In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  What is shocking in the Viganò testimony is the great confusion between priests capable of crimes or a cover-up on the one hand, and homosexual or simply gay-friendly priests on the other. This serious intellectual dishonesty, which mixes up abusers, those who failed to intervene and those who were simply homosexual or homophile, can only be the product of a complicated mind. Viganò has remained stuck in the homophilia and homophobia of the 1960s, when he himself was 20: he hasn’t understood that the times have changed and that in Europe and America, since the 1990s, we have moved from the criminalization of homosexuality to the criminalization of homophobia! His thoughts from another era also recall the writings of homophobic homosexuals like the French priest Tony Anatrella or the Colombian cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, whom we will discuss again in due course. This inadmissible confusion between culprit and victim remains at the heart of the question of sexual abuse: Viganò is the caricature of the very thing he denounces.

  Aside from this serious generalized intellectual confusion, Viganò’s second error, the more serious in strategic terms for the durability of his ‘testimony’, was that of ‘outing’ major cardinals who were close to Francis (Parolin, Becciu), but also those who helped to lead the pontificates of John Paul II (Sodano, Sandri, Martino) and Benedict XVI (Bertone, Mamberti). Certainly, anyone familiar with the history of the Vatican knew that the source of the McCarrick affair lay in disturbances orchestrated under the pontificate of John Paul II: by writing it down, however the nuncio deprived himself of much of his support among conservatives. More impulsive than strategic, Viganò blindly took his revenge by ‘outing’ everybody he didn’t like, without a plan or a tactic, while his word alone was sufficient proof to denounce the homosexuality of his colleagues – for example the Jesuits, who were considered largely to be ‘deviants’ (meaning homosexuals)! In accusing everyone except himself, Viganò magnificently, and inadvertently, revealed that the theology of fundamentalists can also be a sublimation of homosexuality. That was how Viganò managed to lose his allies: however critical it might have been, the right wing of the Vatican could not allow doubt to be cast on the previous pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. By targeting Angelo Sodano and Leonardo Sandri (even though, strangely, he spared Cardinals Giovanni Battista Re, Jean-Louis Tauran and, most importantly, Stanisław Dziwisz), Viganò committed a major strategic mistake, whether his accusations were true or not.

  The far right of the Church, which initially supported the nuncio and defended his credibility, quickly understood the trap. After an initial thunderous outburst, Cardinal Burke fell silent, outraged in the end that the name of his close friend, the ultra-conservative Renato Martino, appeared in the letter (Burke validated a press communiqué written by Benjamin Harnwell, which firmly contested the idea that Martino might be part of the ‘homosexual current’ – without supplying evidence, of course). Likewise, Georg Gänswein, the closest collaborator of the retired pope Benedict XVI, was careful not to confirm the letter, whatever the cost. For conservatives, lending credence to Viganò’s testament meant shooting themselves in the foot, while at the same time risking involvement in a civil war where any means were permitted. There are probably more closeted homosexuals on the right than on the left of the Church, and the boomerang effect would be devastating.

  In Francis’s entourage, a curial archbishop whom I met when the letter was published justified the pope’s prudence with these words: ‘How do you expect the pope to respond to a letter that voices suspicions about several former Vatican secretaries of state and dozens of cardinals of being gay or complicit in homosexual abuses? Confirm? Deny? Deny sexual abuse? Deny homosexuality in the Vatican? You can see that he didn’t have much room for manoeuvre. If Benedict XVI didn’t react either, it was for the same reasons. Neither wanted to talk after such a perverse text.’

  Lies, double life, ‘cover-up’, the ‘Testimonianza’ of Mgr Viganò shows one thing at least: everyone is connected and everyone lies in the Vatican. Which echoes Hannah Arendt’s analyses of lies in The Origins of Totalitarianism or in her famous article ‘Truth and Politics’, in which she suggested that ‘when a community throws itself into organized lying’, ‘when everyone lies about what is important’, and when there is a ‘tendency to turn fact into opinion’, to reject ‘factual truths’, the result is not so much that one believes in lies, as that one destroys ‘the reality of the common world’.

  The curial archbishop concluded: ‘Viganò is barely interested in the question of sexual abuse, and his memo is of little use where this first point is concerned. On the other hand, what he wants to do is to list the homosexuals of the Vatican; it is to denounce the infiltration of gays in the holy see. That is his objective. Let’s say that, on this second point, his letter is probably closer to the truth than it is on the first.’ (In this book I will use Viganò’s ‘Testimonianza’ prudently, because it mixed verified or probable facts with pure slander. And even if that letter was judged credible by dozens of ultra-conservative cardinals and bishops, it should neither be taken literally nor under-estimated.)

  So here we are in The Closet. This time, the witness is irrefutable: an eminent nuncio and emeritus archbishop has just bluntly revealed the massive presence of homosexuals in the Vatican. He has given us a well-kept secret. He has opened Pandora’s box. Francis is indeed among queens!

  3

  Who am I to judge?

  ‘Who am I to judge?’ Giovanni Maria Vian repeats this phrase, still apparently trying to find its deeper meaning. ‘Who am I to judge?’ Is it a new doctrine? A phrase improvized more or less at random? Vian doesn’t really know what to think. Who is he to judge?

  The phrase, in the interrogative form, was uttered by Pope Francis on the night of 28 July 2013 in the plane bringing him back from Brazil. Broadcast around the world, it immediately became the most famous phrase of the pontificate. In its empathy, it is very like Francis, the ‘gay-friendly’ pope who wants to break with the homophobia of his predecessors.

  Giovanni Maria Vian, whose job consists not so much of commenting on the pope’s words as relaying them, remains cautious. He gives me the official transcript of the improvised talk in the course of which Francis delivered his line. Once it’s put back in the context of Francis’s reply, it’s not absolutely certain, he tells me, that it can be read in a ‘gay-friendly’ way.

  A layman, Vian is an academic who likes to be called ‘professore’, and the director of the Osservatore Romano, the newspaper of the holy see. This official daily paper is published in five languages, and its offices are located in the very heart of the Vatican.

  ‘The pope talked a lot this morning,’ Vian explains when I arrive.

  His newspaper publishes all the interventions by the holy father, his messages, his writings. It’s the Vatican’s Pravda.

  ‘We’re an official newspaper, that’s obvious, but we also have a freer part, with editorials, articles on culture, more independent writing,’ Vian adds, knowing that his room for manoeuvre is very small.

  Perhaps to free himself from the constraints of the Vatican, and to show a spirit of mischief, he is surrounded by Tintin figurines. His office is filled with posters of The Black Island, King Ottokar’s Sceptre, miniatures of Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock. A strange invasion of pagan objects in the heart of the holy see! And to think that it never occurred to Hergé to do a Tintin in the Vatican!

  I spoke too fast. Vian picks me up on it, telling me about a long article in the Osservatore Romano about Tintin which is said to prove that, in spite of his miscreant characters and memorable expletives, the young Belgian reporter is a ‘Catholic hero’ inspired by ‘Christian humanism’.

  ‘The Osservatore Romano is as pro-Bergoglio under Francis as it was pro-Ratzinger under Benedict XVI,’ explains a diplomat based in the holy see.

  Another colleague on the Osservatore Romano confirms that the paper exists to ‘defuse all scandals’.

  ‘The silences of the Osservatore
Romano also speak’, Vian tells me, not without humour. In the course of my investigation I would often visit the paper’s offices. Professore Vian would agree to be interviewed on the record five times, and off the record even more often, as would six of his colleagues in charge of the Spanish, English and French editions.

  It was a Brazilian journalist, Ilze Scamparini, Vatican correspondent for the TV channel Globo, who dared to confront the pope head-on with the question about the ‘gay lobby’. The scene played out on the plane on the way back from Rio to Rome. It was the end of the improvised press conference and the pope was tired, always flanked by Federico Lombardi, his spokesman. ‘One last question?’ Lombardi asks, in a hurry to bring the session to an end. It’s then that Ilze Scamparini raises her hand. Here I will quote at length the dialogue that followed, from the original transcript given to me by Giovanni Maria Vian.

  ‘I would like to request permission to ask a slightly delicate question. Another picture has gone around the world: that of Mgr Ricca, as well as information on his private life. Holy Father, I would like to know what you plan to do about this. How would Your Holiness expect to approach this problem, and how do you plan to confront the question of the gay lobby?’

  ‘Where Mgr Ricca is concerned,’ the pope replies, ‘I have done what canon law recommends doing: an investigatio praevia [preliminary inquiry]. This investigation has not thrown up anything that he is being accused of. We have found nothing. That’s my answer. But there’s something I would like to add: I see that often in the Church, beyond this case, but in this case as well, people look, for example, for “the sins of youth” and publish them. No crimes, then? Crimes are something, the abuse of minors is a crime. No, sins. But if a layperson, or a priest, or a nun, has committed a sin and then converted, the Lord forgives … But let’s come back to your more concrete question: you were talking about the gay lobby. Well! A lot is written about the gay lobby. I haven’t yet found anyone in the Vatican who has given me his identity card with “gay” written on it. They say there are some. I believe that when you find yourself with such a person you must distinguish the fact of being “gay” from that of constituting a lobby. Because not all lobbies are good. This one is bad. If a person is gay and seeks the Lord, if they demonstrate goodwill, who am I to judge? The problem isn’t having this tendency, it’s turning that tendency into a lobby. That’s the more serious problem as far as I’m concerned. Many thanks for asking that question. Thank you very much!’

  Dressed entirely in black, and with a slight cold, the day I meet him for the first time, Father Federico Lombardi remembers that press conference very clearly. As a good Jesuit, he admired the new pope’s phrase. Who am I to judge? Never, perhaps, had a phrase of Francis’s been such a perfect masterpiece of Jesuit dialectics. The pope answers a question … with a question!

  We are at the headquarters of the Ratzinger Foundation, of which Lombardi is now president, on the ground floor of a building of the Vatican on Via della Conciliazione in Rome. I will interview him at length several times in his offices about the three popes he has served – John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. He was head of the press service of the first of these, and spokesman for his successors.

  Lombardi is a gentle, simple man who ignores the glamorous, worldly style of many Vatican priests. I am struck by his humility, which has often impressed many of those who have worked with him. While Giovanni Maria Vian, for example, lives all on his own in a magnificent little tower in the Vatican gardens, Lombardi prefers to share his life with his Jesuit colleagues in a modest room in their community. We are a long way from the vast cardinals’ apartments that I have visited in Rome so often, like those of Raymond Burke, Camillo Ruini Paul Poupard, Giovanni Battista Re, Roger Etchegaray, Renato Raffaele Martino and many others. Not to mention the palace of Cardinal Betori, which I visited in Florence, or of Carlo Caffarra in Bologna, or of Cardinal Carlos Osoro in Madrid. Neither is it in any respect like the apartments, which I haven’t visited, of the former secretaries of state Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone, which shocked people with their outrageous luxury and extravagant size.

  ‘When Pope Francis spoke those words, “Who am I to judge?”, I was beside the holy father. My reaction was a bit mixed, you might say. You know, Francis is very spontaneous, he speaks very freely. He accepted the questions without knowing them in advance, without preparation. When Francis speaks freely, for an hour and a half in a plane, without notes, with 70 journalists, it’s spontaneous, it’s very honest. But what he says isn’t necessarily part of doctrine; it’s a conversation and should be taken as such. It’s a problem of hermeneutics.’

  At the word ‘hermeneutics’, uttered by Lombardi, whose job has always been one of interpreting texts, establishing a hierarchy for them and giving a meaning to the phrases of the popes whose spokesman he has been, I have a sense that the Jesuit father wants to diminish the significance of Francis’s pro-gay formula.

  He adds: ‘What I mean is that this phrase is not evidence of a choice or a change of doctrine. But it did have a very positive aspect: it is about personal situations. It is an approach based on proximity, accompaniment, pastoral care. But that isn’t to say that that [being gay] is good. It means that the pope doesn’t feel it is his place to judge.’

  ‘Is it a Jesuit formula? Is it Jesuitical?’

  ‘Yes, if you like, it’s a Jesuit phrase. It’s the choice of mercy, the pastoral way with personal dilemmas. It is a phrase of discernment. [Francis] is looking for a path. In a way he is saying: “I am with you to go on a journey.” But Francis replies to an individual situation [the case of Mgr Ricca] with a pastoral response; on matters of doctrine, he remains faithful.’

  On another day, when I’m questioning Cardinal Paul Poupard about the same semantic debate, during one of our regular meetings at his home, this expert of the Roman Curia, who was ‘close to five popes’ as he put it himself, observes: ‘Don’t forget that Francis is an Argentinian Jesuit pope. As I say: Jesuit and Argentinian. Both words are important. Which means that when he says the phrase “Who am I to judge?”, what matters isn’t necessarily what he says but how it is received. It’s a bit like St Thomas Aquinas’s theory of understanding: each thing is received according to what one wishes to understand.’

  Francesco Lepore was hardly convinced by Pope Francis’s explanation. And neither does he share the ‘hermeneutics’ of its exegetes.

  For this former priest, who knows Mgr Ricca well, this reply by the pope is a typical instance of double-speak.

  ‘If we follow his reasoning, the pope is suggesting that Mgr Ricca was gay in his youth, but that he ceased to be so since he was ordained as a priest. So what the Lord forgave would be a youthful sin. And yet the pope must have known that the facts in question occurred recently.’

  A lie? A half-lie? For a Jesuit, they say, telling half-lies is the same as telling half-truths! Lepore adds: ‘There is an unwritten rule at the Vatican, which is that a cleric must be supported in all circumstances. Francis has protected Battista Ricca towards and against everyone, just as John Paul II covered for Stanisław Dziwisz and Angelo Sodano, or as Benedict XVI defended Georg Gänswein and Tarcisio Bertone to the end, in the face of all criticisms. The pope is a monarch. He can protect the people he likes in all circumstances, without anyone being able to stop him.’

  At the start of the affair there was a detailed investigation by the Italian magazine L’Espresso, in July 2013 the front page being devoted entirely to the Vatican and audaciously titled: ‘The gay lobby’. In this article, Mgr Ricca is presented under his real name as having had a relationship with a Swiss soldier when he was working at the embassy of the holy see in Switzerland and then in Uruguay.

  The night-life of Battista Ricca in Montevideo is particularly detailed: he was said to have been beaten up one night at a public meeting place, and to have come back to the nunciature with his face swollen after appealing to some priests for assistance. L’Espresso reported that anothe
r time, he was found stuck in the middle of the night in a lift, which had unfortunately broken down, in the offices of the Vatican embassy, not being freed by the firemen until the early hours of the morning, when he was found with a ‘handsome young man’ who had been stuck with him. Rotten luck!

  The magazine, which cites a nuncio as a source, also mentions the suitcases of the Swiss soldier, Ricca’s alleged lover, in which ‘a pistol, a huge quantity of condoms and pornographic material’ were said to have been found. Pope Francis’s spokesman, Federico Lombardi, as always, denied the facts, which were not, in his view, ‘trustworthy’.

  ‘The way the affair was managed by the Vatican was quite comical. So was the pope’s response. It was a venial sin! It was in the past? It’s a bit like when President Bill Clinton was accused of taking drugs and apologized, adding that he had smoked marijuana but without inhaling!’ chuckles a Rome-based diplomat who knows the Vatican very well.

  The press was greatly amused by the tribulations of the cleric, his alleged double life and his lift misadventures. At the same time, we shouldn’t forget that the attack came from Sandro Magister, a formidable 75-year-old pro-Ratzinger Vaticanologist. Why, all of a sudden and 12 years after the events in question, did he denounce Mgr Ricca?

  The Ricca case was in fact a settling of scores between the conservative wing of the Vatican, let’s call it the pro-Ratzinger faction, and the moderate wing that represents Francis, and, particularly, between two homosexual camps. A diplomat without having been a nuncio, and a ‘Prelato d’Onore di Sua Santità’ (honorary prelate of the pope) who was not elected bishop, Battista Ricca is one of the holy father’s closest colleagues. He is in charge of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the pope’s official residence, and also runs two other pontifical residences. Last of all, he is one of the representatives of the supreme pontiff at the highly controversial Vatican Bank (IOR). Which is to say that the cleric was exposed.