Eighty percent of the priests in the Vatican are gay, though not all of them are sexually active. That allows journalist Frédéric Martel in his new book Sodom: the secret of the Vatican that from tomorrow in the bookstore. The work is the result of four years of research and 1,500 interviews with insiders. “A mind-boggling description of corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the Vatican,” says publisher Bloomsbury.
Author Frédéric Martel, a former adviser to the French government in the 1990s, he worked for four years on the book and spoke to this other with 41 cardinals, 52 bishops and monseigneurs, 45, papal ambassadors and diplomats, eleven members of the Pontifical Swiss Guard and more than 200 priests and seminarieleden. He travelled to 30 countries and gained the support of 80 researchers, translators, fixers and local journalists, as well as a team of fifteen lawyers.
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Martel, homosexual and non-religious, suggested during the interviews that some of the priests their homosexuality to accept it. Some of them even have a relationship, but others go loose sexual contacts with male prostitutes. Some clerics deny, however, their orientation to accept. The author is particularly critical for high-ranking figures in the Catholic Church that homosexuality is openly very strict judge, but himself secretly gay. The more a cardinal or bishop, homosexuality is disapproved, the greater the chance that he himself is a homosexual, says Martel.
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According to Martel, is the high percentage of homosexuals in the clericus due to the fact that catholic gay men, certainly until the 1970s, when the homosexual orientation is becoming more accepted – few options. “So these pariahs were initiates, and made their weakness a strength”, he writes. That would also explain why less and less men choose the priesthood: homosexual men having their sexual orientation no more to hide and can even marry.
Follow Rik Torfs, professor of canon law at the KU Leuven, is the explanation for the large number of homosexuals in the church is twofold: “In many countries the church is no longer at the centre of the debate and this creates a market niche,” he says. “In addition, his priests are often in rituals concerned with kazuifels and ritual clothing and pulls that may be most of all homosexuals.”
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