In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  At public lectures in Naples and Rome that year I had said, talking about gay Catholics: ‘One day this history of the Vatican will have to be told.’ A young Neapolitan writer reminded me of that phrase, and the journalist with La Repubblica, Pasquale Quaranta, a friend who has accompanied me since then in the preparation of this book, also reminded me of my words. But my subject still remained unutterable.

  Before dinner, I had imagined that Carlo Feltrinelli would turn down such a project; I would have abandoned it had that been so, and In the Closet of the Vatican would never have seen the light of day. The opposite happened. The publisher of Boris Pasternak, of Günter Grass and, more recently, of Roberto Saviano, bombarded me with questions and asked me about my ideas before saying, to encourage me to work while putting me on my guard: ‘This book should be published in Italy and, at the same time, in France, the UK and the United States, to give it greater weight. Will you have photographs? At the same time, you’re going to have to show me that you know more about it than you’re letting on.’

  He topped up his vintage wine and went on thinking out loud. And all of a sudden he added, stressing the letter ‘s’: ‘But they will try to assassssssinate you!’

  I had been given the green light. I hurled myself into the adventure and started living in Rome every month. But I still didn’t know that I was going to carry out my investigation in more than thirty countries and over a period of four years. In the Closet of the Vatican was launched. Come what may!

  At number 178 Via Ostiense, in the south of Rome, Al Biondo Tevere is a working-class trattoria. The Tiber flows at the foot of the terrace – hence the name of the restaurant. It’s nothing special, it’s far from the centre, it doesn’t attract much custom and, that January, it was terribly cold. Why on earth had Francesco Gnerre arranged to meet me in such a remote spot?

  A retired professor of literature, Gnerre devoted a significant part of his research to gay Italian literature. He had also put his name, over more than forty years, to hundreds of book reviews in different homosexual journals.

  ‘Thousands of gays like me built their libraries on the basis of articles by Francesco Gnerre in Babilonia and Pride,’ I am told by the journalist Pasquale Quaranta, who organized the dinner.

  Gnerre had chosen the place deliberately. It was at Al Biondo Tevere that the Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini had dinner on the night of 1 November 1975, with Giuseppe Pelosi, the young prostitute who would murder him a few hours later on a beach in Ostia. This ‘last supper’, just before one of the most horrible and famous crimes in Italian history, is strangely commemorated on the walls of the restaurant. Press clippings, photographs from shoots, still pictures, the whole of Pasolini’s universe comes to life on the enamel-painted walls of the restaurant.

  ‘The biggest gay association is the Vatican,’ Francesco Gnerre says by way of antipasto.

  And the literary critic launches off on a long story of the intricate relationships between Italian priests and homosexuality, and, among them, genuine meeting points; he reveals the homosexuality of several Catholic novelists and also talks to me about Dante: ‘Dante wasn’t homophobic,’ Gnerre explains. ‘There are four references to homosexuality in The Divine Comedy in the parts called ‘Inferno’ and ‘Purgatory’, even if there are none in ‘Paradise’! Dante has sympathy for his gay character, Brunetto Latini, who is also his old teacher of rhetoric. And even if he puts him in the third ring of the seventh circle of hell, he has respect for the homosexual condition.’

  Taking the route of literature, Latin and culture to attempt to resolve his own dilemma, the priest Francesco Lepore also spent years trying to decode the hidden messages in literature or cinema – the poems of Pasolini, Leopardi, Carlo Coccioli, the Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, the films of Visconti, not to mention the homosexual figures in Dante’s Divine Comedy. As for many Italian priests and homosexuals who were uncomfortable in their own skin, literature played a major role in his life: ‘the safest of refuges’, as they say.

  ‘It was through literature that I started understanding things,’ Lepore adds. ‘I was looking for codes and passwords.’

  To try and decipher those codes, we might take an interest in another key figure who we talked about with the academic Francesco Gnerre: Marco Bisceglia. Bisceglia had three lives. He was the co-founder of Arcigay, the main Italian homosexual association of the last 40 years. Even today it has several hundred thousand members, scattered around local committees in over fifty towns in the country. Before that, Bisceglia was, first of all, a priest.

  ‘Marco went to the seminary because he was convinced that he had had a calling from God. He told me he believed, in good faith, in his religious vocation, but he discovered his true vocation once he was over 50: it was homosexuality. For a long time he repressed his sexual orientation. I think that trajectory is very typical in Italy. A boy who prefers reading to football; a boy who doesn’t feel attracted to girls and who doesn’t really understand the nature of his desires; a boy who doesn’t want to admit his thwarted desires to his family and his mother: all of that led young Italian homosexuals quite naturally towards the seminaries. But what was fundamental in Marco Bisceglia was that he wasn’t a hypocrite. For several decades, while he remained in the Church, he didn’t experience gay life; it was only then that he lived out his homosexuality with the excess of the freshly converted.’

  This warm portrait drawn for me by Gnerre, who knew Bisceglia, probably conceals the torments and psychological crises of this Jesuit priest. He then turned towards liberation theology, and apparently had some disagreements with the Catholic hierarchy, which probably led him towards gay militancy. Having become a priest again at the end of his life, after his years of gay activism, he died of AIDS in 2001.

  Three lives, then: the priest; the gay militant opposed to the priest; last of all the man dying of AIDS who reconciles himself with the Church. His biographer, Rocco Pezzano, whom I interview, is still amazed by this ‘loser’s life’, in which Marco Bisceglia moved from failure to failure without ever really finding his path. Francesco Gnerre is more generous: he stresses Marco’s ‘coherence’ and the movement of a ‘painful but magnificent life’.

  Priests and homosexuals: two sides of the same coin? Another figure from the Italian gay movement, Gianni Delle Foglie, the founder of the first gay bookshop in Milan, who was interested in homosexual Catholic writers, made this remark: ‘The gays are almost alone in the face of the Vatican. But maybe that’s good: leave us together! The battle between the gays and the Vatican is a war among poofs!’

  It was in Rome that Francesco Lepore experienced his first sexual adventures, when, as for many Italian priests, the capital – the city of Hadrian and Michelangelo – revealed its unique attractions. It was there that he discovered that the vow of chastity was not greatly respected, and that the majority of priests are homosexual.

  ‘I found myself alone in Rome, and it was there that I discovered the secret: priests often led licentious lives. It was a completely new world for me. I began a relationship with a priest that lasted for five months. When we split up I went through a deep crisis. My first spiritual crisis. How could I be a priest and, at the same time, live out my homosexuality?’

  Lepore talked about the subject with his confessors, as well as with a Jesuit priest (to whom he told all the details) and then with a bishop (who was spared them). They all encouraged him to persevere in the priesthood, to stop talking about homosexuality and not to feel guilty. He was very directly given to understand that he could live out his sexuality as long as he remained discreet and didn’t turn it into a militant identity.

  It was then that his name was put forward for a prestigious position within the Secretariat of State at the apostolic palace of the Vatican, an equivalent of the position of prime minister to the pope.

  ‘They were looking for a priest who spoke perfect Latin, and since the rumour had circulated that I was going through a crisis, someone
put forward my name. Mgr Leonardo Sandri, who has since then become a cardinal, contacted my bishop and invited me to meet the people in the Latin section. They made me take a Latin test and I passed. I remember that they still put me on my guard, which proves that they knew I was gay: with a formula full of innuendos, they told me that “if I had reached the right level to qualify for the post”, I would have to start “dedicating my life to the pope and forgetting everything else”.’

  On 30 November 2003, the Neapolitan priest joined Domus Sanctae Marthae, the official residence of the cardinals at the Vatican – and the current home of Pope Francis.

  You can only visit Domus Sanctae Marthae with special permission, and only on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, between 10 o’clock and midday, when the pope is at St Peter’s. Mgr Battista Ricca, the famous director of the residence, who has an office there, granted me the necessary permit. He explained to me in minute detail how to pass through the police checks, and then the checks of the Swiss Guard. I would often bump into this prelate with the liquid eyes, an outsider close to Francis, who has known both triumphs and failures, and who would end up, as we will see, giving me permission to stay in one of the Vatican residences.

  With 5 floors and 120 bedrooms, Domus Sanctae Marthae could be an ordinary motel in the suburbs of Atlanta or Houston if the pope didn’t live there. Modern, impersonal and Spartan, the residence contrasts with the beauty of the apostolic palace.

  When, with the diplomat Fabrice Rivet, I visit the famous Third Loggia of the apostolic palace, I am amazed by the mappae mundi painted on the walls, Raphael-style wild animals, and the painted ceilings reflected in the costumes of the Swiss Guard. Nothing of the kind in Saint Martha’s.

  ‘It’s a bit cold, that’s true,’ agrees Harmony, a young woman of Sicilian origins who’s been given the task of showing me around.

  On a panel by the entrance I note: ‘suitable dress required’. And a little further on: ‘no shorts or skirts’. I also notice a number of Gammarelli-brand bags – the luxury trademark of pontifical clothing, waiting at Saint Martha’s reception. The linked audience hall and press room are quite Spartan too, and everything is bland: the triumph of bad taste.

  In the pope’s meeting room I find a huge painting representing the Virgin of Guadalupe, which symbolizes all the superstitious religiosity of Latin America: a present given to the pope by the Cardinal Archbishop of Mexico, Norberto Rivera Carrera, who might have been seeking forgiveness for his associations and his sins. (The cardinal has been criticized for his response to allegations of sexual abuse against priests, including those against the famous Marcial Maciel. He was retired by Francis in 2017.)

  A few metres away there is a chapel reserved for the pope: he celebrates mass there with a small congregation at seven o’clock every morning. It is very plain, like the dining room, much bigger, but like a works canteen. Harmony shows me the table, a little apart from the others, where Francis takes his meals, with six people at the most.

  On the second floor is the holy father’s private apartment, which one is not allowed to visit; I am shown an exact replica of it in the opposite wing: it’s a modest suite consisting of a little sitting room and a bedroom and a single bed. One of the Swiss Guard who protects the pope, and who frequently spends the night outside his bedroom door, will confirm this information. I will see him often in Rome, and we will even have regular visits to the Makasar Café in the Borgo, a wine bar not far from the Vatican, where I will meet everyone who wants to see me discreetly. Over the months, as we will see, this young man will become one of my informants about gay life in the Vatican.

  Now we’re in the laundry. Anna is a small, gentle woman, highly devout, and Harmony introduces her to me as ‘the pope’s laundress’. In two rooms to the left of the papal chapel, this nun devotedly looks after Francis’s outfits. With painstaking care, she unfolds, as if they were the holy shroud, chasubles and albs to show them to me (unlike his predecessors, Francis refuses to wear the rochet or the red mozzetta).

  ‘You can see the different habits that his holiness wears. White in general; green for an ordinary mass; red and violet for special occasions; and silver last of all, but the holy father doesn’t use that colour,’ Anna tells me.

  As I’m getting ready to leave Domus Sanctae Marthae, I bump into Gilberto Bianchi, the pope’s gardener, a jovial Italian, devoted servant of the holy father, and clearly concerned about his holiness’s citrus fruit trees, which have been planted outside, just in front of the pontifical chapel.

  ‘Rome isn’t Buenos Aires,’ a worried Gilberto tells me with a knowing air.

  As he waters the orchids, the holy father’s gardener adds: ‘It was too cold last night for the orange trees, the lemon trees, the mandarin trees; I don’t know if they’ll survive.’

  Now worried myself, I observe the trees lined up against a wall, hoping that they will get through the winter. And yes, we’re not in Buenos Aires!

  ‘That wall that you see there, next to the chapel, where the orange trees are, marks the border,’ Harmony suddenly says to me.

  ‘What border?’

  ‘The border of the Vatican! On the other side there’s Italy.’

  On my way out of Domus Sanctae Marthae, right by the front door, I find myself face to face with an umbrella stand containing, quite visibly, a big umbrella with the colours of the rainbow: a rainbow flag!

  ‘It’s not the pope’s umbrella,’ Harmony is quick to point out, as if she suspected a blunder.

  And while the Swiss Guards salute me and the policemen lower their eyes as I leave, I start dreaming. Who could this lovely umbrella with the unnatural colours belong to? Mgr Battista Ricca, the direttore of Santa Marta, who very kindly invited me to visit the residence of which he was in charge? Was it left there by one of the pope’s assistants? Or by a cardinal whose cappa magna went so well with the rainbow umbrella?

  In any case, I imagine the scene: its lucky owner, perhaps a cardinal or a monsignore, takes his stroll in the gardens of the Vatican with his rainbow flag in his hand! Who is he? How dare he? Or is he perhaps not aware of it? I imagine him taking the Via delle Fondamenta and then the Rampa dell’Archeologia, to visit Benedict XVI, who lives cloistered in the monastery of Mater Ecclesiae. Unless, beneath that multicoloured umbrella, he takes a little tour to the Palace of the Holy Office, the base of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the old Inquisition. Perhaps this rainbow umbrella has no known owner, and he too is in the closet. It lies about. People borrow it, put it back, take it away again, use it. Then I imagine the priests passing it around, swapping it according to circumstances and bad weather. Some ‘to say a prayer to the rainbow’; some to go strolling near the Triton Fountain or Saint John’s Tower; some to go and pay homage to the most venerated statue in the Vatican gardens, the one of Bernard of Clairvaux, the great reformer and doctor of the Church, known for his homophilic poems and his love for the Irish archbishop Malachy of Armagh. Is the placement of this stiff statue, which evokes a double life at the very heart of Roman Catholicism, a symbol in itself?

  How I would like to have been a discreet observer, a Swiss Guard on duty, a receptionist at Santae Marthae, to follow the life of that umbrella, that ‘drunken boat’, lighter than a cork dancing in the Vatican gardens? Might this rainbow flag – ‘damned by the rainbow’, in the Poet’s words – be the secret code of a ‘savage parade’? Unless, in fact, its sole purpose is to protect people from the rain?

  ‘I came to Saint Martha’s late in 2003,’ Francesco Lepore continues.

  Although he was the youngest priest working in the holy see, he began living among the cardinals, bishops and old nuncios of the Vatican. He knows them all, has been an assistant to several of them, measures the breadth of their gifts and little foibles, and has guessed their secrets.

  ‘The people who worked with me lived there, and even Mgr Georg Gänswein, who would become private secretary to Pope Benedict XVI, lived there too, with us.’

&
nbsp; Lepore spent a year in this famous residence, which proved to be a hotbed of startling homo-eroticism. ‘Saint Martha’s is a place of power,’ he explains. ‘It is a big crossroads of ambitions and intrigues, a place filled with competition and envy. A significant number of priests who live there are homosexual, and I remember, during meals, that there were constant jokes on the subject. Nicknames were given to the gay cardinals, feminizing them, and that made the whole table laugh. We knew the names of the ones who had a partner or who brought boys to Saint Martha’s to spend the night with them. A lot of them led a double life: priest at the Vatican by day; homosexual in bars and clubs at night. Often those prelates were in the habit of making advances on younger priests like me, seminarians, the Swiss Guard, or laypeople who worked at the Vatican.’

  Several of them have told me about those ‘scandal-mongering meals’ at which priests told stories of the papal court out loud and stories of boys very quietly. Ah, those quips at Domus Sanctae Marthae! The whispering I encountered at Domus Internationalis Paulus VI, Domus Romana Sacerdotalis or in the Vatican apartments, when I was staying and lunching there too.

  Francesco Lepore goes on: ‘One of the priests in Saint Martha’s worked at the Secretariat of State. He was close to Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re. At that time he had a young Slavic friend, and in the evenings he often brought him to the residence to sleep with him. Then he presented him to us as a member of his family: his nephew. Of course no one fell for it! One day, when the priest was promoted, the rumours started flying. Then a public declaration was made by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re and Bishop Fernando Filoni to confirm that the young Slav was indeed a member of his family and the case was closed!’

  So the omnipresence of homosexuals in the Vatican isn’t just a matter of a few black sheep, or the ‘net that caught the bad fish’, as Josef Ratzinger put it. It isn’t a ‘lobby’ or a dissident movement; neither is it a sect of a freemasonry inside the holy see: it’s a system. It isn’t a tiny minority; it’s a big majority.