In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Since that date the question of gay marriage has remained the main fissure in the Spanish Church. In order to understand it, however, we need to think about it counter-intuitively: not believe that ‘gay’ bishops are necessary in the clan of defenders of gay marriage, and that ‘hetero’ prelates would be hostile to it. The rule, as always, is rather the reverse: it is the noisiest and the most anti-gay who are usually the most suspect.

  The Spanish episcopate is, like all the rest, highly homosexualized. Among the thirteen cardinals that the country currently has (four are electors and nine non-electors of over 80), people who know the field estimate that most of them are homophile, at least five being practising. As for the battle that has been played out over gay marriage between the camps Rouco-Cañizares-Reig on the one hand and Amigo-Blázquez-Sebastián on the other, at least four of the six key players are homophilic. (Apart from about a hundred interviews that I carried out in Madrid and Barcelona, here I am using the testimony of someone close to Cardinal Osoro, as well as information from within the Spanish Episcopal Conference communicated by one of its directors.)

  Still, Pope Francis was very familiar with the Spanish episcopate, its frenzies, its charlatans and its sweethearts, and had decrypted its codes. So, from his election in 2013, he would undertake a major house-cleaning in Spain.

  The three moderate cardinals that he created (Osoro, Blázquez and Omella) confirm that he brought it under control. The apostolic nuncio Fratino Renzo, whose way of life, golf parties and associations dismayed Francis, was totally bypassed (and his departure already planned). As for the pedlar of bogus ‘reparative’ therapies bishop Reig Pla, who was waiting to be made cardinal, he went on waiting.

  ‘We’re at the start of a new transition!’ José Beltrán Aragoneses, editor-in-chief of Vida Nueva, the journal of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, tells me.

  The new Archbishop of Barcelona, Juan José Omella y Omella – using prudent, diplomatic and slightly coded tones – confirms the change of line to me when he receives me in his beautiful office beside the Catalan cathedral.

  ‘Since the council, the Spanish episcopate has learned its lesson: we aren’t politicians. We don’t want to intervene in political life, even if we can express our thought from a moral point of view … [But] I think we must be sensitive to people’s concerns. Not engage on the political level without respect. Respect, not a belligerent attitude, not a warlike attitude. [On the contrary] we need an attitude of welcome, of dialogue, not one of judgement, as Francis has reminded us [with his ‘Who am I to judge?’]. We have to help to build a better society and resolve problems, always bearing the poorest in mind.’

  His words are skilful, surgical. The Rouco page has turned. Omella, formerly a missionary in Zaire, was the new strong man in Spanish Catholicism. The one who refused to go into the street to demonstrate against homosexual marriage was made a cardinal by Francis. He would be based at the Congregation of Bishops, in place of the conservative Cañizares, who had been transferred from the office. Intransigent against sexual abuse by priests, more suspicious about the double life, Omella is also more tolerant of gays.

  During one of my trips to Madrid, when the bishops were tearing themselves apart over the election of their new president within the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), an important LGBT association threatened to publish a list of the Spanish ‘obispos rosa’ (pink bishops). But they did not go ahead. However, eldiario.es, a digital newspaper which publishes material from the Guardian in Spanish, reported on the publication by this same association. With rich detail, it mentioned the very outspoken attacks against homosexuality by each of the bishops. The list included Cañizares and Reig, and also emeritus bishop Rouco Varela.

  One evening I was present at a live broadcast in the studios of COPE, a popular radio station owned by the Spanish Episcopal Conference. I was surprised that the election of the new president of the CEE appeared to be an event in Spain (when it didn’t provoke the slightest interest in France). Faustino Catalina Salvador, the editor-in-chief of religious programmes at COPE, predicted victory for Cardinal Blázquez, the pro-Francis tendency; other participants – the Ratzingerian and pro-Rouco wing – forecast that it would be Cañizares.

  After the broadcast, I continued the conversation with some of the journalists on the talk show that I had just witnessed. I was surprised to hear people saying of one Spanish cardinal or another that he was ‘en el armario’ or ‘enclosetado’ (in the closet). Everyone was aware of it, and spoke almost openly about the homosexuality of certain prelates. The gay question even appeared to be one of the underlying themes, one of the issues, in the election of the new president of the episcopal conference!

  ‘People think that Francis’s man in Spain is Osoro. That’s not the case. Francis’s man is Omella y Omella,’ says an important executive in the CEE, himself homosexual, with whom I also spend several evenings talking.

  Slightly apart from all these debates, and keeping his own counsel, the Archbishop of Madrid, Carlos Osoro, was the great loser in this CEE election. When I meet him for an interview, I understand that this complicated man, who comes from the ‘right’ wing but is allied with Francis, is trying to find his feet. Like all the new converts to Pope Francis, who created him cardinal, he wants to establish his credentials. And to show signs of goodwill to Rome on the subject of pastoral care, he went to see Padre Ángel’s church of the ‘poor’ in the gay quarter of Chueca. The day when I went there, it was filled with homeless people, happy to find a place where they had access to toilets, hot coffee, Wi-Fi, biscuits for their dogs, all for free. ‘A red carpet for the poor’, said the CEE priest who accompanied me. ‘Homosexuals also attend this church. It’s the only one that treats them well,’ he tells me.

  Before, the church of San Antón was closed, abandoned, like many small isolated Catholic churches in Spain. The crisis in priestly vocations is dismaying; there are fewer and fewer parishioners everywhere (fewer than 12 per cent of Spaniards are still practising, according to the demographers); the churches are empty; and the many cases of sexual abuse are eating into the episcopacy. Spanish Catholicism is in dangerous decline in one of the countries in the world where it was once most influential.

  ‘Rather than leaving the church closed, Cardinal Osoro gave it to Padre Ángel. That was a brilliant idea. It’s come back to life since then. There are gays all the time, gay priests, mixed with the homeless and the poor of Madrid. Padre Ángel told the gays and the transgender people that they were welcome, that this church was their house, so they came!’ the priest goes on.

  Here we have the ‘peripheries’ dear to Pope Francis reintegrated into a city-centre church that is called ‘la casa de todos’. Cardinal Osoro, now gay-friendly, even shook hands with members of the Crismhom association who gather there (masses for homosexuals are currently celebrated in Madrid by a gay priest, as I have been able to confirm). The cardinal was a bit tense but he ‘did the job’, according to several witnesses.

  ‘We swapped a few words and a few phone numbers,’ a regular member of the church confirms.

  Osoro’s assistant also told me he was worried about the fact that ‘the cardinal was giving his number to everybody: half the people in Madrid have his mobile and Osoro gave it to me too’, when we met.

  ‘Padre Ángel even held the funeral of Pedro Zerolo in his church. It was very moving. The whole of the gay community, the whole quarter of Chueca, a stone’s throw away, came with rainbow flags,’ the Spanish priest from the CEE goes on.

  Zerolo, whose photograph I have often seen in the offices of the LGBT associations in Madrid, is considered to be the icon of the Spanish gay movement. He was one of the architects of gay marriage and married his partner a few months before he died of cancer. And the priest adds: ‘His funeral was magnificent and very moving. But that day, Cardinal Osoro, a little uneasy, told Padre Ángel that he was perhaps going too far.’

  17

  CEI

  All of a sudden
, the Italian cardinal Angelo Bagnasco takes his ring off his right ring finger and spontaneously gives it to me. With a jeweller’s precision, this crumpled little man holds out the ring in the palm of his hand, and I take the ring in the hollow of mine. I admire it. The scene is played out at the end of our conversation, while we are talking about cardinals’ outfits and the cardinal’s ring. For a bishop, it isn’t the ‘fisherman’s ring’, which is reserved for the pope, but is the mark of a privileged relationship with the faithful. It replaces the wedding ring for married people, perhaps to indicate that they have married their flock. At that precise moment, without his attributes and the symbol of his episcopal responsibilities, does the cardinal feel as if he’s laid bare and under scrutiny?

  If his watch is a luxury one, and his bishop’s chain – with its equally luxurious precious metal pectoral cross – Angelo Bagnasco’s ring is simpler than I would ever have dreamed. On the ring fingers of many cardinals and archbishops whom I’ve visited, I have seen stones so precious, so daring in their amethyst green, yellow ruby and violet emerald colours, that I wondered if they weren’t just bits of transparent quartz painted in Marrakesh. I’ve seen rings on twisted fingers, homophilic cardinals wearing a garnet ring which, they said, kept devils at bay, and, on the hands of closeted cardinals, signet rings with goldstones. And what signet rings! They all know that it would be a mistake to put the rings on their thumbs. Or on their index fingers!

  It has to be said that all dog-collars and all clerical attire look the same. And even if Maria, one of the saleswomen in De Ritis, a renowned shop selling priestly garments near the Pantheon in Rome, struggled to explain to me the difference in cut and form, to the eye of a layman like me there is little difference between these frowsty garments. There isn’t much variety in their outfits – not all cardinals are as daring as His Eminence Raymond Burke – so the senior prelates compensate for this shortcoming with jewels. And what jewels! A real ‘rain of the wind of diamonds’ as a Poet writes! What elegance, what style, what taste in the choice of sizes, assortments and colours. This sapphire, this amethyst, this Balay ruby, these stones are so fine, so well worked, that they fit their equally precious wearers like a glove. And how much value is concentrated here, turning these men, guilty as they are of such gentle larceny, into veritable safes? Sometimes I have seen strait-laced prelates wearing spectacular pectoral crosses, with their diamonds, and twisting or interlaced biblical creatures, making them look as if they’ve come out of a drawing by Tom of Finland. And such variety too, in the cuff-links, so conspicuous that the prelates, surprised by their own audacity, are reluctant to wear them for fear of giving themselves away.

  Angelo Bagnasco’s ring is simple and beautiful. It isn’t a dazzling rectangle, or gold enclosing a diamond like some that Pope Benedict XVI wore. Such simplicity is surprising when we know our man.

  ‘Cardinals spend a lot of time choosing their rings. Often they have them made to measure. It’s an important step and sometimes a considerable financial investment,’ says one of the salesmen at Barbiconi, a famous merchant of ecclesiastical habits, pectoral crosses and rings, on Via Santa Caterina da Siena in Rome. And he adds, like a shopkeeper: ‘You don’t have to be a priest to buy a ring!’

  When I visited him, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran wore not only a Cartier ring and an ecumenical cross given to him by his close friend, an Anglican priest, but also a sublime solitaire ring, green and gold, on his right ring finger.

  ‘I attach very great sentimental value to this ring that you see there,’ Tauran said to me. ‘I had it made from the wedding rings of my father and mother, fused together. From this material, the jeweller made my cardinal’s ring.’

  As I discovered in the course of my investigation, some prelates have only one ring. With humility, they engrave on the obverse the figure of Christ, a saint or an apostle, for example; sometimes they prefer to have a crucifix or the cross of their religious order; on the reverse, you can see their episcopal coat of arms or, for a cardinal, under his ligature, the arms of the pope who created him cardinal. Other cardinals have several rings, a veritable panoply; they change them according to the occasion, as they change their cassocks.

  This eccentricity is easily understood. Bishops who wear such beautiful pearls remind me of the veiled women I have seen in Iran, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia. The strictness of Islam, which extends not only to hair, and to the thickness and wideness of the hijab, but also to the length of shirt-sleeves or dresses, transfers female elegance to the veil, whose brilliant colours, enticing shapes and the expensiveness of cashmere, pure silk or angora fabrics are the paradoxical consequence. The same is true of these Catholic bishops: constrained by their Playmobil vestments, dog-collar and black shoes, they let their imagination run riot with rings, watches and cuff-links.

  Dressed to the nines, his hair perfectly combed, Cardinal Bagnasco receives me in his private residence at Via Pio VIII, a cul-de-sac located behind the Vatican that takes me a good twenty minutes to get to on foot from St Peter’s Square in Rome. The road was steep and sunlit, delaying my arrival; besides, the cardinal has set the time of our meeting, rather imperiously, as prelates often do, not suggesting any alternative, but imposing his own timetable, with no room for discussion – even Italian ministers are more accommodating and hospitable! For these reasons, I arrive late for our meeting, having worked up a slight sweat. The cardinal invites me to use his bathroom. And it’s at that moment that I am submerged in a cloud of scent.

  He is refined and flirtatious, well pomaded. I had been told of the perfumes of Cardinal Bagnasco – woody, amber, chypré or citric – and now I understand why. Is it Egoiste by Chanel, La Nuit de L’homme by Yves Saint-Laurent, or Vétiver by Guerlain? Anyway, the cardinal likes to swathe himself in perfume. Rabelais used to mock the flatulence of Italian prelates! He would never have imagined that we would one day mock them for smelling like divas!

  Essentially, perfumes fulfil more or less the same function as rings. They allow uniqueness when clerical attire imposes uniformity. Amber, violet, musk, champaca – all these I have discovered in the Vatican. How many oils! How many scents! What a riot of perfumes! But doesn’t anointing yourself with Opium immediately constitute a discreet admission of addiction?

  For a long time Angelo Bagnasco was the most powerful and most senior dignitary in the Italian Church. More than any other bishop in his country, he was the grand vizier of ‘Spaghetti Catholicism’ (a term sometimes used for Italian Catholicism to distinguish it from the Catholicism of the holy see). He has made and unmade careers; has co-created cardinals.

  In 2003, he was appointed archbishop for the armed forces, a post which, he says, filled him ‘with trepidation’ because it was a ‘huge diocese’, which consisted in evangelizing ‘soldiers everywhere in Italy and even beyond with the military missions abroad’. Appointed Archbishop of Genoa in 2006, replacing Tarcisio Bertone when he became secretary of state to Benedict XVI, Bagnasco was then created cardinal by the pope, to whom he is said to have been close. Most importantly, for ten years, between 2007 and 2017, he presided over the Italian Episcopal Conference – the famous ‘CEI’. Until he was removed from it by Pope Francis.

  His heart is warmed by the fact that a French writer and journalist should come to see him after this forced retirement, even though he is proscribed and banished. He doesn’t speak French, or English, or Spanish, or any foreign language, unlike the majority of cardinals, but he does his best to explain himself, translated by Daniele, my Italian researcher.

  Cardinal Bagnasco is a man in a hurry, one of those people who throw sugar lumps into their coffee without bothering to take off the paper, just to gain some time. Those who know him but don’t like him have described him to me as an irascible and vindictive man, a man of great cunning, a ‘passive authoritarian’, according to a priest who knew him well at the CEI, where he alternated carrot and stick to impose his views. But he is courteous and patient with us. Bagnasco
constantly taps his foot, faster and faster. Out of boredom or because he would like to speak ill of the pope but is holding himself back?

  Since his fall, Bagnasco has been seeking a new paradise. Having been a cynical ally of Benedict XVI and Cardinal Bertone, he now rebukes them for hurling the Church into a venture into the unknown with Francis. It is no compliment for either.

  Of course, the ringed and cuff-linked cardinal barely criticizes his co-religionists, let alone the pope, when speaking to us. But his facial expressions betray his thoughts. So when I mention the name of Cardinal Walter Kasper and his geopolitical ideas, Bagnasco cuts me off, his face contorted with disdain. The name of the most progressive of his opponents provokes such an explicit grimace that, inadvertently, Bagnasco is living proof that men and monkeys have a common ancestry.

  ‘He isn’t someone who knows diplomacy,’ Bagnasco says, simply and succinctly.

  And when we start talking about the tensions within the Italian Episcopal Conference, and Cardinal Bertone’s attempts to regain control of the CEI, Bagnasco turns towards Daniele and says about me, in Italian, while uneasily testing the atmosphere: ‘Il ragazzo è ben informato!’ (The boy is well informed.)

  Bagnasco darts me a significant look. One of those looks that are strange, decisive and completely different. It’s one of those moments when a cardinal’s eyes meet mine, as has happened to me several times. They stare at me, study me, penetrate me. It takes only an instant, a second, but something happens. Cardinal Bagnasco wonders, looks at me, hesitates.