Like the other Swiss Guards, Alexis confirms the large number of homosexuals at the Vatican. He uses strong terms: ‘domination’, ‘omnipresence’, ‘supremacy’. This pronounced gayitude has deeply shocked the majority of the Guards that I’ve interviewed. Nathanaël, when his service is over and his ‘liberation’ completed, never expects to set foot in the Vatican again, ‘except on holiday with my wife’. Another Swiss Guard, interviewed in Basel, confirms to me that the homosexuality of the cardinals and prelates is one of the most frequently discussed subjects in the barracks, and the stories they hear from their comrades further amplify the experiences they have had themselves.
Speaking with Alexis, as with Nathanaël and the other Swiss Guards, we mention precise names, and the list of cardinals and bishops who have made passes at them is confirmed, proving to be as long as Cardinal Burke’s cappa magna. Even though I know about the issue, these statements still surprise me: the number of the elect is even larger than I thought.
Why did they agree to talk to me so freely, to the extent that they are surprised by their own daring? Not out of jealousy or vanity, like some cardinals and bishops; not to help the cause, like most of my gay contacts within the Vatican. But out of disappointment, like men who have lost their illusions.
And now Alexis tells me another secret. If the officers, as I have said, are rarely homosexual, the same cannot be said of the confessors, chaplains and priests who surround the Swiss Guard.
‘We are asked to go to the chapel reserved for us and confess at least once a week. And yet I’ve never seen as many homosexuals as I have among the chaplains of the Swiss Guard,’ Alexis tells me.
The young man gives me the names of two chaplains and confessors of the Guard who he believes are homosexual (his information is confirmed by another Alemannic Swiss Guard and a Curia priest). I am also told the name of a chaplain who died of AIDS (as the Swiss journalist Michael Meier reported in an article in the Tages-Anzeiger, giving the man’s name).
During many stays in Switzerland, where I have gone every month for several years, I met specialist lawyers and the directors of several human rights associations (such as SOS Racisme and Diskriminierung in der Schweiz). They told me of certain kinds of discrimination that affected the Swiss Guard, from the recruitment process to the code of good conduct applied to the Guards in the Vatican.
So, according to a Swiss lawyer, the status of the association recruiting future Swiss Guards, in the Swiss confederation, was said to be ambiguous. Is it a feature of Swiss law, or Italian law, or indeed the canon law of the holy see? The Vatican left that ambiguity in place so that it could play on all three levels. And yet since the recruitment of Swiss citizens took place in Switzerland, it should conform with that country’s labour law, which applies even to foreign companies who work there. So the rules of recruitment for the Guards were deemed to be discriminatory: women were banned (although they are accepted into the Swiss army); a young married man or a man in a relationship cannot apply for a post, only bachelors are accepted; his reputation must be ‘irreproachable’, and he must have ‘sound morals’ (phrases designed to rule out not only gays, but also transsexuals); as for migrants, so dear to Pope Francis, they are also ineligible for recruitment. Last of all, it appears that people with disabilities or people of colour, black people or Asians, are also rejected during the selection process, although the texts are not explicit on this point.
According to the lawyers I consulted, the prohibition on being married was completely illegal, not to mention that it contradicts the principles of a Church that claims to encourage marriage and forbid all sexual relations outside of it.
I had the leaders of the Swiss Guard questioned in German by this lawyer about these legal anomalies, and their replies were significant. They rejected the idea of discrimination, on the grounds that military constraints imposed certain rules (although these were contrary to the specific code of the Swiss army, which takes into account military specifics with regard to the age or physical condition of recruits). As regards homosexuality, they told us in writing ‘that being gay is not a problem with regard to recruitment, as long as one is not too “openly gay”, too visible or too feminine’. Last of all, oral rules issued during the training of the Swiss Guard and the code of conduct (the Regolamento della Guardia Svizzera Pontificia, which I have got hold of, and the last edition of which, with a preface by Cardinal Sodano, dates from 2006) also contain irregularities with regard to discrimination, labour law and harassment.
Anomalies that aren’t merely juridical, in terms of Swiss, Italian or European law, but also moral and theological, tell us a great deal about the peculiarities of a state that is decidedly abnormal.
13
The crusade against gays
At the same time as Pope John Paul II was protecting Marcial Maciel and part of his entourage was abandoning itself to the cruising of the Swiss Guard or lust in general, the Vatican launched its great battle against homosexuals.
There was nothing new about this war. The anti-sodomite fanaticism had existed since the Middle Ages, though this did not prevent dozens of popes from being suspected of having inclinations, including Pius XII and John XXIII – strong internal tolerance along with intense external criticism remained the rule. The Church has always been more homophobic in words than in the practices of its clergy.
However, this public discourse in Catholicism became more hard-line in the late 1970s. The Catholic Church was wrong-footed by the revolution in morals that took place in the 1960s, which it had neither anticipated nor understood. Pope Paul VI, who was far from clear on the subject, reacted in 1975 with the famous ‘declaration’, Persona humana, which was part of the dynamic of the encyclical Humanae vitae: the celibacy of the priesthood was confirmed, value placed on chastity, sexual relations were prohibited and homosexuality was violently rejected.
To a large extent, and on the doctrinal level, the pontificate of John Paul II (1978–2005) was also part of this continuity. But the situation was aggravated by an increasingly homophobic discourse, while the pope’s entourage hurled itself into a new crusade against gays (Angelo Sodano, Stanisław Dziwisz, Joseph Ratzinger, Leonardo Sandri, Alfonso López Trujillo were involved in manoeuvres, among others).
From the year of his election, the pope ensured that the debate was frozen. In a speech on 5 October 1979, delivered in Chicago to an audience of all the American bishops, he invited them to condemn acts that he called ‘unnatural’. ‘As compassionate pastors, you were right to say: “Homosexual activity, to be distinguished from homosexual tendencies, is morally evil.” Through the clarity of this truth, you have proved the true charity of Christ; you have not betrayed those who, because of homosexuality, find themselves confronted with painful moral problems, as would have been the case if, in the name of understanding and pity, for any other reason, you had offered false hopes to our brothers and sisters.’ (Note the phrase: ‘for any other reason’, which might be an allusion to the well-known morals of the American clergy.)
Why did John Paul II choose to appear, so early in his pontificate, as one of the most homophobic popes in the history of the Church? According to the American Vatican expert Robert Carl Mickens, who lives in Rome, there are two essential factors.
‘He was a pope who had never known democracy, so he made all his decisions on his own, with his brilliant intuitions and his archaic Polish-Catholic prejudices, including prejudices about homosexuality. Then there was his modus operandi, his line throughout his pontificate was unity: he believed that a divided Church was a weak Church. He imposed great rigidity to protect that unity and the theory of the personal infallibility of the pontiff did the rest.’
John Paul II’s low level of democratic culture is sometimes mentioned both in Kraków and Rome by those who knew him, along with his misogyny and his homophobia. But the pope seemed to tolerate well the omnipresence of homosexuals in his entourage. There were so many of them, and so many who were practising, amon
g his ministers and his assistants, that he could not have been unaware of their ways of life, and not just of their ‘tendency’. So why maintain such a contradictory position? Why allow such a system of hypocrisy to take root? Why such public intransigence and private tolerance? Why? Why?
The crusade that John Paul II would launch against gays, against condoms and, soon, against civil unions therefore appears in a new context, and in order to describe it we need to get inside the Vatican machine, which is the only way of understanding its violence and the profound psychological impulses behind it – the self-hatred that acts as its powerful secret motor – and finally its failure. Because it was a war that John Paul II would lose.
I shall tell this story first of all through the experience of an ex-monsignore, Krzysztof Charamsa, a simple cog in the propaganda machine, who showed us the dark side of this story by coming out. Then I will turn my attention to a cardinal in the Curia, Alfonso López Trujillo, who was one of its principal actors – and whose career in Colombia, in Latin America in general, and then in Italy, I have followed in great detail.
The first time I heard the name of Krzysztof Charamsa was in an email, from him. The prelate contacted me when he was still working for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Polish priest had enjoyed, he told me, my book Global Gay, and he asked for my help in communicating through the media his imminent coming out, though he swore me to secrecy on the subject. Not knowing at the time if he was an influential prelate as he claimed, or a charlatan, I asked my Italian friend Pasquale Quaranta, journalist with La Repubblica, to check his biography.
Once the authenticity of his testimony had been confirmed, I exchanged a number of emails with Mgr Charamsa, recommended the names of several journalists to him, and, in October 2015, just before the Synod on the Family, his high-profile coming out made the papers and travelled all the way around the world.
I met Krzysztof Charamsa several months later in Barcelona, the city to which he had been exiled after being stripped of his functions by the Vatican. Having become a queer and militant activist for Catalan independence, he made quite a good impression on me. We dined together with Eduard, his boyfriend, and I sensed in him, and in the looks that he gave Eduard, a certain pride, like someone who had just carried out a little revolution all by himself, his ‘One-Man Stonewall’.
‘You realize what he’s done! Such courage! He was able to do all of that out of love. Out of love for the man he loves,’ Pasquale Quaranta told me.
We saw each other again in Paris the following year and, during those various interviews, Charamsa told me his story, which he would go on to write as a book, The First Stone. In his interviews and his writings, the former priest always maintained a kind of restraint, of reserve, perhaps of fear if not of double-speak, which prevented him from telling the full truth. And yet, if he did really speak one day, his testimony would be of enormous importance, because Charamsa was at the heart of the Vatican’s homophobic war machine.
For a long time, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was called the Holy Office, in charge of the sadly famous ‘Inquisition’ and its well-known ‘Index’, the list of censored or forbidden books. This Vatican ‘ministry’ continues, as its name suggests, to fix doctrine and define good and evil. Under John Paul II, this strategic dicastery, the second in terms of protocol after the Secretariat of State, was run by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. He was the one who came up with and decreed most of the texts against homosexuality, and examined most of the sexual abuse files in the Church.
Krzysztof Charamsa worked there, as adviser and deputy secretary to the international theological commission. I have complemented his story with those of four other internal witnesses: that of another adviser, a commission member, an expert and a cardinal who is a member of the council of that Congregation. I myself also had the chance to spend many nights, thanks to the hospitality of understanding priests, in the holy of holies: a Vatican apartment near Piazza Santa Marta, a few metres from the Palace of the Holy Office where I have met minor officials of the modern Inquisition.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith comprises about forty permanent salaried employees, known as ufficiali, scrittori or ordinanze, generally very orthodox, loyal and reliable priests (Charamsa calls them ‘civil servants of the Inquisition’). Most have many degrees, often including theology, as well as canon law or philosophy. They are assisted by about thirty external consultori.
Generally speaking, every ‘inquisitorial process’ (today we would say every ‘point of doctrine’) is studied by the functionaries, then discussed by experts and consultants before being submitted to the council of cardinals for ratification. This apparent horizontality, a source of debate, in fact conceals a verticality: only one man is authorized to interpret the texts and dictate ‘the’ truth. Because the prefect of the Congregation (Joseph Ratzinger under John Paul II, William Levada and then Gerhard Müller under Benedict XVI – both subject to Ratzinger) naturally had ultimate control over all the documents: he proposes them, amends them and validates them before presenting them to the pope at crucial private audiences. The holy father has the last word. Here we can see – as we have known since Nietzsche – that morality remains a tool of domination.
It is also an area highly propitious to hypocrisy. Among the 20 cardinals currently in the flow chart of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, we think that there are about a dozen homophiles or practising homosexuals. At least five live with a boyfriend. Three regularly use male prostitutes. (Mgr Viganò criticizes seven of these cardinals in his ‘Testimonianza’.)
The Congregation is therefore an interesting clinical case and the heart of Vatican hypocrisy. Charamsa: ‘Since many of them are homosexual, these clergy impose a hatred of homosexuals, which is to say self-hatred, in a desperate masochistic act.’
According to Krzysztof Charamsa, as well as other internal witnesses, under prefect Ratzinger the homosexual question became an actual unhealthy obsession. The few lines of the Old Testament devoted to Sodom are read and reread; the relationship between David and Jonathan is endlessly reinterpreted, along with the phrase in the New Testament in which Paul admits his suffering at having ‘a thorn in the flesh’ (for Charamsa, Paul was suggesting his own homosexuality). And all of a sudden, when we have been driven mad by this dereliction, when we understand that Catholicism deserts and desolates existence, a life with no way out, perhaps one secretly begins to weep?
These erudite gayphobes in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have their own SWAG code (Secretly We Are Gay). When these priests talk among themselves in mystical jargon about the Apostle John, the ‘disciple beloved of Jesus’, this ‘John, beloved more than the others’, the one that ‘Jesus, having seen him, loved’, they know very well what they mean; and when they conjure the image of healing by Jesus of a young centurion’s servant ‘who was dear to him’, according to the heavily emphasized insinuations in the Gospel according to Saint Luke, there is no doubt about the significance of this in their eyes. They know that they belong to a cursed people – and a chosen people.
During our meetings in Barcelona and Paris, Charamsa described in great detail this secret universe, this law so fully anchored in people’s hearts, hypocrisy elevated to the state of a rule, double-speak, brain-washing, and he told me all of this in a tone of confession, as if giving away the ending of The Name of the Rose, in which the monks woo one another and exchange favours until, filled with remorse, a young monk throws himself from a tower.
‘I read and worked all the time. It was all I did. I was a good theologian. That was why the directors of the Congregation were so surprised by my coming out. They expected that of everyone, except me,’ the Polish priest tells me.
For a long time, the orthodox Charamsa obeyed orders without demur. He even helped to write texts of unusual vehemence against homosexuality as being ‘objectively disordered’. Under John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger, it was quite a festi
val. The syllabus as a whole didn’t have harsh enough words for gays. Homophobia spread ad nauseam through dozens of declarations, exhortations, letters, instructions, considerations, observations, motu proprio and encyclicals, so much so that it would be difficult to list all the ‘papal bulls’ here.
The Vatican tried to ban homosexuals from joining seminaries (not realizing that this would also mean a drop in vocations); it legitimized their exclusion from the army (when the United States wanted to suspend the ‘Don’t ask don’t tell’ rule); it suggested theologically legitimizing the discriminations to which homosexuals could be subjected in their work; and, of course, it condemned same-sex unions and marriage.
The day after World Gay Pride, which was held in Rome on 8 July 2000, John Paul II spoke during the traditional angelus prayer to denounce ‘the well-known demonstrations’ and to express his ‘bitterness at the insult to the Great Jubilee of the year 2000’. But the faithful were few in number that weekend compared with the 200,000 people who marched in the streets of Rome.
‘The Church will always say what is good and what is bad. No one can demand that it finds just something that is unjust according to natural and evangelical law,’ Cardinal Angelo Sodano said on the occasion of that Gay Pride, and he did everything he could to stop the LGBT procession. We should note at the same time the attacks of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, who disapproved of this demonstration ‘during holy week’, and those of the auxiliary bishop of Rome, Mgr Rino Fisichella, whose episcopal motto was ‘I have chosen the way of truth’, and who couldn’t find words harsh enough to criticize World Gay Pride! A joke, incidentally, circulated inside the Vatican to explain these three pugnacious positions: cardinals were furious about the Gay Pride parade because it wouldn’t let them have a float!
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 34