Secrets of the Vatican
The Vatican’s Secret Life
December 2013
Vanity Fair
Despite headlines about a powerful “gay lobby” within the Vatican, and
a new Pope promising reform, the Catholic Church’s gay cardinals,
monks, and other clergy inhabit a hidden netherworld. In Rome, the
author learns how they navigate the dangerous paradox of their lives.
• BY MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS
Naked but for the towel around his waist, a man of a certain age sat by
himself, bent slightly forward as if praying, in a corner of the sauna
at a gym in central Rome. I had not met this man before, but as I
entered the sauna, I thought I recognized him from photographs. He
looked like a priest with whom I’d corresponded after mutual friends
put us in touch, a man I had wanted to consult about gay clerics in the
Vatican Curia. My friends told me that this priest was gay, politically
savvy, and well connected to the gay Church hierarchy in Rome.
But this couldn’t be that priest. He had told me that he’d be away and
couldn’t meet. Yet as I looked at the man more closely, I saw that it
was definitely him. When we were alone, I spoke his name, telling him
mine. “I thought you were out of the country,” I said. “How lucky for
me: you’re here!” Startled, the priest talked fast. Yes, his plans had
changed, he said, but he was leaving again the next day and would
return only after I was gone.
During the previous few days, I had heard a lot about this man. I had
heard that he is a gossip, a social operator whose calendar is a blur
of drinks and dinners with cardinals and archbishops, principessas and
personal trainers. Supposedly, he loves to dish male colleagues with
campy female nicknames. But I would never have the experience
firsthand. The priest was embarrassed: to have been chanced upon at
this place; to have had his small evasions revealed. The encounter was
awkward. No, he did not wish to discuss the subject I was interested
in. No, he did not think the subject worthwhile. These things he made
clear. We left the sauna and, after further conversation, civil but
stilted, went our separate ways.
I could understand his discomfort. But in Rome these days the topic of
gay priests in the upper reaches of the Holy See is hard to avoid. In
February of this year, not long before the College of Cardinals
gathered in the Sistine Chapel for the conclave to choose the 266th
Pope, the largest Italian daily newspaper, La Repubblica, reported that
a “gay lobby”—a more or less unified cabal of homosexual power
brokers—might be operating inside the Vatican. According to the
newspaper, the possible existence of this gay lobby was among the many
secrets described in a two-volume, 300-page report bound in red and
presented to Pope Benedict XVI by three cardinals he had appointed to
investigate the affair known as “VatiLeaks.” That scandal, which raised
fresh suspicions of endemic corruption within the Curia, had broken the
previous year after Paolo Gabriele, the papal butler, made off with
some of Benedict’s private papers and leaked them to the press.
The internal VatiLeaks report, according to La Repubblica, indicated
that gay clerics in the Vatican were being blackmailed. The report was
also said to document the alleged gay lobby’s social structure and
customs. Yet details concerning gay priests’ gatherings added up to old
news: the tales had been told in articles previously published by La
Repubblica itself. Sensationally, the newspaper suggested that
Benedict’s concern about the alleged gay lobby was one reason he had
suddenly resigned the papacy.
Months later, another leak of confidential information brought the
subject of a gay lobby back into the news. Someone took notes during
what was meant to be a private meeting between Latin-American Church
leaders and the new Pope, the former cardinal Jorge Bergoglio,
Archbishop of Buenos Aires, now known as Francis. In June, those notes
were published on a progressive Catholic Web site. Francis was quoted
as saying, “The ‘gay lobby’ is mentioned, and it is true, it is there …
We need to see what we can do.”
A Closet with No Door
Gay lobby? It depends on what you mean. The term could refer to a
shadowy group like the Illuminati, whose members quietly exercise
supreme power. This is the sort of idea that lights up the tinfoil hats
of conspiracy theorists, and it doesn’t capture the slow, feudal,
inefficient workings of the Vatican. “Gay lobby” is really shorthand
for something else. At the Vatican, a significant number of gay
prelates and other gay clerics are in positions of great authority.
They may not act as a collective but are aware of one another’s
existence. And they inhabit a secretive netherworld, because
homosexuality is officially condemned. Though the number of gay priests
in general, and specifically among the Curia in Rome, is unknown, the
proportion is much higher than in the general population. Between 20
and 60 percent of all Catholic priests are gay, according to one
estimate cited by Donald B. Cozzens in his well-regarded The Changing
Face of the Priesthood. For gay clerics at the Vatican, one fundamental
condition of their power, and of their priesthood, is silence, at least
in public, about who they really are.
Clerics inhabit this silence in a variety of ways. A few keep their
sexuality entirely private and adhere to the vow of celibacy. Many
others quietly let themselves be known as gay to a limited degree, to
some colleagues, or to some laypeople, or both; sometimes they remain
celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way, perhaps the least
common but certainly the most visible, involves living a double life.
Occasionally such clerics are unmasked, usually by stories in the
Italian press. In 2010, for the better part of a month, one straight
journalist pretended to be the boyfriend of a gay man who acted as a
“honeypot” and entrapped actual gay priests in various sexual
situations. (The cardinal vicar of Rome was given the task of
investigating. The priests’ fates are unknown.)
There are at least a few gay cardinals, including one whose long-term
partner is a well-known minister in a Protestant denomination. There is
the notorious monsignor nicknamed “Jessica,” who likes to visit a
pontifical university and pass out his business card to 25-year-old
novices. (Among the monsignor’s pickup lines: “Do you want to see the
bed of John XXIII?”) There’s the supposedly straight man who has a
secret life as a gay prostitute in Rome and posts photographs online of
the innermost corridors of the Vatican. Whether he received this
privileged access from some friend or family member, or from a client,
is impossible to say; to see a known rent boy in black leather on a
private Vatican balcony does raise an eyebrow.
The Vatican holds secrets so tightly that it can make Fort Meade look
like a sloppy drunk. Yet dozens of interviews with current and former
gay priests, gay monks, veteran Vatican journalists, Italian
aristocrats, and gay men at Roman gyms, bars, nightclubs, sex clubs,
and restaurants suggest that, riveting as the more graphic stories are,
they convey a limited part of the reality of gay clerical life in Rome.
To be gay in the Vatican is no guarantee of success, mark of belonging,
or shortcut to erotic intrigue. Most basically it is a sentence of
isolation. Gays in the Vatican are creatures of a cutthroat bureaucracy
whose dogmatic worldview denies or denigrates their own existence. They
live in a closet that has no door. Among recent Popes, Benedict made
the most concerted effort to sharpen Church doctrine on homosexuality,
which he once called “a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an
intrinsic moral evil.” He tried to cull gays from clerical ranks, most
notably in 2005, when men with known “deep-seated homosexual
tendencies” were prohibited from being ordained, even if they were
celibate.
Denunciation and exposure have made gay priests figures of
fascination—though less as people than as symbols—especially to the
secular far left and the religious far right. Both sides find these
clerics to be politically useful. The left uses them to level charges
of hypocrisy. The right sees them as a stain in need of removal. They
all got a shock late last July when Francis made his first direct
public statement about gay clerics since becoming Pope.
During an impromptu press conference aboard the papal jet, en route
from Rio de Janeiro to Rome after his first overseas trip, Francis was
asked about the so-called gay lobby. His response, delivered with
casual humor and punctuated by shrugs and smiles, was as follows: “So
much has been written about the gay lobby. I still haven’t run into
anyone in the Vatican who has shown me an identity card with ‘gay’ on
it.” He pantomimed holding up such a card in his left hand and then
went on: “When you find yourself with a person like that, you have to
distinguish between the fact of a person being gay and the fact of
somebody forming a lobby. . . . If a person is gay and is searching for
the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge him?”
He spoke these words with a palpable warmth, unlike the embattled, wary
tone that other Popes have adopted. This may well have been the first
time in history that a Pope has publicly uttered the term “gay”—the
word that most men who feel romantic love for other men use to describe
themselves—instead of the pathologizing 19th-century medical term
“homosexual.” Then, in a lengthy interview with a Jesuit journal, the
Pope went further, stating that the Church’s ministry should not be
“obsessed” with a few divisive moral issues such as abortion and gay
marriage. “When God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the
existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?”
the Pope asked rhetorically. “We must always consider the person.”
Every Man for Himself
Tales of gays in the Vatican have been told for more than a thousand
years. Pope John XII, who reigned from 955 to 964, was accused of
having sex with men and boys and turning the papal palace “into a
whorehouse.” While trying to persuade a cobbler’s apprentice to have
sex with him, Pope Boniface VIII, who reigned from 1294 to 1303, was
said to have assured the boy that two men having sex was “no more a sin
than rubbing your hands together.” After Paul II, who reigned from 1464
to 1471, died of a heart attack—while in flagrante delicto with a page,
according to one rumor—he was succeeded by Sixtus IV, who kept a nephew
as his lover (and made the nephew a cardinal at age 17). Some such
stories are better substantiated than others. Even while their
reliability is questionable, they demonstrate that playing the gay card
(even if you yourself are gay) is an ancient Curial tactic. “There are
closeted gay priests who are vipers,” observes the theologian Mark D.
Jordan, the author of The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern
Catholicism. “They are really poisonous people, and they work out their
own inner demonology by getting into positions in power and exercising
it” against other gay men, women, and anyone whom they perceive to be a
threat. “Alongside that are suffering priests who seem sincere all the
way down, who are trying to be faithful to God, and also to take care
of people and change the institution. They are the ones who are always
forgotten, and read out of the story from both sides.”
The Catholic priesthood’s contemporary gay cultural memory begins in
the middle of the last century. When Paul VI assumed the throne, in
1963, by one account he took his papal name not from any predecessor
but from a former lover, a film actor. That at least was the contention
of the provocative gay French writer Roger Peyrefitte, whose 1976
allegations about Paul VI caused such a stir that Paul took to the
balcony of St. Peter’s to denounce the “horrible and slanderous”
accusations. Paul looked a laughingstock, and the Curia learned a
lesson: better to ignore such charges than to amplify them by denial.
Meanwhile, some gay clerics were outgrowing the “particular
friendships” that had long been part of monastic life and joining the
sexual revolution. By the 1970s, the center of gay life in Rome was a
cruising area called Monte Caprino, on the Capitoline Hill. At a small
party of gay monks and their friends in Rome last summer, conversation
turned to recollections of that place. “It was like its own little
city,” one monk remembered, “with hundreds of people—everyone from
seminarians to bishops—and then there were, conveniently, bushes off to
the side.” The fellow feeling at Monte Caprino was compromised by the
air of secrecy around the place. The area was a target for muggers and
thieves, who figured rightly that clerics would make ideal victims
because they had much to lose by the public act of pressing charges.
One gay former seminarian recalled a night when three men beat him up
and stole his wallet while numerous men in the crowded park stood by.
Left bloodied by the thieves, the seminarian hollered at the
bystanders, “There’s three of them and 300 of us!”
He told me this story, with its echoes of the parable of the Good
Samaritan—in which a traveler is robbed, beaten, and left by the side
of the road, and pious men do nothing to help him—to illustrate the
every-man-for-himself dynamic of Rome’s gay clerical culture. Gay
clerics often fail to help one another, he says, for the same reason
that no one tried to help him the night that he was robbed: solidarity
entails the risk of being outed.
“La Maledetta”
Self-centeredness can breed a sense of entitlement. “A certain part of
the clergy feels that no one will care what they do if they are
discreet,” says Marco Politi, a prominent Italian journalist and
longtime Vatican correspondent, and the author of several books about
the papacy and the Church. In 2000, Politi published a book-length
interview with an anonymous gay priest, entitled La Confessione,
republished in 2006 as Io, Prete Gay (I, Gay Priest). “Rumors are O.K.,
but not scandal,” Politi observes.
There has been plenty of scandal, though. In 2007, Monsignor Tommaso
Stenico met a young man in an online chat room and invited him to his
Vatican office, where their conversation—in which Stenico denied that
gay sex was a sin, touched the man’s leg, and said, “You’re so hot”—was
secretly videotaped and then broadcast on Italian television. (Stenico
tried to persuade Italian newspapers that he’d just been playing along
in order “to study how priests are ensnared” into gay sex as part of “a
diabolical plan by groups of Satanists.” He was suspended from his
Vatican position.) In 2006 a priest in the Vatican’s Secretariat of
State injured police officers and smashed into police cars during a
high-speed chase through a district in Rome known for transsexuals and
prostitutes. (The priest was acquitted on all charges after claiming
that he fled because he feared he was being kidnapped.) In a 2010
investigation of contract fixing for construction projects, Italian
police wiretaps happened to catch a papal usher and Gentleman of His
Holiness, Angelo Balducci, allegedly hiring male prostitutes, some of
whom may have been seminarians, through a Nigerian member of a Vatican
choir. (The choir member was dismissed; Balducci was convicted on
corruption charges.)
Pope Benedict was rumored to have ordered that prelates who were living
double lives be retired or removed from Rome. Marco Politi speculates
that perhaps as many as 30 were eased out. The most senior prelate to
lose his job was Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the archbishop of St. Andrews
and Edinburgh. A staunch opponent of gay marriage who had publicly
called homosexuality a “moral degradation,” O’Brien was brought down in
February by three priests and one ex-priest who accused him of
“inappropriate contact” and predatory behavior when he was their
bishop. The episodes recounted by the four men involved such consistent
patterns over more than 30 years that some of O’Brien’s colleagues
surely must have had their suspicions. When I asked one archbishop if
he had known that O’Brien was gay, however, the archbishop said he had
not. When I asked the archbishop who among the other cardinals were
O’Brien’s closest friends, he coldly answered, “I don’t think he had
any.” Every man for himself, indeed.
Even Benedict has been dogged by rumors that he is gay. Though no solid
evidence has ever emerged, it is treated as common knowledge by many in
Rome, who cite stereotypes galore, including his fussy fashion sense
(his ruby-red slippers, his “Valentino red” capes); his crusade to nail
down why “homosexual actions” are “intrinsically disordered” (many
closeted gay men, from Roy Cohn to Cardinal O’Brien, have made the most
extraordinary efforts to condemn homosexuality); and his bromance with
Archbishop Georg Gänswein, his longtime personal secretary. (Nicknamed
Bel Giorgio, or “Gorgeous George,” the rugged Gänswein skis, plays
tennis, and pilots airplanes. He inspired Donatella Versace’s winter
2007 “clergyman collection.”) Perhaps the most vicious of Benedict’s
nicknames is “La Maledetta.” The word means “cursed” in Italian, but
the pun derives from the fact that the term means the exact opposite of
Benedict’s own name in Italian, Benedetto, which means “blessed”—with a
gender change achieved in the process.
Neither Benedict nor Gänswein has publicly responded to any of this.
The chatter’s main consequence has been not to hurt them personally
(though surely it must, at least a little) but to help lock down
genuine conversation about the everyday lives of gay priests, whether
celibate or not. It is more or less impossible for gay clerics to
articulate their affections in any way that does not amount to what an
Anglo-Saxon mind might see as hypocrisy. Yet such a dualistic existence
is very much a part of Church tradition. “This is almost an aspect of
the Catholic religion itself,” Colm Tóibín has written in an essay on
gays and Catholicism, “this business of knowing and not knowing
something all at the same time, keeping an illusion separate from the
truth.” It is also typical of Italian sexuality in general, and Italian
homosexuality in particular. This is the country that tolerated the
sexual escapades and serial frauds of former prime minister Silvio
Berlusconi with scarcely a hint of protest from the hierarchy of the
Catholic Church. This is the country where countless married women
ignore their husbands’ dalliances with men.
La Bella Figura
The culture of deception operates according to signals and conventions
by which gay clerics navigate their lives. Camp is perhaps the most
powerful and pervasive of these codes, though it can be difficult to
define. Ironic, effeminate self-mockery—allowing priests to exercise
some limited rebellion against their own isolation and invisibility—is
one form of clerical camp. For fear of laughing out loud, priests
sometimes try to avoid making eye contact with one another in church
when hymns with titles like “Hail, Holy Queen” are sung. After
Bergoglio became Pope Francis, YouTube clips of a sequence from
Fellini’s Roma went viral among gay priests in Rome. It shows a
plain-looking cardinal watching a runway show of over-the-top clerical
attire—which ends when the departed Pope steals the show by appearing
in the glorious garb of a Sun God.
One gay former priest, who still lives in Rome, describes clerical camp
as “a natural way of expressing [gay identity] while celibate.”
Socially, he says, it is “a key that unlocks a further element of
trust.” There’s nothing earth-shattering about this—it’s what every
institution does—but “the Church has a lot more experience and practice
at protecting itself. As far as that goes,” he says, with a nod to Cole
Porter, “they’re the tops.”
When this former priest began his education in Rome, a professor told
him, “There shouldn’t be a subculture. We are all male here, so it’s
inappropriate to say ‘her’ or to refer to other men with feminine
pronouns.” The former priest says that “none of this instruction was
about our behavior. It was about how we should appear.” He believes
that such instruction illustrates a little-noted change in official
thinking about Catholic identity, and what should be at its center.
“The symbols of the Church should be the sacraments,” such as the
Eucharist, he argues, but over time the people who administer the
sacraments have come to displace them in prominence. In other words,
“the priests become the symbols” that are deemed most important. Which
in turn puts a premium on outward appearance and enforces conformity to
a certain official ideal. The Church, therefore, is increasingly
preoccupied with making sure its leaders are groomed from among “boys
who look holy: playing dress-up at the American College and going down
to Piazza Navona at nine P.M. to say their Breviaries.” Sacraments and
liturgy, the former priest says, are “the kernel of what makes the
Church important. This is what makes us powerful. Not the protection of
medieval institutions.”
Yet in the Church, as in Italian society, it’s often the case that
right appearance—la bella figura—is all. In every detail, parties
celebrating appointment to the Vatican and other high Church offices
can be lavish—“like a posh girl’s wedding”—with many clerics in
attendance being “gay men wearing everything handmade, perfect, queer
as it comes,” observes one prominent figure in the Roman art world. But
la bella figura matters just as much at ordinary moments. Especially
for clerics who break the vow of celibacy, it is crucial to keep up
appearances in the normal course of life.
Gay saunas are good places to meet other gay priests and monks. The
best times to find clerics at the saunas are late afternoon or evening
on Thursdays (when pontifical universities have no classes) or Sundays
(after Mass). Some gay celibate clerics use the saunas not for sex but
to experience a sense of fellowship with others like themselves. One
calls his sauna visits “something to confirm myself as I am.” (Rome has
few gay bars, and John Moss, the American owner of the largest and
oldest one, the Hangar, says that the rise of Internet cruising,
combined with the Vatican’s crackdown on gay priests, has decimated his
gay clerical clientele. “There used to be so many seminarians—such
beautiful men—who came to the bar, and we would even get hired to take
parties to them in some of the religious houses. Now there’s nobody.”)
Once you make a connection, it’s possible to use your monastery cell
for sexual assignations, as long as you don’t make much noise. “You can
sneak people in, no problem,” one gay monk says, “but try to avoid
consistent patterns of movement.” In other words, don’t invite a guy
over on the same day of the week, or at the same time of day, very
often. That said, “no one has sex” with other residents of his own
monastery, a former monk told me, “because it is like a Big Brother
house. Everyone knows everything.”
The more senior the cleric, the more likely he may be to play loose
with the rules. One leading Vatican reporter (who says that, among
journalists on the beat, the two most common topics for gossip about
Church officials are “who’s gay and who’s on the take”) describes the
logic of such behavior. “Everything is permitted because you are a
prince of the court,” he says. “If you are truly loyal and entrusted
with the highest level of responsibility, there has to be an extra
liberty attached in order to be able to pull it off.”
Vows of celibacy don’t say anything about eye candy. Some Curia
officials are said to handpick extremely handsome men for menial jobs
in order to make Vatican City more scenic. A layman I know whose job
requires frequent trips to the Vatican used to enjoy flirting with a
muscular go-go boy who danced on the bar at a gay nightclub in Rome.
One day at the Vatican, this layman was amazed to see the dancer out of
context, dressed in the uniform of a security guard. When he made to
greet the man, the guard signaled him to stay back, raising a finger to
his lips in a quiet “Shhhhh … ”
Where silence can’t strictly be kept, word games can compartmentalize
the truth. In the Vatican office of a monsignor who I’d been told might
have some firsthand knowledge concerning recent gay scandals in the
Church, I asked, point-blank, “Are you gay?,” and he serenely answered,
“No.” I replied, “I wonder, if a priest is homosexual—but does not
participate in mainstream secular gay culture—could he say that he is
not ‘gay’ and still think he’s telling the truth?” “What an interesting
question,” the monsignor said, immediately standing up and gesturing me
to the door. “I’m afraid I don’t have any more time to talk.” He
insisted on personally walking me out of the building, and as we passed
along a grand hallway I remarked upon its beauty. “I don’t see it,” he
replied archly. “To me, other hallways are ‘beautiful.’ ” Was this an
innocent remark, or a coded answer to my question? Sometimes talking to
gay priests feels like reading stories by Borges.
For those who want it, organized networks can provide some grounding. A
few small groups of gay Catholics in Rome operate publicly, but because
anyone can come to their meetings, it can be risky for priests,
especially Vatican officials, to be part of them. One private group of
about 50 gay priests and laymen meets once a year, for a kind of
retreat. A Vatican priest I met with—he actually invited me to stop by
his office near St. Peter’s because he said he wanted “to show that
this is no secret,” though it’s secret enough that he can’t be named—is
involved with this group, as part of an unofficial ministry in addition
to his official duties. He says that his superiors, including at least
one very prominent Vatican official, have long known he is gay, and
have even promoted him since learning that fact.
Yet gays in the Vatican, like spies in intelligence services, inhabit
boxes within boxes. The priest who helps with the group of 50 raised
his eyebrows when I repeated to him something an archbishop had told
me. “I know a priest who ministers to people in the Curia in that
situation,” the archbishop said, though “he is not assigned officially.”
“That is not me,” the priest said, amazed. “I wonder who it could be.”
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
As you would expect, the priest I met in the sauna looks rather
different with vestments on. When I walked into church a few days
later, for Sunday-morning Mass, he was the celebrant—even though, when
we met, he had said he was about to leave town. Maybe his plans had
changed again.
He was preaching a homily on the Gospel reading, the parable of the
Good Samaritan. The priest told the congregation that this story was a
challenge. A challenge to accept “risk in favor of compassion.” A
challenge to “look more deeply at ‘Who is my neighbor?’ ” A challenge
to be generous, unlike “the religious, spiritual person who did nothing
to help.” Listening to these words, I could not help but wonder: where,
in that parable, does this priest see himself?
From the day after the conclave ended—when Francis went back to his
hotel and personally checked out, paid his bill, and picked up his
suitcase—the new Pope has surprised people with his actions. During
Holy Week, he went to a juvenile prison and washed the feet of inmates,
including two girls and two Muslims. One morning, he reportedly made a
sandwich for the Swiss Guard who had stood sentinel outside his room
all night. He invited 200 homeless people for dinner in the Vatican
gardens.
Francis has also said some things that, from a Pope’s mouth, seem
extraordinary simply because they are so down to earth—like his choice
to end one homily with the untraditional exhortation “Have a good
lunch!” Yet the first time this Pope’s words, rather than his actions,
made significant headlines was in connection with his comments about
the “gay lobby.”
As noted, the phrase first gained currency before Francis came on the
scene, but it returned to public discussion just as he got serious
about what may be a hallmark of his papacy: a cleanup of Vatican
corruption. The scope of his concern about abuse of power seems total.
He is reforming everything from the Vatican bank’s bookkeeping to the
contents of the papal wardrobe.
For a long time, gay priests have made for convenient scapegoats and
handy pawns in Church power games. All of them, whether actively or
passively, have helped create these roles for themselves, and they can
hardly imagine a different reality—unless they were to emerge from the
closet and get thrown out of the priesthood. One monk told me, “A lot
of us will not condemn. But not speak out. We’re in a system that
controls us. The longer you’re in it, the more it controls, the more
you assume the clerical position.” They keep hope small, or snuff it
entirely. They believe that nothing and no one could make the Church
safe for them. Might this change? “Not in my lifetime,” they all say.
Yet, before he became Francis, Jorge Bergoglio was a Jesuit. As
National Catholic Reporter’s John Allen, the dean of the American
Vatican-watchers, told me, “There’s a kind of Catholic version of
‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ that the Jesuits would be particularly noted
for. There are guys in the Jesuit world that everybody knows are gay,
but they don’t go around making a big deal out of it.” While Pope
Benedict’s Vatican attempted to make sure gays knew they were unwelcome
in the priesthood, the Jesuits developed a reputation for tolerating
and even protecting their gay brethren.
In the collegial Jesuit spirit, Francis appointed eight cardinals to
serve as his core advisers on significant issues, and in the coming
years, this group may have as much influence on the situation of gays
in the priesthood as Francis himself. When I asked an archbishop how he
thinks the cardinals’ conversation about their gay brothers will go, he
answered with reference not to the Holy Spirit but to the god of
Fortune. “Right now the surest thing I can say is that there’s change
in the air,” he said. “If you could say what will happen, you could say
who’d win the lottery.”
The next time I heard mention of a lottery was a few days later, at
dinner with a gay monk who told me that he had recently fallen in love
for the first time, with a man. “Am I a clerical hypocrite? I guess in
one way I am,” he said, in the middle of a long and emotional
narrative, before bringing the conversation to bedrock reality. “But
I’m over 60. I have nothing financially. I can’t leave.” And then he
said, “If I won the Powerball lotto, I would leave.”
Note: An alteration was made in the passage about Marco Politi’s La
Confessione, republished as Io, Prete Gay, in order to give a more
accurate description of the book.