ROME (ITALY)
Daily Beast
February 20, 2019
By Barbie Latza Nadeau
Fréderic Martel, a gay French author whose book In The Closet of the Vatican will be published Thursday to coincide with the Vatican’s crisis summit on clerical sex abuse, drew immediate criticism from victims of clerical sex abuse when he suggested a “complex link” between gay priests and the abuse issue.
Sexual-abuse survivor Peter Saunders, who was expelled from the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors in 2017 for criticizing the church’s lack of resolve, said that many of the victims he has worked with over the years were female, which he says proves his point. “There is no link between people who are gay and people who abuse children.”
Saunders, who is part of the victim-survivor group Ending Clergy Abuse, added, “Once you are inside the church and you are gay, you are bound to be silent and then when you see someone abusing, you are silenced from reporting it.”
Martel told reporters at Rome’s foreign press association that his book was informed by 27 gay priests who live or work inside Vatican City. His conclusion, based on extensive interviews with them, is that the vast majority of the College of Cardinals—the group of esteemed prelates who vote in conclaves—are gay. “They were hit on, flirted with, and slept with a lot of cardinals in the College of Cardinals,” Martel says. “One gay priest alone told me he had slept with six different cardinals.”
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