In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  It has to be said that the Portuguese Church, compromised under the dictatorship before 1974, now keeps its distance from the Catholic far right. It doesn’t seek to become involved in political matters, and stays out of parliamentary debates. This is confirmed to me by José Manuel Pureza, the vice-president of the Portuguese parliament, an MP with the left bloc (Bloco de Esquerda) and a practising Catholic, who was one of the chief architects of the law on homosexual marriage.

  ‘Cardinal Policarpo, known for having been favourable to democracy under the dictatorship, chose a form of neutrality on marriage. At the level of principles and family morality, he was against the planned law, but he was very measured. The Church had the same moderate attitude on abortion and adoption by same-sex couples.’ (This analysis joins that of three other major political figures who supported gay marriage, and whom I interviewed in Lisbon: the intellectual Francisco Louçá; Caterina Martins, the speaker for Bloco de Esquerda; and Ana Catarina Mendes, spokeswoman for the prime minister António Costa.)

  During my travels in this little Catholic country, I have been struck by its political moderation: social questions are discussed politely and homosexuality seems to be discreetly becoming an uncontentious issue even in churches. Sometimes women even take some of the functions of priests in Portugal, because of the crisis in vocations, taking on all tasks except the sacraments. Many Catholic priests are also married, particularly Anglican converts who were already in an established relationship before joining the Roman Church. I have also met several homosexual priests and monks, who seem to be quite calm about their unusual situation, particularly in monasteries. The parish of Santa Isabel, in the heart of Lisbon, welcomes all couples and all genders. As for the chief translator of the Bible into Portuguese, Frederico Lourenço, he is publicly married to his partner.

  This soft liberalism has not escaped the attention of Rome: the neutrality of the Lisbon episcopate on social questions – such as its low level of mobilization against the law on marriage – has caused consternation. Rome was waiting to rule; Cardinal Policarpo supplied the pretext for them to take action.

  Following an interview that was judged to be too liberal (especially on the question of the ordination of women), Policarpo was summoned to Rome at the request of Pope Benedict XVI, by the secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone. There, according to corroborative sources (and a detailed inquiry into the subject by the journalist António Marujo in Público), Bertone gave the cardinal a dressing-down, and he had to publish a communiqué, publicly moderating his moderation. The pope hoped to turn the Policarpo page as soon as possible.

  At this time, Benedict XVI’s key man in Portugal was the auxiliary bishop of Lisbon and vice-rector of the Catholic University, Carlos Azevedo. The organizer of the pope’s trip in 2010, which was aimed specifically at attempting to block the law on marriage, Azevedo became a rising figure in the Portuguese Church. Pope Benedict XVI had big ambitions for his protégé: he planned to create him cardinal and appoint him Patriarch of Lisbon in place of the uncontrollable Policarpo. For a long time a hospital chaplain, Azevedo was neither really liberal nor entirely conservative; he was intellectually respected by everybody, and his rise seemed to be unstoppable, once he had caught the pope’s eye.

  ‘Bishop Carlos Azevedo was a voice who was very much listened to, highly respected,’ stresses the former minister Guilherme d’Oliveira Martins.

  But Benedict XVI had once again spotted a ‘closeted’ cleric! We could even mock the virtuosity of a man who is an expert, in spite of himself, in the art of surrounding himself with homosexuals who go on to be ‘outed’ for their double life. Rumours of Azevedo’s homosexuality were rife, and fed by another closeted prelate who gossiped to the four winds, out of jealousy, in a kind of ecclesiastical ‘revenge porn’ at which Catholic bishoprics seem to excel. The rumours were such that Azevedo’s career was compromised.

  Apparently magnanimous towards prelates who have tendencies, whether active or not, the clerics close to Ratzinger extracted Azevedo to Rome to release him from the noose in which he had inadvertently trapped himself. A post was created, made to measure, and a title found for the unfortunate prelate, thanks to the great understanding of Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who knows the tune: the exiled bishop was appointed ‘delegato’ to the Pontifical Council for Culture in Rome. Shortly after this successful and creative extraction, the main Portuguese weekly Visão published a detailed investigation into Azevedo’s homosexuality back when he lived in Porto. For the first time in the recent history of Portugal, the possible homosexuality of a bishop came out into the open, which was enough to cause a scandal – and to lead to the poor prelate’s definitive ostracism. Azevedo was abandoned by all his Portuguese friends, rejected by the nuncio and abandoned to his fate by Cardinal Policarpo, because supporting him would have entailed the risk of falling under suspicion himself.

  If there was, in fact, an Azevedo ‘scandal’, it wasn’t in the place where one might have expected to find it: not so much in the possible homosexuality of an archbishop, but in the blackmail to which he was subject, and his abandonment by several prelates who shared his inclinations.

  ‘Azevedo was the victim of blackmail or revenge. But he wasn’t defended by the episcopate as one might have imagined,’ confirms Jorge Wemans, the founder of the daily newspaper Público.

  I have interviewed the Portuguese archbishop in Rome several times, and he told me about his life, his mistakes and his unhappy exile. He now spends his days at the Pontifical Council for Culture and afternoons at the Vatican library, researching medieval Portuguese religious figures. He is moderate, tolerant and an expert in ecumenism: he is an intellectual – there aren’t many of those in the Vatican.

  Writing these lines, I think of this intelligent bishop whose career has been broken. He couldn’t defend himself. He couldn’t plead his case before the Italian nuncio in office in Lisbon, a rigid aesthetically minded conservative whose hypocrisy about the case beggars belief. Very dignified, Azevedo has never spoken publicly about his tragedy, made all the more poignant since he was, he tells me, the ‘spiritual director’ of the man in question. ‘The “boy” was an adult,’ he adds, ‘and there was never any sexual abuse.’

  All in all, shouldn’t the Church of Rome have defended the bishop, who was a victim? And in the end, if there is any morality in Pope Francis’s church, shouldn’t Carlos Azevedo now be Patriarch of Lisbon and a cardinal, as most of the Catholic priests and journalists that I met in Portugal believe he should be – a country where gay marriage was adopted once and for all in 2010?

  A third example of the battle against gay marriage is Colombia. We are already familiar with this country through the figure of Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo. In Bogotá, the anti-gay obsession of the Catholic Church didn’t fade away with the death of its most homophobic homosexual cardinal. Which caused unexpected discord and put Pope Francis in difficulties.

  We are in 2015–16. At this point the Vatican was at the centre of a large-scale diplomatic dance trying to put an end to the armed conflict with the FARC guerrillas, which had been going on for over fifty years. Seven million people were displaced, and at least 250,000 murdered during what we must call a civil war.

  Along with Venezuela and Norway, the Vatican was involved in the lengthy Colombian peace negotiations that were carried out in Cuba. FARC representatives were accommodated in a Jesuit seminary. Cardinal Ortega in Havana and the Cuban episcopate, the nuncios in office in Colombia, Venezuela and Cuba, as well as the diplomats of the Secretariat of State, took part in negotiations between the government and the guerrillas. Pope Francis was active behind the scenes and received the main participants in the peace process, signed in Cartagena, in September 2016.

  And yet, a few days later, the popular referendum that was to confirm the peace agreement was rejected. And it was discovered that the Colombian episcopate, with the cardinals and bishops at their head, had rallied to the ‘no’ camp and to former preside
nt Uribe, a virulent ultra-Catholic and anti-communist, who campaigned with the slogan: ‘We want peace, but not this peace.’

  The reasons for the rejection by the Catholic authorities have nothing to do with the peace process, which they had nonetheless derailed: for them, the important thing was to denounce gay marriage and abortion. In fact, since the Colombian supreme court had legalized adoption and marriage between people of the same sex, the Catholic Church claimed that the referendum concerning the peace process, if it was favourable to the powers currently in place, would definitively legitimate that policy. Out of pure electoral opportunism, the Church therefore sabotaged the referendum to defend its conservative positions.

  As a cherry on the cake, the Colombian Minister of Education, Gina Parody, openly lesbian, at the same time suggested introducing anti-discriminatory policies with regard to LGBT people in schools. This announcement was interpreted by the Colombian Church as an attempt to introduce ‘gender theory’ into classes. If the peace referendum was adopted, the defence of homosexuality would be too, the representatives essentially said, calling for abstentions or a ‘no’ vote.

  ‘The Colombian Church has always been allied with the darkest forces in the country, particularly the paramilitaries. This was true in the days of Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo and it remains true today. Gay marriage and gender theory were only a pretext. They called for the “no” vote because neither the paramilitaries nor the Colombian Church really wanted to contribute to peace. And they went so far as to disavow the pope for that reason,’ a Jesuit priest I met in Bogotá rages.

  Double-speak and a double game that would reach abysmal depths in crucial European countries – Spain and Italy – to which we will now turn our attention.

  16

  Rouco

  The battle against ‘gay marriage’ was not played out only in faraway territories such as South Africa or Latin America. It was not confined to the countries of northern Europe, which were often – small consolation for the Vatican – predominantly Protestant. What was more worrying for Rome was that, at the end of John Paul II’s pontificate, the debate touched the hard core of Catholicism: Spain, so important in Christian history; and lastly Italy itself, the heart of the papacy, its navel, its centre.

  At the end of his interminable pontificate, John Paul II, who was ill by now, impotently witnessed the transformation in public opinion and the debate that was beginning in Spain about same-sex marriage. At the end of his own pontificate, in 2013, Benedict XVI could not help but observe, even more impotently, that France was preparing to adopt the law on gay marriage before Italy did the same for civil unions, shortly after his departure. Same-sex marriage would also come to Italy shortly after.

  Between those two dates, homosexual unions became accepted in most of Europe – if not legally in all places, then at least in people’s minds.

  ‘¡No pasarán!’ The message from Rome was clear. Cardinal Rouco received it loud and clear. In fact, he didn’t need much asking. When his friend Angelo Sodano, secretary of state to John Paul II, who had become a second pope in many respects since the holy father’s illness, asked to block ‘gay marriage’ whatever it took, Rouco was already at the head of the ‘resistance’. For Rome, It was imperative that Spain must not yield. If gay marriage were to be legalized there, the symbol would be so powerful, the effects so considerable, that the whole of Latin America could fall very soon.

  ‘¡No pasarán!’ is not, in fact, really Rouco’s language. This Catholic neo-nationalist was closer to the ideas of the dictator Franco than to those of the Spanish Republicans. But he understood the message, which he would repeat and amplify as intensely as did Cardinal Bertone when he came to replace Sodano.

  I went to Spain five times – before, during and after the battle over gay marriage. In 2017, when I came back to Madrid and Barcelona for my last interviews, I found myself at the heart of the election of the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference. More than ten years had passed since the battle over gay marriage; but the wound didn’t seem to have healed. The players were the same; so were the violence, the rigidity, the double lives. As if Catholic Spain were jogging on the spot. And still there, still pulling the strings: Cardinal Rouco. In Spanish, the word is ‘titiritero’ – the puppet-master.

  Antonio María Rouco Varela was born on the ‘camino’ of Santiago de Compostela: he grew up in Villalba, in Galicia, in the north-west of Spain, a staging town on the great pilgrimage taken even today by hundreds of thousands of believers. When he was born, in August 1936, the civil war was just beginning in Spain. His authoritarian career, over the decades that followed, was in line with that of many priests at the time, who supported Franco’s dictatorship.

  From a modest family, with a sick mother and a father who would leave him an orphan prematurely, young Rouco enjoyed a social rise that was far from typical. His education at the minor seminary was strict and conservative – even ‘medieval’, according to a priest who knows him well. He adds: ‘At that time, in Spanish Catholic schools, young boys were told that masturbation, by itself, was an abominable sin. Rouco grew up with this Old Testament mythology, which believed in the flames of hell, where homosexuals would be burned!’

  Ordained a priest in 1959, at the age of 22, hidalgo Rouco already dreamed of being a knight fighting the infidel, his shield emblazoned with the purple cross and the blood-red sword of the military order of St James – which can be seen even today in the Prado, on the chest of Velázquez himself, in one of the finest paintings in the world: Las Meninas.

  His biographers know little about the ten years that Rouco then spent in Germany, during the 1960s, where he studied philosophy and theology, particularly with the liberal Jesuit Karl Rahner. During this time he is described as having been a rather moderate priest, socially ill at ease, of a frail constitution, effeminate, depressed, questioning; some even think he was progressive.

  Back in Spain, Rouco spent seven years in Salamanca; he was elected bishop under Paul VI. During the 1980s he became close to the Archbishop of Madrid, Ángel Suquía Goicoechea, a conservative chosen by John Paul II to succeed the liberal and anti-Franco Vicente Tarancón. Perhaps for strategic reasons more than out of conviction, he joined the new line in Madrid and the Vatican. And it paid off. He was consecrated Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela at the age of 47 – his dream. Ten years later, he was appointed Archbishop of Madrid and then created cardinal by John Paul II.

  I have a meeting with José Manuel Vidal at the Robin Hood restaurant in Madrid. The name is written in English, not in Spanish. This free-trade canteen is run by the social centre of Padre Ángel’s church of San Antón, which receives the homeless and the ‘niños de la calle’. Vidal, a former priest himself for 13 years, has his meals there to support the association. It’s there that we will meet several times.

  ‘Here, at lunchtime, it’s a restaurant like any other. In the evening, on the other hand, it’s free for the poor. They eat the same things as we do: we pay at lunchtime for what they can eat for free in the evening,’ Vidal explains.

  A child of Vatican II, a Jesuit who became a curé, José Manuel Vidal is also part of this big family, a long, unquiet river that runs unnoticed by many through the 1970s and 1980s: that of priests who left the church to get married. I admire Vidal for his openness in a country where it is generally estimated that one priest in five lives out of wedlock with a woman.

  ‘In my youth, in the 1950s, the Church was the only upward route for the son of a peasant like me,’ he says.

  The defrocked curé knows the Spanish Church from the inside; he can decode its intrigues, he knows it from every angle, and behind the ‘murderous purity’ he can spot its tiniest secrets, as in the film Bad Education by Almodóvar. Having become a journalist at El Mundo, then director of the important online media company Religion Digital – the foremost Catholic website in Spanish around the world – Vidal published a biography of Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela. Its title, in l
arge capital letters, as if it were about a character as famous as John Paul II or Franco, is simply: ‘ROUCO’.

  ‘My past as a priest granted me access to internal information; my current secularization gives me a liberty that is rare among Spanish ecclesiastics,’ Vidal tells me, expertly summing up the situation.

  In 626 pages, José Manuel Vidal’s investigation is a fascinating snapshot of Catholic Spain from the 1940s until the present day: the collaboration with the fascist dictatorship; the battle against communism; the domination of money and the corruption that infected the clergy; the ravages of celibacy and sexual abuse. And yet Vidal maintains a kindly vision of these priests – of whom he was one – who still believe in God and love their fellow man.

  Cardinal Rouco was the most powerful man in the Spanish Catholic Church over a period of 20 years, from his appointment as Archbishop of Madrid in 1994 until his retirement at the behest of Pope Francis in 2014.

  ‘Rouco is a deeply Machiavellian man. He has dedicated his life to the control of the Church in Spain. He had a real court at his disposal; he had money, a lot of money; he had soldiers, troops, a genuine army,’ Vidal explains, charting his unusual ascent.

  A figure of the ‘ancien régime’, in the words of his biographer, Rouco Varela is a deeply anachronistic figure in Spain. Unlike his predecessors, such as Cardinal Vicente Enrique y Tarancón, who was the man of Vatican II and the democratic transition in Spain, he does not seem to have ‘made a clean break with Francoism’ according to Father Pedro Miguel, a Jesuit that I interviewed in Madrid.

  Rouco is a ‘rigid-minded opportunist’ who chose Rome over Spain’, Vidal tells me. He had no scruples about engaging Catholics in the political arena: he mobilized the episcopate and soon the whole of the Spanish Church, behind the most sectarian fringe of the Partido Popular – the right wing of the party of José María Azar.