LITTLE ROCK (AR)
Bilgrimage blog
March 22, 2019
By William Lindsey
As I keep reading Frédéric Martel’s In the Closet of the Vatican, I’d like to say more about the theme of corruption I featured in my last commentary about thiss book. I noted, pointing to several important passages in Martel’s book as documentation, that much of the corruption in the Catholic church right now is rooted in the historical matrix of the papacy of St. John Paul the Great. The corruption is rooted quite specifically in the following: while hiding homosexual secrets, the powerful Vatican courtiers surrounding John Paul chose to mount war against the queer community, combating its rights, scapegoating LGBT people — especially for the abuse crisis in the church — and targeting theologians calling for compassionate outreach to queer people.
As I also added in my previous commentary, it’s the corruption of pretend heterosexuality coupled with abominable treatment of queer people — all engineered by homosexual clerics posturing as heterosexual — that’s the very dark heart of the corruption within the Catholic institution. So much of the corruption — real corruption, as in Vatican financial shenanigans, cover-up of clerical sexual abuse, and policies throwing progressive priests in Latin America to murderous wolves — begins with this dark heart of the story.
More needs to be said about the very specific kind of corruption, combining flagrant hypocrisy on the part of homophobic men acting out in homosexual ways with financial malfeasance with gross abuse of fellow human beings who do not belong to the entitled boys’ club that is the Catholic clerical club. It’s, to my way of thinking, a bit too easy to conclude, “Oh, these are men with homosexual secrets who had no choice except to cover up abuse of minors by fellow clerics, lest they themselves be outed as homosexual.” The corruption Martel is describing runs much deeper than that. Here are some key passages documenting the specific kind of corruption with which we’re dealing, especially in the historical matrix of John Paul’s papacy — a matrix that still has enormous influence in many Catholic circles including the governing circles in the Vatican.
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