The majority of Vatican priests are gay, claims an explosive new book by openly gay French journalist and author Frédéric Martel. He’s written other books about LGBTQ rights, and interviewed over 1,500 people during four years for his new book, In the Closet of the Vatican.
The Catholic news outlet The Tablet reported that his sources include 41 cardinals, 52 bishops and monsignors, 45 papal ambassadors or diplomatic officials, 11 Swiss guards and more than 200 priests and seminarians, who say as many as 80 percent of Vatican priests are gay, but not all are sexually active.
Martel has denounced the Vatican’s stance on homosexuality in 2014, an interview with HuffPo Italy while promoting his book Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World.
“The [Vatican’s] refusal to acknowledge gay rights is based on hypocrisy: many people within the Vatican are gay—a phenomenon that also derives from the imposition of celibacy—so as a reaction they show an excessing anti-gay behaviour. In short, the more you are gay in private, the more you will be homophobic in public. This is the Vatican’s secret.”
The new book is described as
“a startling account of corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the Vatican.”
One of the book’s most explosive claims is that the late Colombian Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, used to hire male escorts. He was a former President of the Pontifical Council for the Family and a staunch defender of the Catholic teachings on homosexuality and contraception.
In the Closet of the Vatican is set to be published in 20 countries and eight languages on February 21, the very day that more than 100 bishops from across the world gather in Vatican City to hold a four-day summit on sexual abuse in the church.
The timing of book‘s publication has raised concerns that it may be used to blame sexual abuse on homosexuality. The book reportedly never makes this claim, but several members of the clergy, like German cardinal Walter Brandmuller, have.
The book calls out the culture of secrecy as creating a climate that makes it difficult to denounce sex abuse by the clergy. It says that it
“starts in junior seminaries and continues right up to the Vatican itself.”
(Photo, YouTube; via Pink News)
