Sex parties drugs and gay escorts at the popes residence

Between the Vatican and the papal castle on the River Tiber in Rome runs a passageway built into a high wall that once allowed popes to flee secretly from attacking armies. Then there are the priests cruising for rent boys at the Roma Termini station who refuse to wear condoms, and the story of the prelate who once insisted on having noisy sex with his boyfriend at the Vatican residence where Pope Francis now lives.

But he is not interested in naming names. What I am interested in is the system, the hypocrisy they are all a victim of. Martel has a track record of raising hackles. A well-known writer and broadcaster in France, he has previously challenged the role the French government takes in promoting national culture and angered some in the gay community by alleging it initially ignored the Aids epidemic.

It is not all bottled up — reports do trickle out from time to time, starting with the amazing account of chemsex parties held in a Vatican apartment by one priest who allegedly supplied cocaine and cannabis vodka to guests and even installed red lights before the Vatican police broke up the fun last year. The priest reportedly thought he had it all figured since his apartment was in a building on the perimeter of Vatican territory, with one entrance giving onto a Rome street, meaning guests could get in without being seen by the pontifical Swiss Guards.

Since the flat was in the Vatican state, Italian police could not touch it. The closet is the place of the most incredible cruelty. And the Vatican is one huge closet.

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While experimenting with his computer inside the Vatican, Martel discovered a nanny state was at work, pushing priests to stay on the straight and narrow. He tried to access erotic sites, only to find they were blocked by a Vatican message advising him to call an internal number. Afraid of having their phones tapped, he says, priests used secure apps such as Signal or Telegram, or purchased anonymous second phones to get on to the gay dating app Grindr.

Discretion is not always the rule, Martel claims, recounting how a Swiss Guard told him he had to defend himself from the advances of prelates. All they want to do is protect their own secret lives. But in the upside-down world of the Vatican, the reaction by homosexuals to the new approach was fear rather than relief, says Martel.

You want the structure to be stable and protective, and then you can navigate freely within it. Yet Francis, by wanting to reform it, made the structure unstable for closeted homosexual priests. Things should have shifted after the sexual revolution in the Sixties.

After all, young men afraid of their own homosexuality felt less of a need to lock themselves up in a seminary as the world outside became more tolerant of gays. But gay men were still signing up, he says. Quizzing seminarians for the book he came up with a figure of 60 to 70 per cent homosexuality among their ranks today, including one who said he was trying to stay pious by not having sex with his Grindr contacts until the third date.

If anyone is to blame for gay sex in the Church, they argue, it is him. Homosexuals, they argue, are naturally predisposed to abusing minors, so if you tolerate gays, you are encouraging abuse. Martel dismisses the link, but does see an indirect connection. Unlikely, since he contends that the more conservative and homophobic Catholics are, the more likely it is they are themselves secretly homosexual.

He raises an eyebrow. But at the same time, he was bullying seminarians into having sex with him, according to a former assistant quoted by Martel.