ROME (ITALY)
Crux
February 16, 2019
By Christopher White
A new book, whose release is timed to coincide with the start of Pope Francis’s major summit on sex abuse on February 21, contains sweeping, although unverified, claims that 80 percent of the Vatican clergy are gay.
In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy by French journalist Frédéric Martel will be released in 8 languages in 20 countries and is the product of 4 years of research and interviews with over 1,500 individuals in 30 countries, including 41 cardinals, 52 bishops, and 45 apostolic nuncios.
Ahead of its release, Crux reviewed portions of the work, which, among its most scandalous claims, alleges Colombian Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, Pope John Paul II’s point man on marriage and family, had a “double life” with male prostitutes and affairs, alleges the two deceased “dubia” cardinals were gay, and that “this best kept secret of the Vatican is no secret to Pope Francis,” and it is the motivation for the pontiff regularly speaking out on hypocrisy.
While Martel, who is openly gay, fails to document what percentage of Vatican clergy are actively gay, and at times makes the distinction between those whom he believes are in-touch with their homosexuality but do not act on their orientation and those who do so, he maintains that “the world I am discovering, with its 50 shades of gay, is beyond comprehension,” and ultimately defines many of the power struggles inside the Church.
Martel begins the nearly 600-page book with the expression “he’s of the parish,” a phrase he claims is used frequently inside the Vatican to identify members of the clergy who are known to be homosexual.
As the text unfolds, Martel establishes what he terms as fourteen “rules of the closet,” which are broad principles for understanding both the operations and tensions within the Vatican over this issue.
Perhaps the most salient reason for the timing of the book’s release is the rule that “behind the majority of cases of sexual abuse, there are priests and bishops who have protected the aggressors because of their own homosexuality and out of fear that it might be revealed in the event of a scandal.”
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