Swiss Guard Claims Vatican Official Made Sexual Advances to Him
By Nick Squire
A former Swiss Guard has claimed that he received sexual advances from cardinals, bishops and other clergy while serving in the elite corps, the Pope's personal bodyguard. The ex-soldier claimed that he received 20 to 25 explicit sexual advances, including on one occasion from a cardinal who invited him up to his rooms in the Vatican. The former Swiss Guard, who insisted on remaining anonymous, made the allegations to a Swiss newspaper, Schweiz am Sonntag, which published them on its front page on Sunday. The unnamed soldier served in the Swiss Guard during the papacy of John Paul II, which lasted from 1978 until 2005, and it was not clear why he had only now decided to come forward with the claims. "One night, sometime after midnight, I received a call on my mobile phone. The person on the other end said he was a cardinal and asked me to come to his room," he said. The former Guard also claimed that he had received advances from a member of the Secretariat of State, one of the Vatican's most powerful departments. The clergyman who approached him was later transferred from his post, the former soldier said. He said that he reported the unsolicited attention to his superiors but was accused of misunderstanding conversations as a result of his purportedly poor Italian. Urs Moser, a spokesman for the corps, told the Swiss paper: "Rumours of a gay network inside the Vatican are not our problem. Our men concern themselves purely with religious and military matters." There have been long-standing suspicions that many Catholic clergy in the Vatican are gay, despite the Church's strict teaching that the act of homosexual sex is a sin and that being homosexual is a "deviation". During his return flight from a week-long visit to Brazil last summer, Pope Francis was asked about the alleged existence of a "gay lobby" in the Holy See. The Argentinian Pope said that any lobby was a problem for the Curia, the secretive governing body of the Holy See, whatever its character. "I have not seen anyone at the Vatican who is registered as gay on his identity card. We acknowledge that there are (gays)," he said. He was quizzed specifically on claims that one of his trusted confidantes, a priest appointed to oversee the reform of the scandal-ridden Vatican bank, had had a series of homosexual trysts while serving as a Vatican diplomat in Uruguay and Switzerland a decade ago. The 57-year-old monsignor, who had a 15-year career as a Vatican diplomat, allegedly shocked fellow priests and nuns at the Holy See's embassy in Montevideo by having an affair with a captain in the Swiss army, whom he had met during an earlier posting to Berne. The Pope said he had ordered an investigation into the allegations but had found nothing to back them up. It is not the first time that there have been allegations of gay intrigue within the Swiss Guard, the world's smallest army, which has protected pontiffs for five centuries. The biggest scandal to hit the illustrious corps came in 1998, when Corporal Cedric Tornay, a young guardsman, shot dead the commander of the unit and the commander's wife before turning the pistol on himself. After an official investigation into the crime the Vatican concluded that he had been driven to murder by a fit of rage after being overlooked for a promotion. But there have been long-standing accusations of an official cover-up by the Catholic Church, with numerous conspiracy theories put forward for a possible motive. It has been claimed that Tornay felt spurned by his commander, Alois Estermann, after the two had a homosexual affair. The mother of Cpl Tornay has always contested the version of events presented by the Vatican and has repeatedly asked for the investigation to be reopened.
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