Harleys at the Coliseum and a “Gay Lobby” at the Vatican

It has been a busy, wacky week in Rome with Harley Davidson’s roaring through the center of the city, and the press in an uproar about a “gay lobby” at the Vatican.   As this acoustic and verbal storm has whirled around me, I’ve been happily working on a feature on street performers in Rome, filming a fabulous Michael Jackson imitator whose feet fly over the cobblestones to the tunes of “Billy Jean” as the sun sets over the eternal city. Then there was Maria Grazia, the floppy hat bubble-blower who blows gigantic bubbles in the old Roman neighborhood of Trastevere, the bubbles blowing upward on the wind and bursting above the piazza.  (I will do a separate post on them). There are 35,000 Harley Davidsons in Rome this weekend as part of the celebrations of the 110th anniversary of the founding of the American motorcycle company.  Over 1,000 of them will be blessed by the Pope tomorrow when they attend his Angelus in St. Peter’s Square.

But while the Pope is blessing bikers, he has some other things on his mind.  The news of changes at the Vatican began mid-week when reports emerged that Pope Francis had declared there is a “gay lobby” in the Vatican. Now, in my opinion this is a complete misnomer.  After speaking to friends inside the Vatican, priests outside the Vatican and experts on the Vatican, I am convinced that there is no “gay lobby” in the Vatican, however, since apparently the Pope used that term, it requires an explanation.

On June 6th Pope Francis, in a private audience, told a group from the “Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious”, known by the acronym CLAR, the following: “In the Curia (the Vatican government) there are also holy people. But there also is a stream of corruption, there is that as well, it is true…The ‘gay lobby’ is mentioned, and it is true, it is there…We need to see what we can do about it.” He then went on to say, “The reform of the Roman Curia is something that almost all Cardinals have asked for in the Congregations preceding the Conclave. I also asked for it. I cannot promote reform myself, these matters of administration…I am very disorganized, I have never been good at this. But the Cardinals of the Commission will move it forward.”

A write-up of these comments were published on the website of the CLAR and immediately were picked up by the press.  “Gay Lobby at the Vatican” was splashed all over the headlines.  The CLAR were so embarrassed they immediately published a statement saying they regretted that they had made the comments public, but they did not deny them.

The term “gay lobby” emerged in the Italian press about the time of the Vatileaks Butler scandal (See Blog Posts — The Butler Did It, and The Butler Takes the Stand).  The term was used again in articles during the period leading up to the Papal Election when there were widespread, unsourced reports that the “gay lobby” was at the center of a secret dossier that Benedict XVI asked three elderly Vatican Cardinals to prepare following the Vatileaks-Butler crisis.  Italian media reports suggested that corruption and blackmail surrounding this “gay lobby” might have even pushed Benedict to resign.  The dossier was given to Pope Francis but its details have never been released.

Everybody knows that sex and the Vatican seem to go hand in hand and nobody believes that vows of celibacy manage to keep the thousands of Vatican employees sex-free. And all one has to do is watch one episode of “The Borgias” (see my blog post “The Brilliant, Bloody Borgias“) to know that past Popes, Cardinals and Bishops have been up to some considerable hanky-panky inside Vatican walls. But as far as I can tell there is no group of gay men in the Vatican who lobby for a common political agenda (and certainly not for gay rights).  Yes, there are plenty of gay men in the Vatican and there are plenty of heterosexual men in the Vatican, and there are plenty of both who do not maintain their vows.  These individuals put themselves in a position to be black-mailed leading to corruption.

This week AP Television  spoke to a couple of Vatican experts on the topic.   The first was Austin Ivereigh, Founder of Catholic Voices, a group that promotes Catholic ideas in the media. This is how he put it: “Sexual orientation is not a bar to be a priest or to be working in the Vatican.  The problems come when they are not obeying their vows of celibacy and they have sexual relations.  That is something that obviously they shouldn’t be doing and there is obviously an effort on the part of some to cover it up.  That is what I assume is meant by the term “gay lobby.”

Marco Politi, journalist, long-time Vatican-watcher and author of several books on different popes, including: “His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of our Time” with Carl Bernstein, and “Joseph Ratzinger: Crisis of a Papacy,” was quite clear on the topic: “In the Vatican, a gay lobby doesn’t exist.  In the Vatican there are a lot of people, we can’t give a percentage, who have relationships with males or hidden relationships with women and there are single gay people who are part of cliques, they can be right wing, left wing, center…What is clear is that Pope Francis in this conversation had to admit that there is resistance to reforming the curia.”

So, what seems to be happening is that Pope Francis used the term “gay lobby” to refer to a clique or coterie of officials inside the Vatican who are corrupt.  Using his typical humility he noted that he is not a “good administrator” and is “very disorganized” and will rely on his commission of eight cardinals to help him.  That commission includes the following Cardinals: Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston; George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia; Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello, president of the Vatican city state administration, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz Ossa, the retired archbishop of Santiago, Chile; Oswald Gracias, archbishop of Mumbai, India; Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich and Freising, Germany; and Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya, Archbishop of Kinshasa, Congo.

As Politi explained to me, the Pope is using the commission to encourage more democracy or “collegiality” in the church;  decisions will not just be made from on high, but will be reached at with consensus.

Over the past several months, those of us who live in Rome and cover the Vatican have seen the Pope take the Catholic Church by storm. There is never a day when Pope Francis doesn’t say something that makes the news.  His weekly audiences are packed with people pouring out around the edge of St. Peter’s Square.  He has started the audiences a half-hour earlier so he can tour the square in his Popemobile, his zucchetto (skull-cap) frequently blowing off as he kisses every baby that is held up to him, and hugs every disabled person he sees.  He has won the hearts of common Catholics.  Now he needs to get down to the dirty work of cleaning up the curia, and he knows that.

It looks like he is going to start with the Vatican bank. According to journalist Massimo Franco, author of several books on the Vatican, including most recently, “The Crisis of the Vatican Empire,” over the next few weeks Pope Francis is likely to make dramatic changes at the Vatican bank, known as the Institute for Religious Works (IOR) — an endless source of embarrassment– over the decades it has been accused of corruption and money-laundering for the Mafia.  This morning the Vatican announced that Pope Francis has named a trusted aide  Monsignor Battista Mario Salvatore Ricca as interim prelate to oversee the Vatican bank.

In the same talk where he mentioned the “gay lobby” the Pope said, “it is necessary to shake things up…it is not news when an old man dies of cold, or that there are so many children with no education or hungry….on the other hand, the main stock exchanges go up or down three points and this is a world event.  One must shake things up!”

I think we are going to see some shake-ups at the Vatican in the coming months.

*I thank my two AP Photo colleagues Andrew Medichini and Alessandro Tarantino for allowing me to use their fantastic photo “rejects” — those left over after they’ve filed the best for AP– for my blog.