Image: the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio as it appears on Google Street View. This is the building where the offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are housed.
Last week, we received a text sent to us from reliable Italian sources. It offers new details on a recent scandal which has made international headlines. In June, the story broke of a Vatican police raid which interrupted a drug-fueled homosexual orgy in an apartment within Vatican City. The setting for this sordid tale was not just any Vatican apartment, but one located in the same building in which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has its offices. As Vatican journalist Edward Pentin noted in his 8 July report, “many would find such behavior taking place in the Holy Office not only unconscionable but also highly sacrilegious.”
The occupant of the apartment was Monsignor Luigi Capozzi, the secretary of Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts. It has been reported that Coccopalmerio had advocated for Capozzi to be made a bishop.
As for the apartment that served as the scene of the crime, Pentin describes it as follows:
The [Il Fatto Quotidiano] report further claims that the area of the building was reserved not just for monsignors but senior curial officials, suggesting that the secretary had influential friends in high places to secure such a prestigious apartment.
Pentin also quotes a member of the Roman Curia who further commented on this recent incident:
In the meantime, a reliable senior member of the curia has told the Register that he has heard from “multiple sources” that the story is true, including from another senior curial figure.
He said the extent of homosexual practice in the Vatican has “never been worse,” despite efforts begun by Benedict XVI to root out sexual deviancy from the curia after the Vatileaks scandal of 2012.
After receiving the report below, which contains new information about the Capozzi case, we reached out last week to both Greg Burke, Director of the Holy See Press office, and Don Slawek, the secretary of Cardinal Müller, requesting verification of the facts as reported. As of this writing, neither party has responded to our inquiries. It is perhaps noteworthy that in Pentin’s own 8 July report on this story, he offered a curious description of the silence with which he was greeted when speaking to Mr. Burke on this matter:
Holy See spokesman Greg Burke made it clear he would not confirm the orgy allegations, and did not comment when asked if he could not confirm all, or just parts, of the account reported in Il Fatto Quotidiano. Asked later if the Vatican would comment when the story had received global attention, Burke continued to remain silent.
It seems that the details of this story are something that the Vatican would prefer neither to confirm nor deny.
Let us now consider these additional facts, as they come to us from Italy. We may thereby consider how the pope deals with at least some of his cardinals. The following text is presented as we received it from our sources. It has been translated into English and edited for clarity:
Curial Cancer
While Cardinal Joachim Meisner – the old friend of John Paul II and Benedict XVI – until his sudden death was still waiting, though in vain, for an answer from their successor [Francis] to his request to be received personally in a clarifying audience with the pope, Pope Francis, instead, chose something else. He called personally over the telephone once more, some two weeks (or so) ago, Eugenio Scalfari, and he asked him about his well-being, adding some solicitous counsel for that elderly editor of La Repubblica. That is to say, that “two liters of water and well-salted food” would do him good in this summer heat of Rome. Then he invited him again to visit for a conversation on that same day, at 4 p.m., in the guest house Santa Marta, which is to the left side of, and directly behind, St. Peter’s Dome.
It was the fourth [sic] lengthy interview given by the pope from Buenos Aires to this 93-year-old atheist and prominent Italian Freemason, with Scalfari himself – again once more – not making use of his own recorder, but, rather, presenting the interview afterwards only “from memory.” Old School, that is.
At the end, Francis touched the old man to tears when he accompanied him to the car, opened for him his door, helped him to seat himself, and then stood and waved after him until the car had left his sight.
Their conversation itself, however, was less exciting, if we are to rely on the notes of Scalfari. The discussion proceeded from the G-20 Summit, to the Italian journalist’s own Jesuit education, over to [the somewhat anti-Jesuit] Blaise Pascal whose Beatification and Canonization would especially delight Scalfari.
Some of the greater controversial topics were for some reason left out, and also such papal provocations such the ones stemming from his 2014 Christmas address to the Curia where he attested in the presence of his closest collaborators to their having “spiritual Alzheimer’s”; and also denounced the cliques he then detected within the Curia as a “cancer.”
As much as it was disconcerting, this papal Christmas address at the time pleased many, especially those from outside of the Catholic Church; but it also slightly distorted the view that, behind this overpowering pope, there are now forming – as naturally as the swirl and wake behind a wide ship – distinct cliques with their own special, even disparate, properties. Wherever there is real power (not just formal power), there also accumulate the sycophants: the bootlickers, brownnosers, and wannabe minions – everywhere and by themselves, at all times. No wonder that it is not now different with a man like Francis who has made such extensive use of the personal power of the popes as none of his predecessors has done for a long time.
There is talk in Rome, now burning with the heat of summer these days, about one such a case: a case which is also especially delicate:
Because in that very same apartment in the venerable Palazzo del Sant’Ufficio [a part of the former Holy Office] – where gendarmes of the Vatican, some weeks ago, and in the middle of the night, raided a homoerotic orgy and thereby also confiscated large amounts of cocaine – life could have been much more leisurely and more pious, if things had just continued to take their even half-way normal and reasonable ways in the Vatican. But such “normalcy” is not any more so.
That is to say, this chosen and now-besmirched apartment had stood empty for quite some time, and it had first seemed to be an ideal place for one of Cardinal Gerhard Müller’s own special assistants, who was, at that time, looking for an apartment for himself, and, if possible, also near the working place of his own chief. The apartment thus seemed to be ideal for him. The matter seemed already nearly perfectly settled, when then, suddenly, Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio – with his own close connections to Pope Francis – claimed an urgent need for it, instead, as a useful dwelling for his own dicastery secretary – and in exactly that very same, then empty, apartment.
A personal intervention by Pope Francis himself finally decided that matter, and very quickly, so that this beautiful dwelling then did not go to the assistant of Cardinal Müller, but fell, rather, into the hands of that curial secretary who afterwards turned it, together with his own friends – and, as it seems, also with the addition of some “rented boys” – into a nest for homosexual escapades and drug experiments.
As the French say, and often ironically so: “Tant pis!” [“So much for that!”]
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CODA:
We are left to wonder how Cardinal Müller — who has objected so strongly to the Church’s own failure to follow Catholic Social Teaching when dealing with employees of the CDF — responded to this papal initiative and “style“.
