New book says Vatican houses world’s largest gay community

Sodom, by French writer and researcher Frederic Martel, describes on page 10: “The Vatican has one of the biggest gay communities in the world and I doubt that even in Castro, San Francisco’s noted gay district, there are as many!”

Martel states that there is a “majority of gays on the other side of the Tiber” and says that their double life “has been erected into a system”.

Sodom will be published in 20 countries around the world on February 21.

Martel, who has interviewed many religious representatives about their “double life”, seeks to demonstrate their influence in his book.

He describes how “homosexuality” at the highest level of the Catholic Church, open doors for gays. The presence of such an inclination within the clergy is not new.

Certainly the book of 600 pages, published by Robert Laffont globally in eight language editions, will make an impression and rile many. But the author’s investigation is only partially convincing, according to French daily Le Figaro.

Martel is an academic and journalist working for France Culture, and author of several reference books on homosexuality. He does not hide his militancy, but has not yet dared to enter the Italian ecclesial environment thanks to the priests themselves, the practicing homosexuals he studied.

The author has had to rely on accounts of defrocked priests instead and the clergy outside Italy because of the culture of secrecy.

The investigation by the French journalist is a revelation about the “best kept secret of the Vatican”. Martel speaks of 80 percent of the community while the rest of them are not necessarily sexually active.

Martel spoke exclusively to French weekly Le Point, explaining that “homosexuality extends as one approaches the holy of holies. There are more and more homosexuals when one goes up in the Catholic hierarchy. In the Cardinal College and the Vatican, the preferential process is successful: homosexuality becomes the rule, heterosexuality the exception.”

He says that “the prelates who utter the most homophobic and traditional language on the level of morals themselves turn out to be private homosexuals or homophiles.”

Paul VI , John Paul II and Benedict XVI and John Paul II regularly denounced homosexuality, but they lived with a predominantly gay entourage, until having to answer for the behavior of two prominent cardinals allegedly entangled in a case of male prostitution.

Pope Francis is portrayed as more progressive, mainly thanks to his 2013 sentence and his entry into history: “Who am I to judge?”. And yet, aware of the large proportion of homosexual priests in the Church, he was worried about a “gay trend” in a book released last August.

“Homosexuality is a very serious issue that requires proper discernment of candidates for priesthood and religious life,” he wrote.

In his 1 500 interviews, Martel met with 41 cardinals, 52 bishops and Monseigneurs and 45 apostolic nuncios (ambassadors of the Holy See) to expose the norm of homosexuality in the heart of the Vatican.

The book is the result of four years of investigation into “a quite special homosexual community” according to its author, on the first day of a summit on pedophilia initiated by the Vatican.