first met Lepore at the start of this investigation, a few months before his letter and the call from the pope. This man who was professionally silent, the holy father’s discreet translator, agreed to talk to me openly. I had just started this book and had few contacts within the Vatican: Francesco Lepore was one of my first gay priests, before dozens of others. I would never have thought that the priests of the holy see, and even members of the Swiss Guard, would have confessed to me in such numbers.

  Why do they talk? Everyone confides in Rome: the priests, the Swiss Guard, the bishops, the countless ‘monsignori’ and, even more than the others, the cardinals. Real canary birds! All those excellencies and eminences are very chatty if you know how to approach them, sometimes almost overly loquacious and frequently imprudent. Each of them has his reasons: for some it’s conviction, to take part in the fierce ideological battle now being fought inside the Vatican, between traditionalists and liberals; for others it’s a hunger for influence and, we might even say, vanity. Some talk because they are homosexual and want to tell all, about the others, for want of talking about themselves. Last of all, some are expansive out of bitterness, out of a taste for scandal and malicious gossip. Old cardinals live only on tittle-tattle and denigration. They make me think of those shady homophilic clubs in the 1950s who cruelly mocked everyone, worldly and poisonous, because they didn’t accept their own nature. The ‘closet’ is the place of the most incredible cruelty. And the Vatican is one huge ‘closet’.

  Francesco Lepore wanted to leave it. He immediately told me his real name, agreeing to have our conversations recorded and made public.

  At our first meeting, organized by a mutual friend, Pasquale Quaranta, a journalist with La Repubblica, Lepore arrived a little late on the se
cond floor of the Eataly restaurant in Piazza della Repubblica, Rome, where we had agreed to meet, because of the umpteenth transport strike. I chose Eataly, which surfs on the wave of ‘slow food’, fair-trade suppliers and ‘made in Italy’, because it’s a relatively discreet location far from the Vatican, where one can converse freely. The menu offers 10 kinds of (rather disappointing) pasta, and 73 types of pizza. Lepore and I met there often, for long discussions, almost every month, over spaghetti all’amatriciana – my favourite, although hardly compatible with my ‘low carb’ diet. And, every time, the former priest would suddenly grow animated.

  Many have told me that they found the Church to be ‘like a second mother’: and we know the importance of the cult – always irrational and self-selecting – of the holy virgin to this fraternity. Mamma! Many homosexual writers, from Marcel Proust to Pasolini, via Julien Green or Roland Barthes, and even Jacques Maritain, have sung their passionate love of their mothers, an emotional effusion that was not only essential but often constitutes one of the keys to their self-censorship (many writers and priests only accepted their homosexuality after the death of their mother). Mamma, who always remained true to her little boy, giving him that love and watching over her son as if he were her own flesh, understood everything – and she absolves!

  Francesco Lepore, on the other hand, wants to follow in the footsteps of his father. On the slightly yellowed photograph that he shows me, the dog-collar is dazzling, chalky white under the black cassock: Francesco Lepore had just been ordained as a priest. His short hair is well combed and his face close-shaven; by contrast with today, when he has a generous beard and a completely smooth head. Is it the same man? The repressed priest and the alleged homosexual are two sides of a single reality.

  ‘I was born in Benevento, a town in Campania, a little to the north of Naples,’ Lepore tells me. ‘My parents were Catholic, although they weren’t practising. Very soon I came to feel a deep attraction to religion. I loved churches.’

  Many homosexual priests I have interviewed have described that ‘attraction’ to me. A mysterious quest for grace. The fascination with the sacraments, the splendour of the tabernacle, its double curtain, the ciborium and the monstrance. The magic of the confessional, toll booths rendered fantastical by the promises attached to them. The processions, the recollections, the banners. The robes of light as well, the vestments, the cassock, the alb, the stole. The desire to penetrate the secret of the sacristies. And then the music: the sung vespers, the men’s voices and the sonority of the organ. Not forgetting the prie-dieux!

  ‘My father was a Latin teacher and I wanted to learn the language to approach that world,’ Lepore goes on. ‘Learn Latin perfectly. And from the age of 10 or 11 I wanted to join the seminary.’

  Which he did, contrary to his parents’ advice: by 15 he already wanted to ‘embrace’, as the saying goes, the ecclesiastical career.

  A classical path for young priests in general: the seminary in a Catholic grammar school, then five years of higher education in philosophy and theology, followed by ‘ministries’, still known in Italy as ‘minor orders’, with their readers and acolytes, before the diaconate and ordination.

  ‘I became a priest at the age of 24, on 13 May 2000, at the time of the Jubilee and World Gay Pride,’ Franceso Lepore says, in a gripping résumé.

  The young man understood very quickly that the connection between the priesthood and homosexuality was not contradictory, or even contingent, as he had originally thought.

  ‘I’ve always known that I was homosexual. At the same time, I had a kind of attraction–repulsion for that kind of desire. Moving in a milieu that considered homosexuality to be intrinsically bad, and reading theology books that defined it as a sin, for a long time I experienced it as guilt. The path that I chose to leave that guilt was to deny that sexual attraction by transferring it to religious attraction: I made the choice of chastity and the seminary. For me, becoming a priest was a kind of solution to expiate an error that I had not committed. During those years of formation at the University of Opus Dei in Rome, I devoted myself very intensely to prayer, I was ascetic, going so far as to accept corporal punishment, even trying to become a Franciscan to experience my religion even more intensely, and managing, in any case, to remain chaste for five years, without even masturbating.’

  The journey of Francesco Lepore, between sin and mortification, with that searing need to escape desires at the cost of the most trying constraints, was almost normal in twentieth-century Italy. For a long time, the ecclesiastical career was the ideal solution for many homosexuals who found it difficult to accept their private orientation. Tens of thousands of Italian priests sincerely believed that the religious vocation was ‘the’ solution to their ‘problem’. That was the first rule of The Closet: For a long time the priesthood was the ideal escape-route for young homosexuals. Homosexuality is one of the keys to their vocation.

  Let’s dwell on that pattern for a moment. To understand the journey of most of the cardinals and countless priests that we will meet in this book, we have to start out with the almost Darwinian selection process that is explained sociologically. In Italy, it was even a rule for a long time. These effeminate young men who were worried about their desires; those boys who felt an inclination towards their best friends, who were teased for the affectation of their voices; those homosexuals who sought themselves without wishing to declare themselves; those seminarians who weren’t on the right path – these had few options in Italy in the 1930s, 40s or 50s. Some of them understood precociously, almost atavistically, how to turn homosexuality into a strength, to turn a weakness into an advantage: by becoming a priest. This allowed them to regain power over their own lives, imagining that they were answering the twofold call of Christ and their desires.

  Did they have any other options? In a little Italian town in Lombardy, or a village in Piedmont, where many cardinals came from, homosexuality was still considered at the time to be absolutely evil. People could barely comprehend this ‘dark misfortune’; they feared this promise of a ‘multiple and complex love’, to use the words of the Poet; they dreaded that ‘unspeakable, even unbearable happiness’! To yield to it, even while remaining discreet, meant choosing a life of lies or proscriptions; becoming a priest, on the other hand, appeared like a form of escape. By joining the clergy, everything became simpler for the homosexual who assumed nothing: he went and lived among boys and wore dresses; he stopped being asked questions about his girlfriends; his school-mates, who were already making unpleasant jokes, were impressed; having been mocked, he now enjoyed great honour; he had joined a race of the elect, having belonged to an accursed race; and Mamma, I repeat, who had understood everything without saying a word, encouraged this miraculous vocation. Most importantly, this chastity with women and the promise of celibacy weren’t frightening; quite the contrary: he joyfully embraced them both! In Italy between 1930 and 1960, the fact that a young homosexual should have chosen ordination and this kind of ‘vow of celibacy among men’ was in the order of things, and indeed decreed by circumstances.

  An Italian Benedictine monk, who was one of the senior officials at the Sant’Anselmo University in Rome, explained the logic to me: ‘For me the choice of the priesthood was at first the product of a deep and vital faith. But retrospectively I also analyse it as a way of keeping my sexuality under control. I’ve always known that I was gay, but it was only later, after the age of 40, that I accepted this fundamental aspect of my identity.’

  All careers are unique, of course. Many Italian priests told me that they had only discovered their homosexuality after their ordination or when they started working at the Vatican. Many of them, in fact, crossed the line only later, after the age of 40, or during the 1970s.

  To this sociological selection of priests we might add the selection of bishops, which amplifies the phenomenon still further. Homophilic cardinals privilege prelates who have inclinations and who, in turn, choose gay priests. Nuncios, those amba
ssadors of the pope who are given the task of selecting bishops and among whom the percentage of homosexuals reaches record levels, in turn operate a ‘natural’ selection. According to all the statements that I have collected, the priests who have such inclinations are thought to be favoured when their homosexuality is guessed. More prosaically, it is not rare for a nuncio or a bishop to promote a priest who is also part of ‘the parish’ because he expects some favours in return.

  That is the second rule of The Closet: Homosexuality spreads the closer one gets to the holy of holies; there are more and more homosexuals as one rises through the Catholic hierarchy. In the College of Cardinals and at the Vatican, the preferential selection process is said to be perfected; homosexuality becomes the rule, heterosexuality the exception.

  I really began this book in April 2015. One evening my Italian editor, Carlo Feltrinelli, invited me for dinner at the Rovelli restaurant on Via Tivoli in Milan. We knew each other already, because he had published three of my books, and I had wanted to talk to him about this one. For over a year I had been investigating the question of homosexuality in the Catholic Church, carrying out many interviews in Rome and in various different countries, reading lots of books on the subject, but my project still remained hypothetical. I had the subject, but not the way of writing it.