Frederic Martel, Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy.

        

- I’ve just been so fucking absorbed in this book for the last week! It is simply amazing. It's a personal story by a French investigative journalist as he discovers and uncovers the secret gay culture in the Vatican and the Catholic Church generally. 

- Through countless recorded interviews he reports, word for word, what the insiders are saying. This is a political yarn as much as anything. And the enmities amongst the Cardinals, Bishops and priests of the hierarchy are vicious. ‘Now begins an episode of slander, gossip and revenge of a kind unknown since the time of Julius Caesar...’ 

- He paints wonderful portraits of some extraordinary and fascinating characters, like the conservative, reactionary, but still very powerful 'queen', American Cardinal Raymond Burke. 

- He’s put an enormous amount of leg work into this in-depth investigation, interviewing the main characters numerous times. ‘...Rodiles explained when I interviewed him four times at his home in Havana’. 

- I wouldn't call this book an easy read, yet like a well-paced crime thriller or police procedural, it's unputdownable. It's 550 pages long and full of names and places and packed with policy, theological and historical detail. 

- There are four parts, one for each recent pope: Francis, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. Each pope is subject to a blistering critique, particularly the reactionary John Paul and the manifestly incompetent Benedict (who didn't retire because of illness, by the way, but because he finally realised he just wasn't up to it. He'd lost all control). Francis is far and away the most admirable. 

- Martel offers an acute dissection of the styles and obsessions of the popes since Paul VI, and their henchmen. There is so much insider information, and it's delicious! Material is gleaned from constant dinners at excellent Roman restaurants (very gay, ironically). The high camp style of these robed prelates is relentless, but also charming in its own way. Their offices and apartments, or more accurately palaces, within the Vatican and its surrounds are described in arch detail. The Vatican is Gaytown, with the odd sprinkling of celibate heterosexuals! 

- Martel does not spare Francis when he fails. He contrasts his frequently inspiring rhetoric with his disappointing actions, and examines what insiders call his ‘Jesuit way’ - one step forward then one step back. Francis is frequently ambiguous, contradictory and lame. But he is undoubtably a progressive and a liberal, confronting constant resistance and antagonism from powerful conservatives in the hierarchy. Thankfully he's a sharp contrast to his recent predecessors. And he's not been afraid to hire and fire. He is assiduously working behind the scenes to clean out the stables. Anti-gay, anti-reform homophobics and misogynists are being shafted left, right and centre. He is also supportive of ‘liberation theology' and its new iteration ‘gay theology’ and ‘queer theology’.

- Benedict is not spared at all. Before he became pope Joseph Ratzinger, as head of the Congregation of the Faith, was the grand inquisitor. He blacklisted theological reformers repeatedly, and suspended priests or nuns who dared to distribute condoms in Africa to fight AIDS. He was a dreadful fanatic. Pope Francis had no difficulty in altering or reversing most of his diktats. After eight years as pope, Benedict's resignation was in response to his final realisation that he had comprehensively failed in his papal mission. The Church was ‘full of filth’, he confessed in his memoir. Everywhere, 'it was corrupt'. Clerical pedophilia was emerging as a huge issue and Benedict refused to do anything substantial about it.

- The chapter on contemporary seminarians is enlightening. The majority are gay and use apps such as Grindr to seek sexual liaisons. 

- ‘The Church has always been a place where homosexuals felt safe. That’s the key. For a gay, the Church is safe.’ (Martel quotes David Berger, former theologian and Vatican insider, who in a book accused Benedict XVI of being gay himself, though there remains no real evidence of this). ‘A hatred of homosexuals on the outside; homophilia and the double life on the inside. The circus went on’. Benedict's papacy was ‘the gayest pontificate in history’.  

- After four years of intensive research into the power structures and influential players in the vast hierarchy of the Church, recording the opinions and confessions of hundreds of Vatican operatives, Martel also shows, quite surprisingly in my view, real theological sophistication in his critiques, insights and conclusions. He confirms the widely held view throughout the liberal Church and within society generally that celibacy is a medieval disgrace, the denial of priesthood to women an essentially immoral, anti-human act, and the opposition to homosexuality and gay marriage a destructive, life-denying aberration.  

- The Epilogue about the author's first contact with an inspiring young priest when he was a teenager is quite beautiful. In tracking the priest down decades later he was saddened to learn that he died, alone and rejected, of AIDS.