VATICAN CITY
Huffington Post
Michelangelo Signorile
The news that the UK’s most senior Catholic cleric, the anti-gay Cardinal Keith O’Brien, has resigned over allegations of unwanted sexual advances on priests, combined with last week’s reports of a secret gay cabal within the Vatican that supposedly pushed Pope Benedict to resign, is explosive. The stunning news certainly bolsters the argument that the Catholic Church is in crisis and that the pope’s resignation is reflective of that fact, but it’s important to separate the sensationalism in this rapidly developing story, not to mention the anti-gay bias, from the facts and the probabilities.
First off, the idea that an all-powerful “gay lobby” forced Pope Benedict to resign, as some of the international media reports have insinuated, is pretty ludicrous. If there really were such an influential gay cabal, you’d better believe that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would not have become pope in the first place, nor would the Vatican be such a repository of blood-curdling homophobia.
But it would not be surprising if there were some truth to the report in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that three Vatican cardinals conducted an investigation focusing on the existence of many gay men in the Vatican and produced a report on their findings. The Vatican has angrily dismissed the idea that a gay cabal led to Benedict’s resignation, but it has not outright denied the existence of that investigative report. If the report had anything to do with Benedict’s stepping down, it is probably that at 85 years old, he is not up to the task of purging the Vatican and the church of the secret gays whom the Vatican sees as the cause of its problems (in addition to dealing with the corruption, financial mismanagement and leaks inside the Vatican). But make no mistake: That would certainly be the plan, and, if true, it will be left to the next pope.
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