Several sources indicated that Mgr Anatrella was not only inspired by, but also involved in the writing of Grocholewski’s circular: Grocholewski is said to have consulted him and met him several times. According to his entourage, Grocholewski was impressed by the arguments of the priest-psychoanalyst, and his denunciations of the ‘narcissistic goals’ of gay priests and their obsession with ‘seduction’. Pope Benedict XVI, himself eventually convinced by Anatrella’s analyses of chastity, is said to have applauded him, making him a model to be followed and a Catholic intellectual to be listened to. What does Mgr Anatrella really want? He has attracted a great deal of attention in France.
I must return for a few moments to this thinker. A poster-boy for demonstrators against gay marriage and a close colleague of cardinal Ratzinger, Tony Anatrella was appointed as a consultant to the Vatican for the pontifical councils in charge of the family and health. Thanks to this Roman recognition he then became the quasi-official voice of the Church on the gay question, even when he was becoming increasingly fundamentalist.
From the mid-2000s, Anatrella was given the task by the French Conference of Bishops to draft their policy document against gay marriage. His notes and articles and, soon, his books, became increasingly violent, not only against marriage, but also more broadly against homosexuals. With all his strength, and on every media stage, this priest-therapist even rejected ‘the legal recognition of homosexuality’ (even though it had been decriminalized in France since Napoleon). He denounced the homosexualisation of the seminaries and therefore demanded that individuals with homosexual inclinations be excluded from them. Indulgently, Anatrella also appointed himself the spokesman of ‘reparatory therapies’ which in his view gave homosexuals a solution for ceasing to be so.
Since the priest was also a psychoanalyst – although he did not belong to any psychoanalytic association – he offered ‘conversion’ sessions to his patients, preferably male, in a specialist consultancy. There he received young seminarians who were filled with doubt, and boys of middle-class Catholic families who had problems with their sexual identity. However, Dr Anatrella hid his intentions, as we understand from the fact that in order to correct this ‘evil’, his patients had to undress and be masturbated by him! This charlatan worked for many years until three of his patients decided to lodge a complaint against him for sexual aggression and repeated molestation. The media scandal became international, particularly as Anatrella was close to Rome, to popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. (Mgr Anatrella has denied these accusations. Even if the case was eventually dropped because of statutory limitation periods, it nonetheless established the facts: Mgr Anatrella was suspended from his duties and a canonical trial was launched by the cardinal of Paris; in July 2018, at the end of this religious trial, the priest was sanctioned and suspended once and for all from any public priestly practices by the new archbishop of Paris, Mgr Aupetit.)
Ydier and Axel are two seminarians whom I meet at the Mario Mieli cultural centre (their names have been changed).
‘There are about twenty of us in my seminary. Seven are clearly gay. About six others have, we might say, tendencies. That agrees more or less with the usual percentage: between 60 and 70 per cent of seminarians are gay. Sometimes I think it’s as many as 75 per cent,’ Axel tells me.
The young man would like to join the Rota, one of the three tribunals in the holy see and the initial reason for his attending the seminary. Ydier, for his part, wants to become a teacher. He wears a white cross on his shirt, and has dazzling blond hair. I mention this.
‘Fake blond! It’s fake! I have brown hair,’ he tells me.
The seminarian goes on: ‘The atmosphere at my seminary is also very homosexual. But there are important nuances. There are students who really live out their homosexuality; others who don’t, or not yet. There are homosexuals who are really chaste; there are also heterosexuals who are practising for want of women, out of substitution, one might say. And there are others who only live it out secretly. It’s a very unique atmosphere.’
The two seminarians share more or less the same analysis: in their view, the celibacy rule and the prospect of living together prompts young men who are undecided about their inclinations to join Catholic establishments. They are far from their village for the first time, without their family, and in a strictly masculine context and strongly homosexual universe, they begin to understand their uniqueness. Often, the ordinands – even the older ones – are still virgins when they reach the seminary: in contact with other boys, their tendencies are revealed or come into focus. Then the seminaries become the context for future priests ‘coming out’ and having their first experiences. It’s a real rite of passage.
The story of the former American seminarian Robert Mickens sums up a path taken by many.
‘What was the solution when you discovered that you had a different “sensibility” in an American city like Toledo, Ohio, where I come from? What were the options? For me, going to the seminary was a way of dealing with my homosexuality. I was in conflict with myself. I didn’t want to confront that question in the United States. I left for Rome in 1986, and I studied at the Pontifical North American College. During my third year at the seminary, when I was 25, I fell in love with a boy.’ (By his own choice, Michens was never ordained as a priest: he became a journalist at Radio Vatican, where he stayed for 11 years, and then for The Tablet, and he is now editor-in-chief of La Croix International. He lives in Rome, where I met him several times.)
Another seminarian, a Portuguese I met in Lisbon, tells me a story quite similar to that of Mickens. He had the courage to come out to his parents. His mother replied: ‘At least we’ll have a priest in the family.’ (He joined the seminary.)
Another example: that of Lafcadio, a Latin American priest of about thirty who now teaches in a Roman seminary (his name has been changed). I met him at the Propaganda restaurant after he became the lover of one of my translators. No longer able to conceal his homosexuality, he chose to talk to me frankly, and we’ve met up again for dinner five times during this investigation.
Like Ydier, Axel and Robert, Lafcadio linked his career path to his homosexuality. After a difficult adolescence in the depths of Latin America, but with no initial doubts about his sexuality, he chose to join the seminary ‘out of a sincere vocation’, he tells me, even though an emotional laziness and boundless ennui – the cause of which he didn’t know at the time – may have played a part in his decision. Gradually, he managed to put a name to his malaise: homosexuality. And then, suddenly, a chance event: on a bus, a boy put his hand on his thigh. Lafcadio tells me: ‘I suddenly froze. I didn’t know what to do. As soon as the bus stopped, I fled. But that evening I was obsessed by that trivial gesture. I thought about it constantly. It seemed terribly good, and I hoped it would happen again.’
He gradually discovered and accepted his homosexuality, and left for Italy, since the Roman seminaries were ‘traditionally’, he tells me, the place ‘where the sensitive boys of Latin America are sent’. In the capital, he started living a well-compartmentalized life, without ever allowing himself to spend the night away from the seminary where he stayed, and where he now had important responsibilities.
With me, he is ‘openly gay’, and he talks about his obsessions as intense sexual desires. ‘I’m often horny,’ he says. ‘So many nights spent in random beds – and still this promise to return to the seminary, before curfew, even when there were so many things to do!’
In accepting his homosexuality, Lafcadio also started seeing the Church in another light.
‘Since then, I’ve got better at decoding things. Sometimes I find monsignori, archbishops and cardinals making passes at me in the Vatican. Before, I wasn’t aware of what they wanted from me. And now I know!’ (Lafcadio became one of my precious informers because, young and good-looking, with close connections inside the Roman Curia, he was subjected to sustained emotional solicitations and recurrent flirtations on the part of several cardinal
s, bishops and even a ‘liturgy queen’ in the pope’s entourage – several of which encounters he described to me.)
Like a number of seminarians I have interviewed, Lafcadio describes to me another phenomenon that is particularly widespread in the Church, so much so that it has a name: crimen sollicitationis (solicitation in confession). In confessing their homosexuality to their priest or spiritual director, the seminarians leave themselves exposed.
‘A number of priests to whom I have confessed my doubts or attractions have made advances to me,’ he tells me.
Often these solicitations are fruitless: at other times they receive consent and lead to a relationship; sometimes couples form. At yet other times, these confessions – even though this is a sacrament – lead to touching, harassment, blackmail or sexual aggression. When a seminarian confesses that he has attractions or tendencies, he takes risks. In some cases, the young man is denounced by his superior, as the former priest Francesco Lepore experienced at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross.
‘In the course of a confession, I mentioned my internal conflicts to one of the chaplains of Opus Dei. I was open and a bit naïve. What I didn’t know was that he would betray me and tell everyone around him.’
Other seminarians have been trapped into having their confessions used against them to exclude them from the seminary; something that is strictly illegal under canon law because the secrets of the confessional are absolute, and betraying them should mean excommunication.
‘Here again, the Church demonstrates double standards. It puts up with the denunciation of homosexuals, whose admissions have been elicited in confession, but it forbids priests who are made aware of sexual abuse in confession to betray that secret,’ one seminarian laments.
According to several witnesses, cruising in confession occurs particularly frequently during the first few months of a seminarian’s training, during the year of ‘discernment’ or ‘propaedeutic’, more rarely at the level of the diaconate. Among the regular clergy, Dominicans, Franciscans and Benedictines have confirmed to me that they underwent this ‘rite of passage’ as novices. Advances made, whether consented to or not, are justified by a kind of biblical excuse: in the book of Job, the guilty party is the one who yields to temptation, not the tempter themselves; in a seminary, then, the guilty party is ultimately always the seminarian, and not the predatory superior – and here we encounter the whole inversion of the values of Good and Evil that the Church constantly maintains.
To achieve some kind of understanding of the Catholic system, of which the seminaries are only the antechamber, we must decrypt another code of The Closet: that of friendships, protections and protectors. Most of the cardinals and bishops I have interviewed have talked to me about their ‘assistants’ or their ‘deputies’ – meaning: their ‘protégés’. Achille Silvestrini was the protégé of Cardinal Agostino Casaroli; the layman Dino Boffo of Stanisław Dziwisz; Paolo Romeo and Giovanni Lajolo of Cardinal Angelo Sodano; Gianpaolo Rizzotti of Cardinal Re; Don Lech Piechota of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone; Don Ermes Viale of Cardinal Fernando Filoni; Archbishop Jean-Louis Bruguès of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran; the future cardinals Pietro Parolin and Dominique Mamberti, also the protégés of Cardinal Tauran; nuncio Ettore Balestrero of Cardinal Mauro Piacenza and then Cresenzio Sepe; Fabrice Rivet of Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, etc. One could take hundreds of examples of this kind, which dramatize the idea of the ‘guardian angel’ and the ‘favourite’ – and sometimes the ‘wicked angel’. These ‘special friendships’ can turn into homosexual relationships, but in most cases they aren’t. In general they are a system of highly compartmentalized hierarchical alliances, which can lead to clans, factions and sometimes camarillas. And as in any living body, there are reversals, turnarounds and inversions of allegiance. Sometimes these binomials, in which both parties are ‘bound together’, become genuine associations of lawbreakers – and the key to understanding certain financial scandals or VatiLeaks affairs.
This model of ‘protector’ and ‘protégé’, which recalls some indigenous tribes studied by Claude Lévi-Strauss, can be found at all levels of the Church, from the seminaries to the College of Cardinals, and generally makes appointments unintelligible and hierarchies opaque to the outsider who cannot decrypt their codes. It would take an anthropologist to grasp their complexity!
A Benedictine monk, who was one of the directors of the Saint Anselm University in Rome, explains the implicit rule to me. ‘Overall, you can do what you like in a religious house as long as you are not discovered. And even when you are caught red-handed, the superiors turn a blind eye, particularly if you let them believe that you’re ready to correct yourself. In a pontifical university like St Anselm, you would also have to bear in mind that the majority of the teaching body is homosexual!’
In ‘A Heart Beneath a Cassock’, Rimbaud described, from the visionary heights of his 15 years, the ‘intimacies of seminarians’, their sexual desires which revealed themselves ‘clad in the holy robe’, their genitals beating under their ‘seminarian caps’, the ‘imprudence’ of a ‘confidence’ betrayed and, perhaps, the abuses by the father superior whose ‘eyes emerge from his fat’. The poet would sum up the subject later in his own way: ‘I was very young. Christ sullied my breath.’
‘The confessional is not a torture chamber,’ Pope Francis has said. The holy father could have added: ‘And neither should it be a place of sexual abuse.’
Most of the seminarians I interviewed helped me to understand something that I hadn’t grasped, and that is very nicely summed up by a young German I met by chance in the streets of Rome: ‘I don’t see that as a double life. A double life would be something secret and hidden. But my homosexuality is well known within the seminary. It isn’t noisy, it isn’t militant, but it is known. What is truly forbidden, however, is to be militantly in favour, to assert oneself. But as long as one remains discreet, everything is fine.’
The ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ rule does outstanding work, as it does elsewhere in the Church. Homosexual practice is better tolerated in the seminaries when it is not displayed. But woe to him who causes a scandal!
‘The only thing that is really banned is to be heterosexual. Having a girl, bringing a girl back, would mean immediate exclusion. Chastity and celibacy apply mostly to women,’ the German seminarian adds with a broad smile.
A former seminarian who lives in Zurich explains his point of view. ‘Essentially, the Church has always preferred gay priests to heterosexual priests. With its anti-gay circulars, it claims to be changing things a little, but you can’t change a reality with a circular! While the celibacy of priests remains in place, a gay priest will always receive a better welcome in the Church than a straight priest. That’s a reality, and there’s nothing the Church can do about it.’
The seminarians I have interviewed agree on another point: a heterosexual cannot feel completely at ease in a Catholic seminary, because – and I’m quoting the expressions they used – of ‘the looks’, the ‘special friendships’, the ‘bromances’ the ‘boy-chasing’, and the ‘sensitivity’, ‘fluidity’, ‘tenderness’ and ‘generalized homoerotic atmosphere’ that emanates from it. Anyone who wasn’t a confirmed bachelor would be flummoxed.
‘Everything is homoerotic. The liturgy is homoerotic, the habits are homoerotic, the boys are homoerotic, not to mention Michelangelo!’ the former seminarian Robert Mickens tells me.
And another seminarian adds, repeating a mantra that I have heard several times: ‘Jesus never once mentions homosexuality. If it’s such a terrible thing, why does Jesus not talk about it?’
After a pause, he observes: ‘Being in a seminary is a bit like being in Blade Runner: no one knows who is a human and who is a replicant. It’s an ambiguity that straights usually take a dim view of.’ The seminarian suddenly continues, as if thinking about his own fate: ‘Let’s not forget that lots of people give it up!’
The journalist Pasquale Quaranta is one of those. He, to
o, tells me about his time as a seminarian. Now an editor at La Repubblica, Quaranta was, with the publisher Carlo Feltrinelli and a young Italian writer, one of the three people who persuaded me to undertake the project of this book. Over several dozen dinners and evenings in Rome, but also travelling to Perugia or Ostia, where we traced Pasolini’s last moments, he told me his history.
The son of a Franciscan friar who left the Church to marry his mother, Pasquale initially chose the path of a priest. He spent eight years with the Stigmatines, a clerical congregation dedicated to teaching and the Catechism.
‘I must say, I had a good education. I’m very grateful to my parents for sending me to the seminary. They passed on a passion for The Divine Comedy!’
Was homosexuality one of the secret drivers of this vocation? Pasquale doesn’t think so: he entered the minor seminary at too young an age for it to have an influence. But maybe that’s why he abandoned his vocation.
When he discovered his homosexuality, and talked about it to his father, their extremely good relations broke down instantly. ‘My father didn’t talk to me again. We stopped seeing one another. He was traumatized. At first he thought the problem was me; then that the problem was him. Gradually, over a long period of dialogue, which lasted several years, we were reconciled. In the meantime, I had renounced the priesthood and, on his deathbed, my father corrected the proofs of a book that I was preparing to publish about homosexuality, written with a priest who helped me to accept myself more fully.’
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 50