Secrecy

Well, he’s getting old, getting tired, he’s not up to the job. So he does what any other guy would do. After all, he doesn’t need the dough, he’s comfortably well off, he’ll have everything he needs. And really, who needs the headache? The politicking and rivalry for power, the machinations in the office, the rat race. Guys call it quits all the time—why shouldn’t he?

Well, Pope Benedict is the first guy in over 700 years to do it. And don’t think, Gentle and Trusting Reader, that Ratzinger had this papacy thrust on him. His elbows were very sharp indeed, so often and so well had he used them to knock the others out of his way. He turned the adage into a lie: the man who enters the conclave as a pope leaves as a cardinal.

One of the things about Latin culture is our love of conspiracy theory. There are Cubans who swear—Fidel died years ago. But not before finding a guy who looked almost identical to him, and happened to be in superb health. Or maybe the real powers behind the regime have consistently identified ever so slightly younger “Fidels” and they keep replacing the fading “Fidel” as needed.

Well, could any culture be more Latin than the Vatican, which actually is the only town where the language is still spoken? (By the way, the resignation was announced in a routine Monday morning meeting, and yes, it was in Latin. Fortunately, one of the Italian press had boned up on the language, and managed to scoop a lot of other more prestigious media….)

So the idea that a pope not particularly known for modernism, innovation, hey-let’s-throw-tradition-to-the-winds was doing something as radical as resigning the position he had spent decades scheming for left a lot of Vatican-watchers scratching their heads. He did WHAT!!!!

Right, so it took a couple of weeks for us all to close our mouths, wobble to our feet, and look dizzily around us, but now the news is in. We figured it out.

Or not.

We’ll know or we won’t know if the conspiracy theory is true, but here’s how it runs, courtesy of the Guardian, which reports that a Rome Newspaper, La Repubblica, is alleging that Benedict is being forced to step down because of twin causes: stealing and gay sex.

You may remember the pope’s butler, who was tried and convicted (and then pardoned by the pope) of stealing important documents and leaking them. The documents, according to the Guardian, painted the Vatican “as a seething hotbed of intrigue and infighting.”

Well, we all knew that, of course. But the pope put together a little threesome to investigate the whole mess, and what turned up—remember, this is theory—was ugly indeed.

Here’s the Guardian again, describing the report:

The newspaper said the cardinals described a number of factions, including one whose members were "united by sexual orientation".

In an apparent quotation from the report, La Repubblica said some Vatican officials had been subject to "external influence" from laymen with whom they had links of a "worldly nature". The paper said this was a clear reference to blackmail.

It quoted a source "very close to those who wrote [the cardinal's report]" as saying: "Everything revolves around the non-observance of the sixth and seventh commandments."

The seventh enjoins against theft. The sixth forbids adultery, but is linked in Catholic doctrine to the proscribing of homosexual acts.

Like so many purportedly happy families, there are a few little secrets. But the world is a different place now, and things that were known but not talked about are now not just talked about but filmed, recorded, spread via the media and the social media.

In 2007, a senior official of the Vatican was filmed in a sting operation making sexual advances to a young man. In 2010, a chorister was found to be arranging for male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting. A few months later, priests were filmed in gay bars, as well as filmed having sex in gay clubs.

“Well, darling, you could have knocked me over with a steel girder,” I said to Pablo. (No, it’s not mine, but Dorothy Parker’s…)

“Well, darling, you could have knocked me over with a feather from my boa,” returned Pablo, more originally.

We’re being campy—something I do maybe once a decade. But with Pablo, it’s fun, like having a martini with lunch. Any more than once a decade is dangerous.

And we’re doing it in a drugstore, as Pablo waits for some Motrin to ease the strained shoulder muscles a week of family warfare has afflicted him with. People pass by, observe us, think nothing of it. Of course we’re gay, everybody knows we’re gay… so?

So the great thing about being out and open is that you become invisible. Ordinary, in fact. Boring, which is a good thing to be, at times. None of my family is going to be crushed by any hint that Uncle / Brother Marc is gay.

Secrecy, however, breeds a whole set of problems, of which deception and hypocrisy head the list.

Pablo has a hole in his heart this week, after dealing with serious craziness in the family. He came limping home, bleeding but alive.

“You know, you’ll forgive them because it’ll make you feel better—you’re not gonna want to carry all that hate and hurt around. And you’ll realize, you’re living in a much better world than they are.”

That’s what I told Pablo.

Ratzinger has spent an entire life seeing and acquiescing to evil, going along with it, condoning it, decrying it publicly while practicing it privately. Now, he has been undone by it.