In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  The cardinals and bishops I spoke to put forward several hypotheses to explain this passion of Paul VI for the arts. One of them notes the crucial influence exerted on him by a book by Jacques Maritain, his essay Art and Scholasticism, in which he imagines a philosophy of art that allows artists their own peculiarities.

  Another fine connoisseur of the cultural life of the Vatican under Paul VI insists on the role of the pope’s personal assistant, the Italian priest Pasquale Macchi, a man of letters who was passionate about art, and a proven homophile who kept the company of artists.

  ‘Thanks to Pasquale Macchi, Paul VI brought together the intellectuals and tried to bring artists back to the Vatican. They both measured the gulf that already separated them from the world of art. And Macchi was one of the craftsmen behind the new collections,’ a priest in the Pontifical Council for Culture tells me.

  I’ve visited that modern wing of the Vatican museums. Although it is by no means a match for the old collections – how could it be? – it must be acknowledged that the Vatican curators were enlightened in their choices. I notice in particular two unorthodox artists: Salvador Dalí, a bisexual painter, with a fine painting entitled Crucifixion with masochist soldierly connotations. And most importantly, Francis Bacon, an artist who was openly gay!

  Paul VI’s homosexuality is an old rumour. In Italy it is very persistent, having been mentioned in articles and even on the pope’s Wikipedia page, which goes so far as to mention the name of one of his famous alleged lovers. During my many stays in Rome, cardinals, bishops and dozens of monsignori working at the Vatican have talked to me about it. Some denied it.

  ‘I can confirm that this rumour existed. And I can prove it. There were pamphlets, after the election of Montini [Paul VI] in 1963, denouncing his morals,’ I am told by Cardinal Poupard, who was one of the pope’s collaborators.

  Cardinal Battista Re assures me: ‘I worked with Pope Paul VI for seven years. He was a great pope and all the rumours I have heard are false.’

  Paul VI is generally said to have had a relationship with Paolo Carlini, an Italian theatre and television actor 25 years his junior. They met when Giovanni Montini was Archbishop of Milan.

  While that relationship is often mentioned in Italy, some of its factual elements seem anachronistic or erroneous. For example, Paul VI was said to have chosen his name in tribute to Paolo, which is denied by various sources, which put forward other, more credible explanations. Similarly, Paolo Carlini is said to have died of a heart attack ‘two days after Paul VI, out of grief’: and yet, while he was already ill, he didn’t die until much later. Montini and Carlini were also said to have shared an apartment near the archbishop’s palace, which is not confirmed by any trustworthy police source. Finally, the file kept by Milan police on the Montini–Carlini relationship, which is often cited, has never been made public and to this day there is no proof that it ever existed.

  Claiming to be better informed than anyone else, the French writer Roger Peyrefitte, a militant homosexual, set about ‘outing’ Paul VI in a series of interviews: first in Gay Sunshine Press, then in the French magazine Lui, an article picked up in Italy by the weekly magazine Tempo in April 1976. In his repeated interventions, and later in his books, Peyrefitte declared that ‘Paul VI was homosexual’ and that he had ‘proof’. ‘Outing’ was his speciality: the writer had already accused François Mauriac in an article in the journal Arts in May 1964 (rightly on that occasion), as well as King Baudouin of Belgium, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Shah of Iran – until it was discovered that some of his sources were mistaken, and that he had fallen for a journalistic hoax!

  I did have the opportunity, when I was a young journalist, shortly before his death, to interview Roger Peyrefitte about the rumour concerning Paul VI’s homosexuality. A repetitive gossip, the old writer didn’t seem to me to be very well informed and, in truth, was simply excited by the scent of scandal. In all these cases, he never supplied the least proof of his ‘scoop’. It seems in fact that he wanted to attack Paul VI after his declaration Persona Humana, which was hostile to homosexuals. In any case, the mediocre and sulphurous writer, close to the extreme right and deliberately polemical, at the end of his life became a specialist in fake information, and indeed homophobic, as well as sometimes spreading anti-Semitic rumours.

  The interesting point was, of course, Paul VI’s public reaction. According to several of the people I interviewed (notably cardinals who worked for him), the articles about his alleged homosexuality deeply affected the holy father. Taking the rumour very seriously, he was said to have encouraged multiple political interventions to make it stop. He was believed to have asked in person for the help of the then Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, who was among his close friends and with whom he shared a passion for Maritain. What did Moro do? We don’t know. The political leader was kidnapped a few months later by the Red Brigades, who demanded a ransom. Paul VI publicly intervened to ask for his release, and was even said to have tried to assemble the necessary funds. But Moro was murdered in the end, plunging Paul VI into despair.

  The pope finally chose to deny, in person, the rumour started by Roger Peyrefitte: he spoke out publicly on the subject, on 4 April 1976. I found his intervention in the Vatican press office. Here is Paul VI’s official declaration: ‘Beloved brothers and sons! We know that our cardinal vicar and with him the Italian Episcopal Conference have invited you to pray for our humble person, who has been the object of mockery and horrible and slanderous insinuations on the part of a certain press, in contempt of honesty and truth. We thank you for your filial demonstrations of piety, moral sensibility and affection … Thank you, thank you from the bottom of our heart … Also, since this episode and others were caused by a recent declaration by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, about certain questions of sexual ethics, we ask you to give this document your virtuous observance, and thus to strengthen you in a spirit of purity and love opposed to the licentious hedonism that is very widespread in the morals of the world today.’

  Major communication error! While the rumour put about by a reactionary author with little credibility was limited to some anti-clerical homophilic milieu, Paul VI’s public denial, in the solemnity of the Palm Sunday angelus, helped to spread it around the world. Hundreds of articles were published passing on this denial, particularly in Italy, and probably raising doubts. Something that had only been a rumour became a question, perhaps even a theme. The Curia learned its lesson: better to ignore rumours of the homosexuality of popes or cardinals than give them publicity by denying them.

  Since then other witness statements have appeared, supporting the ‘terrible’ rumour: first of all that of a minor Italian poet, Biagio Arixi, a friend of Carlini’s, whom the actor was said to have revealed his liaison with the pope shortly before he died. The chamberlain and master of ceremonies of John XXIII and Paul VI, Franco Bellegrandi, also mentioned the subject in a dubious book. The Polish archbishop Juliusz Paetz also expatiated at length about the pope’s supposed homophilia, even distributing photographs and suggesting that he might have been in a bromance with him, as is confirmed by witnesses, journalists from Gazeta Wyborcza and my ‘researchers’ in Warsaw (Paetz’s testimony is uncorroborated.) A former Swiss Guard also provided information of a similar kind, and several former lovers, whether real or self-proclaimed, of Paul VI tried to testify, often in vain, and in any case unconvincingly. On the other hand, other witness statements from cardinals and a number of serious biographers firmly rebut this claim about the pope.

  A more important point: the hypothesis of Paul VI’s homosexuality and his relationship with Paolo Carlini were taken seriously enough during the beatification process of Paul VI. According to two sources whom I have interviewed, the file was examined in extreme detail by the priests who had prepared for that ‘trial’. If there was a debate, if there was a file, it’s at least because there was doubt. The question of the alleged homosexuality of Paul VI even figures explicitly i
n the documents submitted to Pope Benedict XVI, which were written by Father Antonio Marrazzo. According to one first-hand source who is very familiar with the large dossier assembled by Marrazzo, and who talked to him about the morals attributed to the holy father, the question appears in numerous documents and written statements. According to that same source, however, Marrazzo concluded, after checking and cross-checking all the documents, that Paul VI probably wasn’t homosexual. His position was finally taken by Pope Benedict XVI, who, after examining the file at length, decided to beatify Paul VI and to acknowledge his ‘heroic virtues’, bringing the controversy to a temporary close.

  One mystery remains around Paul VI: his entourage, full of homophiles and practising homosexuals. Consciously or otherwise, this pope severely forbade this form of sexuality, yet surrounded himself with men almost all of whom had ‘inclinations’.

  This was, as we have seen, true of Paul VI’s personal secretary, Pasquale Macchi, who worked with him for 23 years, first in the archbishopric of Milan and then in Rome. Apart from the part he played in the creation of the collection of modern art in the Vatican museums, this priest, with a legendary artistic bent, was a close friend of Jean Guitton and had many contacts with the creative people and intellectuals of his era, in the name of the pope. His homophilia was confirmed by more than ten witnesses.

  In the same way, the priest and future Irish bishop, John Magee, who was also a close friend and assistant of Paul VI, was homosexual (as the courts made clear in the trial for scandals in his diocese of Cloyne).

  Another man close to Paul VI, Loris Francesco Capovilla, who was also personal secretary to his predecessor, John XXIII, and a key participant in the council (he was appointed cardinal by Pope Francis in 2014 and died at the age of 100 in 2016), was said to have been homophilic.

  ‘Mgr Capovilla was a very discreet man. He said his little words to the younger priests, and was very kind. He made delicate passes. He wrote to me once,’ the former Curia priest Francesco Lepore confirms to me.’ (A cardinal and several archbishops and prelates in the Vatican also confirmed Capovilla’s inclinations.)

  Paul VI’s official theologian, the Dominican Mario Luigi Ciappi, a Florentine with a devastating sense of humour, was also seen as an ‘extrovert homophile’ who lived side by side with his ‘socius’, or personal secretary, according to three convergent witness statements by Dominican priests that I have taken (Ciappi was one of the official theologians of five popes, between 1955 and 1989, and was created cardinal by Paul VI in 1977).

  The same is true of Paul VI’s master of pontifical ceremonies, the Italian ‘monsignore’ Virgilio Noè, a future cardinal. People in the Vatican were amused for a long time by this man who was straight as a die in public, and said to lead a racy life in private.

  ‘Everyone knew that Virgilio was practising. Let’s even say very practising! It was a kind of joke between us, inside the Vatican,’ a priest of the Roman Curia confirms.

  The pope’s manservant was also a known homosexual; and the same is true of one of the main translators and bodyguards of the holy father – the famous Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, whom we will be speaking of again. As for the cardinals, many of them are ‘part of the parish’, beginning with Sebastiano Baggio, whom the pope entrusted with the Congregation for Bishops, after making him a cardinal. Last of all, one of the heads of the Swiss Guard under Paul VI, a close friend of the pope, still lives with his boyfriend in a suburb of Rome, where one of my sources met him.

  By recruiting most of his entourage among priests who were homophile, ‘questioning’, ‘closeted’ or practising, what was Paul VI trying to tell us? I will leave that up to the reader, who has in front of them all the points of view and all the pieces of the puzzle. In any case, the ‘Maritain code’, a template drawn up under Paul VI, would be perpetuated under the subsequent pontificates of John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. Ever astute, the pope made ‘loving friendship’ a rule of the Vatican fraternity. The ‘Maritain code’ was born under good auspices; it still applies today.

  Part III

  John Paul

  9

  The Sacred College

  ‘Under Paul VI, we were still in the days of homophilia and “inclination”. With John Paul II things changed completely in their nature and breadth. In his entourage there were more practitioners – unimaginable levels of venality and corruption. Even around the holy father there was a veritable ring of lust.’

  It’s a priest of the Curia who talks to me like this, one of the witnesses of the pontificate. When he uses the expression ‘ring of lust’, this monsignore is only picking up an idea already put forward by Benedict XVI and Francis. If they were careful not to quote any particular cardinals or to criticize their Polish predecessor, the two popes were shocked by John Paul II’s hybrid entourage.

  Francis never speaks at random. And when he launched his scathing attack, which has often been repeated since, against the ‘current of corruption’ in the Curia, he obviously had these names in mind. It was June 2013, the beginning of his reign – the pope was speaking in Spanish to a group of Latin American Catholic representatives. The discussion turned, just this once, to the gay lobby. And if the new pope talked about a ring of ‘corruption’, it was because he had the proof: he had particular cardinals in his sights. He was thinking of Italians, Germans and also Latino cardinals and nuncios.

  It is a matter of public knowledge that the pontificate of John Paul II was strewn with scandals, and that several of the cardinals in his close circle were both homosexual and corrupt. But until this investigation, I hadn’t been aware of the full degree of hypocrisy of the Roman Curia under Karol Wojtyła. Might his pontificate have been ‘intrinsically disordered’?

  John Paul II is the pope of my youth, and many of my friends and relations always respected him. Among the editors of Esprit, an anti-totalitarian Catholic journal to which I contributed, Wojtyła was generally considered as one of the major figures associated with the end of communism. I have read several books and biographies of this giant of the twentieth century, this global figure. It was when I met the cardinals, bishops and priests who worked with him that I discovered the hidden side – the dark side – of his very long pontificate. A pope surrounded by plotters, thugs, a majority of closeted homosexuals, who were homophobes in public, not to mention all those who protected paedophile priests.

  ‘Paul VI had condemned homosexuality, but it was only with the arrival of John Paul II that a veritable war was waged against gays,’ I was told by a Curia priest who worked at John Paul II’s ministry of Foreign Affairs. ‘Irony of history: most of the players in this boundless campaign against homosexuals were homosexual themselves. In making this choice of official homophobia, John Paul II and his entourage had not realized the extent of the trap that they were setting for themselves, and the risk to which they were exposing the Church by undermining it from within. They hurled themselves into a suicidal moral war that they were inevitably going to lose, because it consisted of denouncing what they were. The fall of Benedict XVI would be the final consequence of this.’

  To try to understand one of the best-kept secrets of this pontificate, I interviewed numerous cardinals in Rome. Among them the main ‘ministers’ of the pope: Giovanni Battista Re, Achille Silvestrini, Leonardo Sandri, Jean-Louis Tauran and Paul Poupard, who were, at the time, at the heart of the Roman Curia. I visited the pope’s private secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz, in Kraków; I also met about ten nuncios who worked as diplomats on his behalf, several of his press advisers, assistants and masters of ceremony and secretaries, members of the Secretariat of State between 1978 and 2005, as well as many bishops or simple monsignori. In addition, I obtained a great deal of information and confidences from cardinals, bishops or ordinary priests as I travelled abroad, pursuing my investigations in Latin America and, of course, in Poland. Last of all, the archives of the Chilean dictatorship, recently opened, were crucial.

  One mystery survives for me tod
ay, as I begin to give an account of this descent into hell. What did John Paul II know concerning what I am about to relate? What did he know of the double lives of most of his entourage? Was he naively unaware of it; did he quietly indulge or validate the financial scandals and sexual wickedness of his close colleagues – because those two excesses, money and the flesh, were added to, as a pair and a couple, in the course of his pontificate? For want of an answer to this enigma, I would like to believe that the pope, who would very soon fall ill, and become senile, knew nothing about any of it and didn’t cover up the excesses that I am about to describe.

  The two main players in the John Paul II years were the cardinals Agostino Casaroli and Angelo Sodano. Both Italians, both from modest families in Piedmont, they were the holy father’s chief collaborators, occupying, in turn, the post of cardinal secretary of state – the most important function in the holy see: the pope’s ‘prime minister’.

  Cardinal Casaroli, who died in 1998, was for a long time a subtle and cunning diplomat, notably when responsible for the communist countries under John XXIII and Paul VI, before becoming John Paul’s right-hand man. His great and unfussy diplomacy, which consisted of dialogues, compromises and small steps, is admired even today by most of the diplomats who have talked to me about him; for example, the nuncio François Bacqué, Mgr Fabrice Rivet or the nuncio Gabriele Caccia, whom I interviewed in Beirut.

  I have often heard it said at the Secretariat of State that one nuncio or another was ‘in the line of the great Casaroli diplomacy’. Even today that magical name seems to be a benchmark, much as one might say of an American diplomat that he is ‘Kissingerian’ or of a French diplomat that he is ‘neo-Gaullist’. Implicitly, it is also a subtle way of distinguishing this version from the diplomacy of his successor Angelo Sodano, who was put in place after 1991.