Benedict XVI is also a style. He is a veritable gender theory all by himself. Sua cuique persona (to each his mask), as the Latin expression has it.
As soon as he was elected, this eccentric pope became the heart-throb of Italian magazines: a fashionable figure, seen wearing all the fashion houses of Milan, as once Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis or Elizabeth II had done.
It has to be said that Benedict XVI liked to flirt. At first, like all popes, his robes were made to measure for him by Gammarelli, the famous ‘clerical tailor’ right next to the Pantheon. There, in that little dark, discreet and expensive shop, one can buy a mitre, a biretta, a mozzetta, a rochet or a simple dog-collar, all kinds of cassocks and curial scarves, as well as the famous Gammarelli red shoes.
‘We’re an ecclesiastical tailor’s, and at the service of the whole clergy, from seminarians to cardinals, via priests, bishops, and of course the holy father, who is our most precious customer,’ Lorenzo Gammarelli, the manager of the shop, tells me during an interview. Adding: ‘But, of course, when it’s the pope we go to the Vatican, to his apartments.’
During our conversation, I still feel that we’re missing something. Paul VI, John Paul II and Francis are venerated here, but the name of Benedict XVI remains difficult to pronounce. As if it’s in brackets.
The insult to Gammarelli has not been forgotten: Benedict XVI did his shopping at Euroclero, a rival, whose shop is near St Peter’s. Its by now famous director, Alessandro Cattaneo, made his fortune thanks to this pope. Criticized on this essential element in the liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI would make a much-noticed return visit to the official tailor, but without abandoning Euroclero: ‘You can’t do without Gammarelli!’ he would admit. Two tailors are better than one.
Only two? Benedict XVI was so keen on haute couture that he had a flock of tailors, hatters and cobblers hanging on his heels. Soon it was Valentino Garavani making his new red cape; then Renato Balestra sewing his big blue chasuble. In March 2007, on a visit to a boys’ prison, the pope appeared in full sail in an extravagant long bonbon-pink robe!
On another sunny day, Italians were startled to see their pope wearing Ray-Bans; and soon he would also wear a pair of Geox shoes signed by the Venetian shoemaker Mario Moretti Polegato.
This was a strange piece of casting for such a chaste pope: some of these tailors and boot-makers are well known for their ‘intrinsically disordered’ morals. Criticized for the Ray-Bans, Christ’s representative on earth opted instead for Serengeti-Bushnell sunglasses, which are slightly more discreet; criticized for his Geoxes, he opted instead for a sublime pair of sparkling Prada moccasins in brilliant lipstick red. Much ink was spilt about the Prada loafers – hundreds of articles at the very least. So much so that deeper investigations and a report by CNN star Christiane Amanpour showed that they weren’t, perhaps, Prada shoes after all. While the devil might wear Prada, the same wasn’t necessarily true of the pope!
Benedict XVI had a marked liking for accessories. More than any pope before him, he provided his chamberlain, the man who prepared his outfits, with plenty of work. And the odd scare. In one photograph, Ratzinger appears with the smile of a teenager who has just done something very silly. This time, did the pope hide his new madness from his tailor? Because here he was looking terribly cheerful in a red ermine-lined bonnet. Admittedly it was what is known in ecclesiastical language as a ‘camauro’, a winter hat, but popes stopped wearing those with John XXIII. This time, the press mocked Papa Ratzinger for wearing a silly Santa Claus hat!
Full alert in the holy see! Incident in the Vatican! Benedict XVI was asked to explain himself. And he did, in this admission, known as the Santa hat confession: ‘I only wore it once. I was just cold, and my head is sensitive. And I said, since we’ve already got the camauro, let’s wear it. I haven’t worn it again since them. To avoid any superfluous interpretations.’
Frustrated by these grouches and miseries, the pope returned to more chasubles and mozzettas. But let’s not misunderstand our queenie: here he is again, taking out of the cupboard a fluorescent red mozzetta with ermine edging, abandoned by Francis since then. A consummate showgirl, the pope also added to the fashion of the day the medieval chasuble in the shape of a violin!
And of course, hats. Let’s linger for a moment on his laughable choice of headgear, whose audacity goes beyond understanding. For a non-pope to wear such bicorn hats, such outlandish headgear, would mean if not purgatory then at least an identity check by the police. The most famous was a cowboy hat (think Brokeback Mountain) but in bright red. In 2007, Esquire magazine put the pope first in its list of personalities, under the heading ‘Accessory of the year’.
Let us add an old gold watch of the German Junghans brand, an iPod Nano, a fringed leotard, and the famous cuff-links which, by his own account, ‘made his life difficult’ – and the caped portrait of Benedict XVI is painted. Even Fellini, in the ecclesiastical fashion show in his film Roma, which did not stint on ermine and pink shoes, would never had dared go quite so far. And if one dared, one might have quoted the inverted rhymes of a famous sonnet by Michelangelo: ‘Un uomo in una donna, anzi un dio’ (A man in a woman, or rather a god).
We owe the most faithful portrait of Cardinal Ratzinger to Oscar Wilde. He provided a masterly description of the future pope in the famous chapter in The Picture of Dorian Gray, when his hero is transformed into a homosexualized dandy and develops an enthusiasm for the priestly vestments of Roman Catholicism: devotion mingled with sacrifice; the cardinal virtues and the bright young men; pride ‘that is half the fascination of sin’; a passion for perfume, jewels, gold cuff-links, embroidery, scarlet clothing and German music. It’s all there. And Wilde concludes: ‘In the mystic offices to which such things were put, there was something that quickened his imagination.’ And again: ‘Is insincerity really such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.’
I imagine Joseph Ratzinger exclaiming, like the dandy Dorian Gray, after trying out all those jewels, all those perfumes, all those embroideries, and of course all those operas: ‘How exquisite life had once been!’
And then there is Georg. Apart from the habits and hats, Joseph Ratzinger’s relationship with Georg Gänswein was so much discussed, and prompted so many rumours, that we must approach it with greater caution than the polemicists did.
The German monsignore was not the cardinal’s first protégé. Before Georg, we know of at last two other special friendships that Ratzinger had with young assistants. Each time, these dizzying relationships were genuine osmoses, and their ambiguities provoked recurring rumours. All of these boys were remarkable for their angelic beauty.
The German priest Josef Clemens was Cardinal Ratzinger’s faithful assistant for a long time. With a pleasing physique (but ten years older than Georg), Clemens is said to have had a real intellectual coup de foudre for the young priest Gänswein, and subsequently recruited him as his own assistant. In line with a well-trodden scenario in Italian opera, rather less so in the German variety, Gänswein, the assistant’s assistant, soon managed to take Clemens’s place, once Clemens had been promoted and elected bishop. This ‘capo del suo capo’ – becoming his boss’s boss – would become celebrated in the annals of the Vatican.
Two first-hand witnesses within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith told me the plot of this soap opera, its seasons and episodes, and even its ‘cliff-hangers’. They mentioned a failed ‘transfiliation’ – a word I loved.
For want of room here, I’ll go straight to the season finale: the conclusion of this episode is marked, as it must be, by the defeat of Clemens, who was imprudent in his treatment of the ambitious trainee prelate. Georg triumphs! It’s amoral, I know, but that’s what’s in the script.
In the meantime, the psychological divorce turned into a dramatic quarrel: domestic scenes in public; low blows by drama queens; back-and-forth dithering by the paranoid pope, who was finally reluctant to leav
e his ‘great and beloved soul’ before following his natural inclinations; Georg’s refusal to give his new phone number to Joseph; and, finally, the remake and the public scandal, in a modern version of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, via the last episode of the series VatiLeaks.
Being averse to conflict, and even less fond of scandal (the affair was being talked about in the Italian press), Ratzinger consoled the spurned son by promoting him promoveatur ut amoveatur. And Georg became the true assistant. The Premium.
Before getting to him, I need to quote a second assistant who also quickened the imagination of Benedict XVI and enjoyed a rapid rise: this was the Maltese Alfred Xuereb. He was the pope’s second private secretary, deputy to Georg Gänswein – and one who didn’t try to take the caliph’s place. Benedict XVI maintained excellent relations with him and, when he left office, took him to Castel Gandolfo. Shortly afterwards, he was supposed to have been entrusted to Francis, and stayed with him briefly. The new pope – who had heard the rumours about his Machiavellianism – quickly got rid of him on the pretext that he needed a Hispanic assistant: in his place he would choose the Argentinian prelate Fabián Pedacchio, whom he had known for a long time. Alfred Xuereb was finally reassigned to Cardinal George Pell, to oversee the morals and finances of the Vatican Bank.
Georg is Marlboro Man. Gänswein has the athletic physique of a movie star or a fashion model. His Luciferian beauty is an extra. When people talked to me about him in the Vatican, they often mentioned the charm of actors in Visconti films. For some, Georg is Tadzio in Death in Venice (for a long time he too had long curly hair); for others, he is Helmut Berger in The Damned. We might add Tonio from Tonio Kröger, perhaps, because of his heartbreakingly blue eyes (and because Ratzinger has read Thomas Mann, who writes so cogently about repressed or thwarted inclinations).
Apart from these aesthetic and, in the end, superficial criteria, there are at least four fundamental factors underlying the perfect accord between the young monsignore and the old cardinal. First of all, Georg was 30 years younger than Ratzinger (almost the same as the age gap between Michelangelo and Tommaso Cavalieri), and had an unparalleled humility and tenderness towards the pope. He was also a German from Bavaria, born in the Black Forest, which reminded Ratzinger of his own youth. Georg was as virtuous as a Teutonic knight and human, too human, like Wagner’s Siegfried, always in search of friendships. Like the future pope, Georg also liked sacred music and played the clarinet (Benedict XVI’s favourite piece is Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet).
Finally, the fourth key to this very intimate friendship: Georg Gänswein was a severe conservative, a traditionalist and anti-gay, who liked power. Several articles, which have not been challenged, suggest that he was close, in Écône in Switzerland, to the Saint Pius X Fraternity of Mgr Lefebvre, the far-right dissident who was finally excommunicated. Others, particularly in Spain, where I interviewed a large number of people, and where Georg spent his holidays near ultra-conservative circles, thought he was a member of Opus Dei; he also taught at the University of Santa Croce in Rome, which belongs to that institution. But his allegiance to ‘The Work’ has never been confirmed or proven. This fiery man’s inclinations are nevertheless clear.
In Germany and in German-speaking Switzerland, where I carried out investigations over more than fifteen stays, visiting Georg Gänswein’s friends and enemies, his past is still the subject of rumours. Thick dossiers, which have circulated widely, are kept by several journalists I have met in Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt and Zurich, concerning his supposed links with the far-right fringe of Germanic Catholicism. Is he really the poisonous dandy that people say he is?
The fact remains that Gänswein is at the heart of what is known in Bavaria as the ‘Regensburg network’. This is a movement of the radical right in which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, his brother Georg Ratzinger (who still lives in Regensburg) and Cardinal Gerhard Müller have long shone brightly. The royalist billionaire Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, whom I interviewed in her castle in Regensburg, seems to have been the patron of this group for a long time. This counter-intuitive network also includes the German priest Wilhelm Imkamp (who is now put up by Princess ‘Gloria TNT’ in her palace), and the ‘luxury bishop’ of Limburg, Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, who received me in Rome (he was, perhaps thanks to the support of Cardinal Müller and Bishop Georg Gänswein, brought back into the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, run by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, in spite of a financial scandal: Tebartz-van Elst, known as ‘Mgr Bling Bling’ had had his bishop’s residence restored for 31 million euros, causing great controversy and later earning him severe punishment from Pope Francis).
Not far from Bavaria, a major offshoot of this ‘Regensburg network’ is located in Coire, in German-speaking Switzerland, around Bishop Vitus Huonder and his deputy, the priest Martin Grichting. According to over fifty priests, journalists and experts in Swiss Catholicism that I have spoken to in Zurich, Illnau-Effretikon, Geneva, Lausanne, St Gallen, Lucerne, Basel and, of course, Coire, the bishop of the town has surrounded himself with far-right homophobes, as well as with homophiles who are sometimes very ‘practising’. This hybrid and versatile entourage is the subject of much gossip in Switzerland.
So Georg was, for Joseph, what we might call a good match. He and Ratzinger formed a fine spiritual alliance. Gänswein’s ultra-conservatism, even in its contradictions, resembles that of the old cardinal. The two singletons, having met one another, would not part. They would live together in the Apostolic palace: the pope on the third floor; Georg on the fourth. The Italian press went completely wild for the couple, and found a nickname for Georg: ‘Bel Giorgio’.
The power relations between the two men of the Church are not, however, easy to decode. Some people have written that Georg, knowing that the pope was old and frail, had started dreaming of the same kind of role as Stanisław Dziwisz, the famous personal assistant to John Paul II, whose influence would grow as the pope declined. Gänswein’s taste for power can no longer be in doubt once we read the secret documents in VatiLeaks. Others have guessed that Benedict XVI was only second fiddle, and went along with his assistant. A typical relationship of reverse domination, they concluded, not entirely convincingly. With a certain degree of humour, as if making fun of all this gossip, Georg came up with this snowy metaphor: ‘My role is to protect His Holiness from the avalanche of letters that he receives’. Adding: ‘In a sense I’m his snow-plough.’ The title of a famous profile of Georg in Vanity Fair, which made the front page, is a quotation from him: ‘Being handsome isn’t a sin.’
Was he overdoing it? This thwarted Narcissus loved to appear by the side of the holy father. There are hundreds of photographs: Don Giorgio holding the pope’s hand; whispering in his ear; helping him to walk; holding him a bouquet of flowers; delicately putting a hat back on his head when it has blown off. Some of these snaps are even more unexpected, like the ones in which, in the style of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, Georg appears above the pope with a large bright-red cape, his jacket floating in the wind, putting it delicately over the shoulders of the great man, in the manner of a masculine guardian angel protecting him from the cold, before embracing him tenderly and fastening his habit. In this series of images, Benedict XVI is dressed entirely in white; Georg wears a black cassock, with a discreet purple silk hem and 86 magenta buttons. No private assistant to a pope has ever appeared like this – not Pasquale Macchi with Paul VI, nor Stanisław Dziwisz with John Paul II, nor Fabián Pedacchio with Francis.
One last detail. The reader may not attach too much importance to this, and will say that it happens all the time; that it’s a very widespread practice and doesn’t mean anything. But the writer thinks otherwise; nothing is too small to have a meaning and, in a moment, details sometimes give away a truth that people have tried to hide for a long time. The devil, as we know, is in the detail.
It is this: I have learned that the pope has given a new name to Georg: he calls him ‘Ciorci
o’, pronounced in a strong Italian accent. This is not a nickname used in the Curia, but an affectionate diminutive that the pope has chosen, and that he alone uses. A way, of course, of distinguishing him from his older brother, who has the same first name; a way of saying that this professional relationship is also a friendship, or what we might call a ‘loving friendship’.
What we must not under-estimate is the jealousies that the presence of this literate Antinoüs beside Cardinal Ratzinger has provoked in the holy see. All of Georg’s enemies within the Curia would, in fact, come out of the woodwork with the first ‘VatiLeaks’ affair. When one questions priests, confessors, bishops or cardinals within the Vatican, this jealousy explodes, barely veiled: Georg is alternately described as ‘a beautiful person’, ‘nice to look at’, ‘George Clooney at the Vatican’ or a prelate ‘for paparazzis’ (a vicious pun on ‘Papa Ratzi’). Some people have pointed out to me that the relationship with Ratzinger ‘made tongues wag’ inside the Vatican, and that when photographs of Georg, in hiking gear or tight shorts, appeared in the mainstream Italian press, ‘the awkwardness became unbearable’. Not to mention the collection of men’s fashion for autumn–winter 2007 launched by Donatella Versace and called ‘clergyman’: the fashion designer admitted that she was inspired by ‘Beau Georg’.
In the face of all this extravagance, clearly tolerated by the holy father, several repressed cardinals and closeted monsignori were shocked. Their resentment, their jealousy, was intense and played a part in the failure of the pontificate. Georg Gänswein was accused of casting a spell on the pope and, under cover of humility, concealing what he was genuinely up to: the German prelate was said to have had a streak of ruthless ambition. He already saw himself as a cardinal, or indeed ‘papabile’!
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 53