Sex, Lies and the Vatican

If one wants an evening soap opera like plot complete with lies, scheming, criminal conspiracies, illicit sex and much more, then one need look no farther than the Vatican according to a new book entitled Vatican Diaries released a little over a week ago.  Yet somehow the nasty old men that inhabit the Vatican's halls and palaces think they are fit to be the moral arbiters to over a billion Catholics even as the are the epitome of un-Christian conduct.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the new book and the snake pit that lies behind the lavish exterior of the Vatican.  Here are some excerpts:

Vatican insider John Thavis always had a hunch Pope Benedict XVI would retire. But he had no idea it would coincide with the release of his book Vatican Diaries, which was published on February 21. “I’d like to say I had planned it that way,” he told The Daily Beast in the Vatican’s press office days after the papal resignation. “But it was just a happy coincidence.”

Thavis’s book is a notebook dump of sorts gathered from 30 years working as a Catholic News Service Vaticanista—the official term used for Rome journalists who have personal cellphone numbers for cardinals and high-ranking Roman Curia prelates. While his book would have been interesting for Church watchers before Benedict’s resignation, it will surely become a veritable handbook on all things Vatican now that the world is watching who the cardinal electors choose as a new pope. 

On one papal trip, the Vatican press spokesman actually reworded a statement Benedict made on abortion and excommunication that Thavis felt crossed the line. “Editing Pope Benedict’s extemporaneous comments had been a com­mon practice from the very first day of his pontificate,” Thavis writes.  .  .  .  .  The idea of a midlevel bureaucrat fine-tuning Pope Benedict’s language may sound strange, but it reflects a deeply entrenched conviction that the actual words a pope pronounces are not definitive until the ‘official version’ is published. Usually the editing was merely annoying, but in this case it was an attempt to rewrite reality.”

Thavis wastes no words on his condemnation of the Vatican’s handling of the various sex-abuse scandals that have rocked the church in the 30 years he has been covering the Vatican beat. He dedicates several chapters to the unsavory sex-abuse cases the Catholic Church has been involved in, and manages to explain in laymen’s terms the very complicated Legions of Christ scandal by walking through a series of investigations and interviews by high-ranking church officials including the Vatican’s promoter of justice. He focuses on the lurid life of Legions founder Father Marcial Ma­ciel Degollado and paints as vivid a character profile of the disturbingly strange man as has been written to date. Father Marcial, as he is referred to, was a favorite of Benedict’s predecessor Pope John Paul II, despite a myriad of allegations of sexual improprieties and financial corruption. Benedict, as pope, finally put an end to Marcial’s reign amid his apologies to seminarians he sexually abused and his admission that he had fathered several children with different women. “Nowhere was there any hint that the order itself bore any responsibility for a cover-up; on the contrary, the Legion’s highest officials were portraying themselves as victims of Maciel’s duplicity,” Thavis writes. “And while the Legion was admitting to the founder’s extramural heterosexual affair—he was human, after all—it re­fused to touch the more serious allegations that Maciel had turned his own seminary into a pedophilia camp.”

Thavis may not have known that his book would coincide with Benedict’s sensational resignation and a historical conclave when there is still a living pope, but he certainly was prophetic in his last chapter, which is a succinct and unapologetic tribute to the former pope. He wades through the various incarnations of Benedict’s papacy, from his gaffes to his more meaningful moments, painting a human portrait of a man who shocked the world with his resignation.

The more I learn of the lies, deceit, and abuses overseen by the Vatican, the more saddened I become that I remained a Catholic as long as I did. 

A Former Insider's View of Vatican Machinations and the Papal Race

Tony Adams, a/k/a Father Tony, is a columnist, editor, playwright and ex-priest that I first met at the LGBT Blogger Summit in Washington, D.C., in December, 2008.  Among other things, he is Senior Features Correspondent with South Florida Gay News and a contributor at PRIDE magazine and The Mirror. And, while he was a Catholic priest, he was stationed at the Vatican where he had a fist hand view of many in the Church hierarchy - the good, the bad and the ugly.  In the wake of Nazi Pope Benedict XVI's announced abdication, Tony has an insightful and interesting piece in the South Florida Gay News.  Here are excerpts:

Pope Benedict XVI has announced that he will retire the papacy on February 28. In hindsight, there were recent signs hinting at this. He made his beloved secretary Georg Gänswein an archbishop, assuring the handsome fellow a post-papal future in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. He promoted the servile head of his household, American James Harvey, to cardinal. These are the kind of loose ends tied up by an aged pope who had years ago stated his willingness to voluntarily vacate the papacy should he no longer be able to fulfill the duties of that office. No one ever expected him to exercise that option, given the obvious delight he took in the ermine, velvet and watered silk that perpetually swathed him as he seemed to float through the serene routine of his seven-year papacy.
From the immaculate soles of his Pradas to the jeweled tip of his gold-threaded mitre, Pope Benedict XVI has been a paragon of gilded denial whose brow furrowed briefly when confronted with news of pedophile priests, church cover-ups, condom use in Africa, unruly nuns, plummeting Sunday church attendance and a general lack of new and renewed subscription to a church that has kept its flock in line with the threat that disobedience to the infallible moral teaching of its pope would lead to eternal fire in hell.

What can we expect of the 117 voting-age cardinals who will lock themselves into the Sistine Chapel next month and smoke the place up with the burned ballots that will elect Benedict’s successor? Will they choose a man who will stop the anti-gay crusades of recent years? Will they elect a man who will hold women in such high regard that he will relinquish obsessive control over their lady parts and grant them access to that exclusively male club of the Catholic priesthood? Will they elevate a man who will understand how wallowing in ostentatious wealth irritates not only the poor but workers struggling to provide for the basic survival of their families? Will they tap a man who loves children in an honorable way and will cherish their innocence by getting rid of abusive priests with speed and transparency?

[C]ardinals are creatures who care little for popularity until such time as unpopularity means loss of revenue, the closing down of churches and schools, and the payment of millions of dollars in settlements for the victims of priestly abuse.  As they enter the Sistine Chapel, those fiscal realities will be writ with red ink on the ballots they burn to produce white smoke.

Among the American cardinals who will take part in the conclave are men I knew in Rome in the ‘70s, including Tim Dolan, Don Wuerl, Ray Burke, Jim Harvey, Justin Rigali and Dan DiNardo.
Most of them are celibate gay men who will never admit to being gay because they have that uncanny ability to feel same-sex attraction while eschewing the gay nametag.  DiNardo and Harvey may have some skeletons in their closets. Burke is a good henchman but not a charismatic leader. Rigali is an elegant diplomat but is not considered an antidote to the priest abuse scandal.  Wuerl persecuted bad priests when other bishops were wringing their hands but he may be slightly too refined for his own good.  That leaves Dolan  .  .  .  . Cardinal Dolan has always been a rule-follower and one of his appetites is his desire to please his boss as perfectly as possible. If he finds himself answering to no higher earthly authority, we will finally see what is in his heart as he tries to discern what god really wants of him.

Although the LGBT community has decried his strenuous efforts to thwart marriage equality, I know him as someone who took the time to write me a “let’s do lunch” letter after I sent him an email welcoming him to New York. He did not have to do that. He knew my situation, and also, he counts many gay priests among his close friends. I do not know if Tim Dolan is gay or straight. He was never the kind of guy who talked sex. I do know that I would rather have a straight pope who was our ally than another closeted gay pope who is our foe.

[T]he sad fact is that most of the LGBT community has shed anti-gay Catholicism, and is critical of those of us who wish for its reform. “Why bother with it?” they ask me.  Maybe the five years I spent marrying people, baptizing their babies, holding their hands on their deathbeds and absolving their tearful guilt in the secrecy of the confessional made me a better person.  Maybe I just want to see those good Catholics get the good pope they deserve . . .

Yes, I shed Catholicism.  Remaining a Catholic would have been like staying in an abusive marriage where one was regularly beaten and subjected to psychological abuse.   That said, I would be over joyed to see Catholicism reformed and brought into the 21st century.  Will it happen?  I am not going to be holding my breath.