The gay journalist, Frederic Martel, visited Australia recently, publicising a sensational book on the Vatican, which he describes as teeming with closeted homosexuals, including several priests, bishops and cardinals.
Martel's work cannot be ignored because it is published at a time when the Church is engulfed by several sexual scandals of global magnitude. Reviewing Martel's book provides an opportunity to critically examine the narratives of accusation and defence that surround such terrifying accounts, so that onlookers can make sense and judgement of them.
Martel's views about a majority of celibates working in the Vatican being active homosexuals are backed up by evidence published on his website, sodoma.fr. The choice of this appellation is evidently not enough to set alarm bells ringing for his many reviewers, many of whom have embraced his accusations with the kind of enthusiasm that does their other, more considered, work an injustice.
While it is accepted that the sensational aspects of Martel's writing style may have elements of truth as well as assist his sales, his analysis doesn't include serious reflection on what is to be done about the 'problem', as he sees it, of such widespread priestly homosexuality, and just as pertinently, why it might exist.
Here Martel's book demonstrates its second flaw. He has no analysis or solution to offer, other than, presumably, the exposure of the 'hypocrisy' that he reveals and excoriates. And 'hypocrisy' for him is to be exposed at every juncture in the left-straight versus right-gay split that divides the Catholic Church.
Martel seeks here to side with a left-straight Church, led by Pope Francis, and condemn the right-gay conservative faction, led by Emeritus Pope Benedict, described by him as a closeted homosexual. Yet very little explanation is offered by Martel for why some popes, like Paul VI and Francis, are regarded as 'leftish' on social justice questions, but conservative (in Paul VI's case) and at best neutral (in Francis's instance) on some contemporary sexual questions.
Since it is the shame and condemnation of homosexual desire and action that has in the past drawn so many into the closet, Martel's presumed lifting of the veil of deceit is intended to generate a kind of moderating corrective, if not on the behaviour of these potentates, then on the papacy itself which, in full knowledge of their practices, he insists, has tolerated homosexual behaviour in the Vatican.
"One is left with the feeling that, far from being a champion of homosexual clergy, Martel's main interest is to 'out' gay clergy at the Vatican."
Serious questions, such as relating to compulsory celibacy as a condition for priestly ordination, and which he links with a homosexual Vatican, lie unaddressed in Martel's work. Instead, one is left with the feeling that, far from being a champion of homosexual clergy, Martel's main interest is to 'out' gay clergy at the Vatican.
In this crusade, Martel reserves his pith for his postscript or Epilogue, in which he alleges that in the highly restricted cauldron of subversion of Church teaching, which is the Vatican, priests are living out their amorous passions while at the same time 'renewing' gender and 'imagining' new kinds of family.
One is intrigued by what he means here, when he says the Vatican is an 'unexpected place of experimentation: new ways of living are constructed there; new emotional relationships are tried out; new models of the family of the future are explored; (and) preparations are made for the retirement of elderly homosexuals', all of these theories elaborated upon in the pages that follow and precede.
To elaborate, Martel identifies five main 'profiles' of the priesthood, none of them with any semblance of reference to the theologies that speak to vocation or priestly election but offered in a kind of Foucauldian manner, to enlighten us as to why such typologies might exist. Granted that Martel may not be a theologian, it is reasonable to expect that a journalist reporting so intensively on the alleged links between homosexuality and ordination to the celibate Catholic priesthood should have some broad recommendations to make.
For instance, the recent royal commission into reporting on the abuse of minors in Australia made several recommendations relating to compulsory celibacy as well as the clerical culture of the Catholic Church, evidently without compromising its judicial and secular remit. This kind of emancipatory dialogue between the sacred and the secular is by now well-established in contemporary journalism.
Instead, Martel's 'profiles' venture into the field of the fanciful, identifying typologies of the gay priesthood as the 'mad virgin', the 'infernal husband', the 'queen of hearts', the 'Don Juan' and 'La Mongolfiera' (or 'prostitute'). No social theorist that I am aware of would advance this typecasting classification without prior appeal to well-known and widely respected experts in the field. Martel is content in this regard with providing names of Vatican officials, both deceased and, if living, now retired, whom he evidences under each of these 'profiles'.
Even more worryingly, Martel categorises all celibates who abide by the rules as asexual, on questionable grounds that those who fall under this category exclude other closeted heterosexual clergy leading active sex lives. Clerical sex, then, is his topic du jour.
Meantime, he weaves in all aspects of theoretical legerdemain to validate his theories, including references to the decadent writer, Paul Verlaine, and the feminist sociologist, Judith Butler. Martel introduces this analytical framework to shore up a narrative that bears all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory of the kind that first saw the light of day in the fin-de-siecle writing of the anti-Catholic fantasist, Maria Monk.
While there are undoubtedly some closeted homosexuals in the Vatican, Martel has yet to convince that there are more there than elsewhere, as well as in the world of male-only organisations. Or that they cheat on the kind of grandiose scale that he alleges; and, most important of all, what is to be done about it.
Michael Furtado is a researcher with a background in Catholic Social Teaching. He is Catholic and gay.