Who supports Cardinal Sarah’s campaign and, where appropriate, the distributions of his books? Does he enjoy financial support from Europe or America? One thing is certain: Robert Sarah maintains contacts with ultra-conservative Catholic associations, particularly the Dignitatis Humanae Institute (as confirmed to me by its director, Benjamin Harnwell). In the United States, Sarah had connections with three foundations, the Becket Fund of Religious Liberty, the Knights of Columbus and the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, to whom he delivered a lecture. In Europe, Robert Sarah is also able to count on the support of the Knights of Columbus, particularly in France, as well as the affection of a billionaire who we have already visited in this book: Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, an extremely wealthy German royalist. ‘Gloria TNT’ confirmed to me during a conversation at her castle in Regensburg in Bavaria: ‘We’ve always invited the clergy here: it’s part of our Catholic legacy. I receive speakers who come from Rome. I am very involved in the Catholic Church, and I love inviting speakers like Cardinal Robert Sarah. He presented his book here in Regensburg and I invited the press: we had a lovely evening. That’s all part of my social life.’
In the photographs of this high-society party, we can see Princess ‘Gloria TNT’, surrounded by Robert Sarah and his ghost Nicolas Diat, as well as Cardinal Ludwig Müller, the priest Wilhelm Imkamp and Georg Ratzinger, the pope’s brother (the German edition of Sarah’s book has a preface by Georg Gänswein). In short: these are the main architects of what has been called ‘das Regensburger Netzwerk’ (‘the Regensburg network’).
Robert Sarah also has connections with the organisation of Marguerite Peeters, a Belgian militant extremist, homophobic and anti-feminist. Sarah wrote the preface to a little pamphlet by Peeters against gender theory, which was published almost entirely at the author’s expense. In it he writes: ‘Homosexuality is nonsense in terms of conjugal and family life. It is at least pernicious to recommend it in the name of Human Rights. To impose it is a crime against humanity. And it is inadmissible for western countries and UN agencies to impose on non-western countries homosexuality and all its moral deviances … To promote the diversity of “sexual orientations” even in African, Asian, Oceanian or South American territory is to lead the world towards a total anthropological and moral breakdown: towards decadence and the destruction of humanity!’
What financial support does Sarah enjoy? We don’t know. In any case, Pope Francis, with certain cardinals in the Roman Curia, has in mind: ‘There is God and there is the God of money.’
One last mystery: the cardinal’s entourage never ceases to surprise observers: Sarah travels and works with gays. One of his close collaborators is a far-right gay, with a powerful reputation for being forward in his advances. And when Sarah was secretary to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, fashionable homosexual parties were organized in one of the dicastery’s apartments. Within the Vatican, people still joke about this unusual time, when ‘private dancers’, ‘chemical orgies’ and ‘chem-sex parties’ occurred within the ministry of the ‘red pope’. Did Sarah know? There is no evidence that he did.
‘Was it possible that Sarah might have been unaware of the dissolute life of certain priests in the Congregation, and the risqué parties that were being held in the building where he lived and worked?’ wonders a visibly shocked priest who lived with him in the ministry at the time (and whom I interviewed in Belgium).
Today, people familiar with the Curia also notice Sarah’s professional proximity to a monsignore caught up in a corruption scandal which involved the procurement of male prostitutes. This prelate was mocked by the press and then accused of belonging to a gay prostitution network. Punished by the pope, the monsignore disappeared before miraculously reappearing in Sarah’s team at the Vatican (his name still appears in the Annuario Pontifico).
‘The most anti-gay cardinal in the Roman Curia is surrounded by homosexuals. He appears with them in social media. In Rome or France, which he often travels to, he is seen in the company of busy and entirely practising gays,’ a French journalist who knows him well tells me in a choked voice.
Pope Francis knows Sarah too. Because while the cardinal publicly voices admiration for the pope, he criticizes him harshly in private. When he delivers lectures, his entourage – to attract the public and sell his books – presents him as ‘one of the pope’s closest advisers’, but in fact he is one of his most implacable enemies. Francis, who has never been taken in by obsequious courtiers or bare-faced hypocrites, regularly punishes him with brutal severity. For a long time now, Sarah has lost his odour of sanctity at the Vatican.
‘The pope’s technique against Sarah is what I would call Chinese water torture: you don’t sack him all at once, you humiliate him little by little, depriving him of funds and taking away his collaborators, marginalizing him, denying his ideas or refusing him an audience … and then one day you make him commit hara-kiri. The technique was refined for [Raymond] Burke and [Ludwig] Müller. Sarah’s turn will come in time,’ a Curia priest in Cardinal Filoni’s entourage tells me.
The Chinese torture is already at work. Created cardinal by Benedict XVI in 2010, Robert Sarah assumed the head of the powerful pontifical council Cor Unum, which deals with charitable Catholic organizations. He proved sectarian, and more concerned with evangelization than philanthropy. After his election, Pope Francis removed him from his post, for carrying out his charity mission in a less than charitable manner. Phase I of the Chinese torture: rather than dismissing him, the pope reorganized the Curia and entirely dissolved the pontifical council Cor Unum, thus depriving Sarah of his post. As a consolation prize, employing the famous technique of ‘promoveatur ut amoveatur’ (promote to remove), the cardinal was made head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. There again he made faux pas after faux pas and revealed himself as an unconditional militant in favour of the Latin rite and the mass ad orientem: the priest must celebrate the mass with his back to the congregation, facing east. The pope called him to order: stage two of the Chinese torture. Stage three: all at once Francis removed 27 of the 30 cardinals of the team advising Robert Sarah, and without even taking the trouble to consult him, appointed his own men in their place. Stage four: Francis deprived him of his assistants. In appearance, little had changed: Sarah was still in place; but the cardinal was marginalized at the very heart of his ministry.
In the shadows for a long time, it was with the Synod on the Family called by Francis that Sarah showed his true face. He had no hesitation in calling divorce a scandal and remarriage adultery. In 2015 he even delivered a hysterical speech in which he denounced, as if he were still in his animist village, the ‘beast of the Apocalypse’, an animal with seven heads and ten horns sent by Satan to destroy the Church. And what was this devilish beast threatening the Church? Sarah’s 2015 speech is explicit on this point: it is the ‘ideology of gender’, homosexual unions and the gay lobby. And the cardinal went even further, comparing the LGBT lobby to Islamic terrorism: in his view, they are two sides of the same coin, the ‘two beasts of the Apocalypse’. (I am quoting from the official transcript, which I have got hold of.)
In comparing homosexuals to Daesh, Sarah reached a point of no return. ‘We’re dealing with a fanatic,’ a cardinal close to the pope says harshly, off the record. And a priest who took part in the synod tells me: ‘It’s no longer about religion: this is a speech typical of the far right. It’s Monseigneur Lefebvre: we don’t have to look any further for his sources. Sarah is re-Africanized Lefebvre.’
What is strange here is Sarah’s obsession with homosexuality. What an idée fixe! What psychosis about this ‘apocalypse’! In dozens of obscurantist interviews, the cardinal condemns homosexuals or begs them to remain chaste. Magnanimously, he even suggests for the least frugal of them ‘reparative therapies’ – often defended by the priest-psychoanalyst Tony Anatrella and various snake-oil salesmen – are said to ‘heal’ them and allow them to becom
e heterosexual! If a homosexual person doesn’t manage to attain abstinence, reparative therapies can help them: ‘in many cases, when the practice of homosexual acts has not yet been structured, [these homosexuals] can react positively to appropriate therapy’.
Against this background, the cardinal’s position is not without contradictions. In France, he became one of the tutelary figures of the ‘Manif pour tous’ movement, without seeing that some of his ‘anti-gender’ supporters were also pure racists who advocated voting for the far right Marine Le Pen in the 2017 presidential election. Thus a cardinal defending an absolutist vision of the family appeared beside those seeking to reserve family allowances only for the ‘native-born French’, and oppose family reunification of African parents with their children.
Imprudence, or provocation? Robert Sarah even wrote the preface for a book by Daniel Mattson, Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay. This book, with its dizzying title, is significant in that what the author proposes for homosexuals is neither ‘charity’ nor ‘compassion’ but total abstinence. Sarah suggests that being homosexual is not a sin as long as one remains continent: ‘When confronted with an adulterous woman, did Jesus not say, “I do not condemn you; go and sin no more”?’ This is the message of Sarah, which brings him strangely to the position of many homosexual Catholic writers and thinkers who have placed value on chastity so as not to follow their tendencies.
With this kind of statement, Sarah comes close, whether consciously or not, to the most caricatured homophiles, who have sublimated or repressed their inclinations into asceticism or mysticism. The prelate admits that he has read a great deal about this ‘illness’, and attended lectures in Rome addressing the homosexual question, particularly those at the pontifical university of Saint Thomas (as he reveals in his preface to the book Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay): ‘[Listening to homosexuals] I sensed the loneliness, pain and unhappiness that they endured as a result of pursuing a life contrary to their true identity as God’s children,’ he writes. ‘Only when they lived in keeping with Christ’s teaching were they able to find the peace and joy for which they had been searching.’
In fact, the world of Robert Sarah is a fiction. His criticism of Western modernity as opposed to the African ideal is only credible for those who do not know Africa.
‘African reality does not correspond in any way to what Sarah claims, out of pure ideology,’ the African diplomat at the Vatican, who has worked with him, tells me.
The illusion is particularly palpable on three issues: the celibacy of the priesthood, AIDS and the supposed homophobia of Africa. The Canadian economist Robert Calderisi, former spokesman of the World Bank in Africa, explains to me when I interview him that most of the priests on the continent live discreetly with a woman; the others are generally homosexual and try to exile themselves to Europe. ‘Africans want the priests to be like them. They like them to be married and have children,’ Calderisi adds.
All the nuncios and diplomats that I have interviewed for this research, and all my contacts in the African countries – Cameroon, Kenya and South Africa – that I have visited, confirm the frequency of this double life of Catholic priests in Africa, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual.
‘Sarah knows very well: a significant number of African Catholic priests live with a woman. Besides, they would lose all legitimacy in their village if they didn’t demonstrate their heterosexual practice! Far from Rome, they sometimes even manage to be married in the church in their village. Sarah’s current discourse on chastity and abstinence is a huge fable, when we know the lives of priests in Africa. It’s a mirage,’ according to a priest who specializes in Africa and who knows the cardinal well.
This prelate also confirms that homosexuality is one of the traditional rites of passage of West Africa, particularly in Guinea. A feature of African life of which the cardinal cannot be unaware.
Today, African seminaries are also, in the image of Italian seminaries in the 1950s, homosexualized places and spaces of protection for gays. Here again, this is a sociological law or, if one might dare to say so, a kind of ‘natural selection’ in the Darwinian sense: by stigmatizing homosexuals in Africa, the Church forces them to hide. They take refuge in seminaries to protect themselves and not have to marry. If they can, they flee to Europe, where Italian, French and Spanish episcopates appeal to them to repopulate their parishes. And that way things come full circle.
Robert Sarah’s discourse has become more hard-line since he left Africa. The bishop is more orthodox than the priest, and the cardinal more orthodox than the bishop. While he closed his eyes to many of the secrets of Africa, in Rome he was more intransigent than ever. Homosexuals then became scapegoats, along with all the things which, in his eyes, go along with it: AIDS, gender theory and the gay lobby.
Robert Sarah was one of the most vocal cardinals against the use of condoms in Africa. He rejected international development aid, which he saw as contributing to this ‘propaganda’, and refused the Church any social mission and punished associations, such as the Caritas network, which distributed condoms.
‘There is a large gap in Africa between the ideological discourse of the Church’s work on the ground, which is often very pragmatic. I have seen nuns giving out condoms everywhere,’ I am told by the Canadian economist Robert Calderisi, the former mission head and spokesman for the World Bank in West Africa.
Sarah commits another historical error on homosexuality. His template here is neo-Third-Worldist: Westerners, he says time and again, want to impose their values through human rights; in attributing rights to homosexuals they wish to deny the ‘African-ness’, of the peoples of that continent. Sarah, therefore, is standing up, in the name of Africa – which he left a long time ago, his detractors say – against a sick West. For him, LGBT rights can’t be universal rights.
In fact, as I have discovered in India, almost all the homophobic laws currently imposed as part of the penal codes in countries in Asia and Africa were instituted around 1860 by Victorian England on the colonies and protectorates of the Commonwealth (article 377 of the Indian penal code, the initial template, and then repeated, with the same number, in Botswana, the Gambia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Somalia, Swaziland, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia …). Furthermore, a comparable phenomenon also exists in North and West Africa, this time a leftover of French colonialism. The penalization of homosexuality therefore has nothing African about it – it is a leftover from colonialism. The supposedly unique quality of ‘African-ness’ was an injunction by the colonists to try and ‘civilize’ the indigenous Africans, to teach them ‘good’ European models and condemn homosexual practices.
Taking into account this homophobic dimension of colonial history, we can tell to what extent Cardinal Sarah’s discourse is loaded. When he claims that ‘Africa and Asia must absolutely protect their own cultures and values’, or insists that the Church must not allow itself to have ‘a western vision of the family’ imposed on it, the cardinal is abusing his believers, blinded by his prejudices and his interests. His discourse here is close to that of the African dictator Robert Mugabe, former President of Zimbabwe, for whom homosexuality was an ‘anti-African western practice’, or that of the autocratic presidents of Kenya and Uganda, who repeat that it is ‘contrary to the African tradition’.
Ultimately, if cardinals like Robert Sarah or Wilfrid Napier were coherent with themselves, they would be calling for the depenalization of homosexuality in Africa in the name of anti-colonialism, with a view to returning to a genuine African tradition.
It was not until Pope Francis that the Church’s position on condoms softened, or at least became more nuanced. On his trip to Africa in 2015, the pontiff explicitly acknowledged that the condom is ‘one of the [viable] methods’ in the battle against AIDS. Rather than speaking about prevention, he would insist on the major role played by the Church in the treatment of the epidemic: thousands of hospitals, dispensaries and orphanages, as well as the Catholic network Caritas I
nternationalis, treat the sick and find anti-retroviral therapies for them. In the meantime, AIDS has led, all around the world and in Africa in particular, to over 35 million deaths.
15
Strange household
After waging the battle against the use of condoms in Africa, the cardinals and nuncios of John Paul II tried to forbid civil unions. Here we enter one of the most surprising episodes in this book: that of an army of homophiles and homosexuals going to war against gay marriage.
It was in the Netherlands that the debate began, with the surprising introduction on 1 April 2001 of marriage for same-sex couples. In Amsterdam, the gay community celebrated the event, astonished by its own daring. The resonance of this development was international. The new article of law was written as follows; quite simply: ‘A marriage may be contracted by two persons of different sexes or the same sex.’
Some analysts in the holy see had spotted early warning signs, and nuncios like François Bacqué, in office in the country, had sent many diplomatic telegrams alerting Rome. But the spectacular Dutch decision was received in the Vatican like a second biblical Fall.
Pope John Paul II was out of action at that moment because of his state of health, but the secretary of state created enough agitation for two. Angelo Sodano was literally ‘confused’ and ‘puzzled’, according to a witness, and shared this confusion and puzzlement in no uncertain terms with his team, while maintaining his unshakeable placidity. Not only did he refuse to accept this precedent in Western Europe, but he feared, like the whole Curia, that the Dutch decision would open a breach that other countries would pour into.
Sodano gave the ‘minister’ of foreign affairs at the Vatican, the Frenchman Jean-Louis Tauran, the job of taking over the dossier, with the support of the nuncio Bacqué, who had already been his deputy in Chile. Shortly afterwards, he appointed to Geneva a bishop that he himself had consecrated, Silvano Tomasi, to follow the debate at the multilateral level. Benedict XVI’s ‘minister’ of foreign affairs, Dominique Mamberti, would also go on to play an important part. (To tell this story, I am relying on my conversations with four key actors, Tauran, Bacqué, Tomasi and Mamberti, as well as on ten other Vatican diplomatic sources. I have also obtained copies of dozens of confidential telegrams from diplomats posted to the UN describing the positions of the Vatican. Last of all, I spoke to several foreign ambassadors, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bernard Kouchner, the director of UNAIDS, Michel Sidibé, and Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, who piloted the ‘core group’ at the UN in New York.)
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 41