Voices
Balducci, a so-called “Gentleman
of His Holiness,” was exposed
via police wiretaps as running a
prostitution ring out of the Vatican, securing hot young men for
a Nigerian member of the Vatican
choir. As John L. Allen Jr. at the
National Catholic Reporter notes,
“it would be a little surprising if
[those incidents] hadn’t” induced
the Vatican to undertake an investigation of secret gays in its ranks.
Now we have Cardinal O’Brien,
who has railed against homosexuality, resigning over allegations
that he made sexual advances
on other priests, though he has
denied that the allegations are
true. The swiftness with which
the pope accepted O’Brien’s resignation, before the cardinals had
even met to elect a new pope,
reveals how much the Vatican is
deathly afraid of how the gay issue will play out. If the allegations against O’Brien are true, the
story would expose to the world
the hypocrisy and self-loathing
of powerful men who condemn
homosexuality — and blame the
ills of the world on it — while
they may be secretly gay themselves. It’s unlikely that Benedict
resigned because he was pushed
out by a powerful “gay lobby”; it’s
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SIGNORILE
HUFFINGTON
03.03.13
more probable that he’s just too
frail to deal with this mess.
That will be left to the conclave
of cardinals who, in the next few
weeks, will elect the new pope.
They’ll meet to do so in the Sistine Chapel, as they’ve done for
centuries. Of course, that room’s
ceiling frescoes were painted by
the man-loving Michelangelo Buonarroti, who was inspired to paint
the muscle-bound figures in “The
If there really were such
an influential gay cabal, you’d
better believe that Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger would not have
become pope in the first place.”
Last Judgment” by the men he
met in Renaissance-era gay bathhouses and brothels, according
to one Italian art historian. And
it is under those frescoes of male
hustlers and gay bathhouse tricks
cast as prophets that the cardinals
will decide who is going to be the
next pope and thus who will likely
purge the Vatican of its
secret homosexuals.
Michelangelo Signorile is editorat-large of HuffPost Gay Voices.