Some years ago a well-placed German Catholic priest sent me a long letter denouncing a network of gay clergy supposedly centred around Pope Benedict XVI’s private secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein. In official Catholic teaching it is not a sin to be gay, although the inclination is “an objective moral disorder”; but it is sinful to act on this inclination. How sinful depends on your confessor. The result is that gay clergy are officially innocent until guilty but in gossip guilty until proven innocent – which of course they never quite can be. Most of the men cited were identified only by their initials, and the sender himself hoped to remain anonymous. But with patience and the help of friends, I worked out who all the initials belonged to and tracked the author to his cathedral. He denied everything and expressed surprise that a reputable newspaper should be interested in such gossip. I will not easily forget his smirk as he said this.
It was a glimpse of the poisonous world that Frédéric Martel, himself gay, has spent five years researching for this book. In this place of make-believe, guilt and constant innuendo the prelates live in a tension between the dreadful fear of being outed and the loneliness of not being recognised for who and what they are. So they out each other instead, compulsively. Martel’s rule of thumb is that the most publicly homophobic prelates are those most likely to be homosexually inclined themselves; the only ones who feel they can afford to be sympathetic to gay people are celibate straight people, who do exist in the Vatican. Martel quotes the estimate of the pope’s former chief Latinist that up to 80% of the Vatican staff could be gay even if obviously most of them are buttoned up. The real figure is unknowable but 80% is not entirely incredible.
One of the most impressive, and saddening, parts of Martel’s research is his exploration of the world of migrant sex workers in Rome. Elsewhere in Europe there are fewer gay sex workers on the streets, he says, but in Rome they still thrive, in part because of the concentration of priests, who seek out migrants for the anonymity their encounters offer. The sex workers tell him that their priestly clientele divide into two classes: the lordly ones, who treat them like dirt and pay very badly, and the younger ones, tortured by tenderness, who fall in love with them and are carefully cultivated for their money.
That this is all predicated on lies and denial is in part because the Vatican is a gerontocracy, still run by men who grew up when the priesthood was almost the only career open to a homosexual youth in Europe or the US and priestly celibacy offered a sanctified escape from what would otherwise have been a crippling shame. But the price of this compromise was paid in uncountable twisted lives.
A more subtle and less scandalous theme in Martel’s book is the way in which gay men who grew up before the sexual revolution understood their own nature. If the only way to be good and gay was to remain entirely celibate, then the only possible approach to sex was to sublimate it. This intellectualisation carried over, disastrously, into the celibate clergy’s instructions to the married laity on birth control.
Although he distinguishes sharply between homosexuality and paedophilia, Martel believes that life in the closet predisposes priests to cover up for each other. All institutions operate on loyalty and fear of scandal, but beyond those factors the Catholic church is full of men who feel neuralgic, he claims, about guilty secrets. Such men need not consciously conspire against the public; they just have an instinctive knowledge that the public need never know.
The most obvious complaint against Martel is that he can’t prove much of what he alleges. He claims to have recordings of most of his interviews: one certainly wants to hear the moment when a prominent conservative cardinal’s assistant refers to him as “elle”. But such recordings couldn’t for obvious reasons be published. Many of his most vivid informants are veiled in anonymity: one cardinal is referred to by the nickname of a famous prostitute, and so on. Perhaps this is inevitable. The gay and honest Dominican father James Allison once said that the Vatican is “a honeycomb of closets” where everyone’s secrets are known, but only to a few. Nonetheless, the flaw in this book that will disappoint most readers is that it has no index. You’ll simply have to read it all the way through.
• In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy by Frédéric Martel, translated by Shaun Whiteside, is published by Bloomsbury (RRP £25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
