VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
New Humanist [London UK]
December 15, 2024
By Gabriele Di Donfrancesco
As the Church pushes for harsher drug laws in Italy, a series of cases suggest that the priesthood is hiding a problem of its own
“If you knew the right people, you would know it’s very common,” wrote a man on Grindr, the LGBTQ dating app. He was one of many users of the app who claimed to have witnessed, or participated in, drug-fuelled parties within the Catholic Church. Not all felt able to meet in person, but digging further I found men willing to disclose their identities and share their stories in full.
What initially sparked my curiosity was the news of a priest testing positive for cocaine after crashing his car on the highway in central Italy in March 2024, while driving home from dinner. Police withdrew his driver’s licence, but did not press charges. It was not the first such case for the priest, nor for the Catholic Church. Cases involving Catholic priests using or dealing drugs have hit the headlines worldwide over time. In 2015, a priest was sentenced to five years for operating a meth-dealing ring in Connecticut. In 2016, in Northern Ireland, Friar Stephen Crossan was caught on camera snorting cocaine in a room filled with Nazi memorabilia. In February 2024, in Spain, a priest was arrested on suspicion of running a Viagra trafficking operation, and has been temporarily suspended by the Church.
But the biggest case in recent years took place in 2017, when the Vatican gendarmerie – in agreement with the Italian police – raided a drug-fuelled orgy involving high-level members of the clergy inside a Vatican palazzo. Luigi Capozzi, a priest and secretary to one of Pope Francis’s key advisers, was arrested and later suspended by the Vatican. Instead of being sent to jail, however, Capozzi was packed off to a Vatican-run “spiritual retreat”.
The Vatican, as a city state, has its own police and legislature. Italian law forms part of the Vatican legal system, but Italian police do not have jurisdiction on Vatican soil. The most important form of the law is the canon law of the Catholic Church, meaning the lines are blurred between acts considered a “crime” and those that are deemed a “sin” according to Catholic faith. There are only three jail cells in the Vatican. Misbehaving clergy are often sent to retreats, rather than into the Italian prison system. Meanwhile, these retreats, and the Vatican court system, are shrouded in mystery.
After the 2017 palazzo trial, the scandal was buried in silence. But such parties are rumoured to be commonplace in Rome and the newspapers carry a constant trickle of smaller stories involving drug-using clergy that rarely garner much attention. While Pope Francis has often repeated his opposition “to every type of drug use”, he has rarely publicly addressed the drug problem taking place within his own Church.
Some people are not troubled by this evidence of drug-taking. “Being clergy is a job, it’s not your private life,” said Leonardo (not his real name), who told me about attending drug-fuelled parties with clergy in Rome in the 1990s. “I believe that everybody has the freedom to do what he wants”.
But others point out that the Church has advocated for harsher laws on drug use in Italy, which is a problem if its own clergy are not always subject to these same penalties and sentences. Aside from the hypocrisy, it also points to the general lack of transparency around the criminal system in the Vatican.
Shaping and evading the law
Italian anti-drug legislation dates back to 1990, when a socialist government copied the US’s hardline approach. Three years later, the country decriminalised drug possession for personal use with a public referendum, but Catholic right-wing governments have found ways to harden penalties over the decades, often influenced by the Church. Possession of more than 1.6g of cocaine now counts as evidence of drug dealing. Prison sentences range from two to six years for soft drugs (like cannabis) and from eight to 20 years for hard drugs (like cocaine), alongside fines of thousands of euros. As a result, 34 per cent of inmates in Italy were serving time for drug dealing in 2023, compared to the European average of 18 per cent, according to the Ministry of Justice.
When two journalists, Emanuela Provera and Federico Tulli, tried to find out how many clergy were serving criminal sentences in Italy in 2018, they could find only six cases – and none involved drug offences. This is despite the number of stories hitting the headlines in recent years involving clergy in possession of drugs – cases that seem to have been dropped, or that have been dealt with within the walls of the Vatican, as Capozzi’s was. Meanwhile, the only Vatican trial for a drugs case dates back to 2007 and involved a lay employee found with 87g of cocaine. He received a €1000 fine and a four-month prison sentence, which was later suspended. Under Italian law, the man would have received harsher penalties.
Bishops often handle problematic priests informally and in secrecy to avoid scandals, sending them to Vatican-owned retreat houses. There, treatment for drug offences revolves around communal life, spiritual counselling and treatment by confessional psychologists (qualified professionals operating within the boundaries of the Catholic faith), without abiding by the official guidance of the Italian National Health Service.
Adele Orioli, responsible for legal battles at the UAAR, the Italian Union of Atheists and Rationalist Agnostics, believes this difference in treatment between lay people in Italy and clergy in the Vatican is unethical. “Why should wearing a cassock make someone more entitled to certain privileges, morally and juridically?” she asked.
Criminal activity can lead to clergy being expelled from the Church and tried in the Italian court system, but this typically only happens in the most severe cases. For example, in 2022, a prison chaplain in Sicily was arrested on suspicion of supplying drugs to an inmate. Rosario Buccheri was expelled from the Church and underwent a regular trial in Italy. In September, he was sentenced to five years and eight months of detention for drug dealing and illegal possession of firearms, though his lawyer said he will appeal.
But even when it comes to the Italian legal system, certain privileges apply to the clergy. According to the Concordat – the agreement between the Church and the Italian state – the police must notify a clergyman’s superior before initiating any criminal charges against him. On top of that, Church members are not obliged to report criminal offences to the police. Both of these special mechanisms help to enable the clergy to evade full justice under Italian law.
Palazzi parties and “priests in distress”
Many testimonies recount drug-fuelled parties in the beautiful palaces owned by the Church that are scattered around central Rome, outside the boundaries of the Vatican state. “The parties were held in houses [in Rome], often on Via della Conciliazione [which leads from St Peter’s Square out into the city of Rome],” Leonardo told me of his experiences in the 90s. “Nobody lived there. They were like prestigious palazzi, they had bedrooms but were almost empty. They had big parlours and frescos.” Leonardo, who was 19 at the time, said he was introduced to the circle by a friend who worked in the Vatican and attended three parties with priests and bishops. He stressed that he didn’t have sex and does not consider himself a victim of abuse. He smoked cannabis and believes others were using harder drugs, as well as engaging in sexual activities.
Orioli of the UAAR says the stories of drug use amid the clergy that reach the Italian press are probably just the tip of the iceberg. She says when newsrooms report on cases they are often contacted by lawyers demanding the stories be taken down under the “right to be forgotten”. (According to European data protection regulations, an individual can have personal data deleted if it is no longer relevant to the community.) The UAAR often republishes news stories and also receives these requests. Moreover, Orioli claims that Italian police frequently fail to proceed with criminal cases where they involve the clergy, leaving them to the Church, which does not provide any data on the issue. As a result, it is impossible to gauge the real scale of the problem.
Nevertheless, efforts have been made to understand how deep it goes. Though focused on child abuse, Provera and Tulli’s 2018 book Giustizia Divina (“divine justice”) offers valuable insight into how the Church escapes secular justice. During their research, they discovered 17 Vatican-owned houses for treating clergy, set up in secluded villas, religious facilities and former convents across Italy.
The retreat houses were mostly aimed at “treating” priests who had “problems” with paedophilia, or were struggling with addictions to alcohol, gambling and porn. But they also found that these places provided drug-addiction programmes. Homosexuality was also on the list of “illnesses” to “treat”, as the Church does not differentiate between what it considers to be a sin and a crime.
However, data on these retreat houses is still scarce. Quoting Vatican sources, the book reported that “priests in distress” – that is, priests the Church found guilty of some sin or crime – made up at least 8–10 per cent of all consecrated persons. This is hard to verify, as retreat houses periodically destroy their files to safeguard the privacy of their patients. But the authors conclude that “priests in distress” are “not a marginal phenomenon in the Church.”
Pushing for harsher legislation
The Vatican today no longer enjoys the direct influence on Italian politics that it did in the past. But it continues to shape attitudes and ultimately the tenor of the political debate around drugs. Politicians often make reference to Catholic doctrine and ideological battles.
That is the case with several senior members of the current government, led by Giorga Meloni and her far-right Brothers of Italy party. Alfredo Mantovano, Meloni’s secretary who presides over the drugs committee, is a member of Alleanza Cattolica, a fundamentalist Catholic group. At the 2023 session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna, he equated the liberalisation of soft drugs to giving permission to freely “kill yourself”.
Mantovano’s public position mirrors that of Pope Francis and the Catechism of the Church. In 2014, to oppose the legalisation of cannabis, the Pope argued that “drug addiction is evil, and with evil there can be no compromise”, a position reiterated this year. However, as Marco Perduca, a former senator and president of the Italian cannabis legalisation campaign, pointed out, Vatican-owned hospitals are allowed to use cannabis as pain medication. When it comes to its own affairs, the Church seems to have “a more pragmatic attitude”, he says.
Perduca is afraid that the current government will further toughen sentences for drug use in Italy. In 2022, before Meloni took power, an attempt at liberalising the rules around cannabis through a referendum failed as a conservative constitutional court dismissed it as inadmissible. Recently, the government passed a ban on products made with CBD – a relaxing, non-psychoactive component of cannabis, forms of which are legal in many other European countries. Hardline Catholics welcomed the move, including the influential Pope John XXIII Community, a Christian association and charity. The ban has since been suspended; meanwhile, the European Commission is considering its legality. We are yet to see whether it will be lifted.
Perduca believes Italy is marred by a “parochial mentality”, going backwards while other European countries like Germany are embracing a more liberal approach to drug use. “The Church has sown so much that […] you still have the slow release of the Catholic culture of the 50s,” he said.
Drug addiction as a “sin”
There is another worrying dimension to this picture. The Vatican does not only run retreat centres for its own clergy suffering from addiction. It also plays a considerable role in supporting lay people struggling with drug abuse problems. The majority of addiction treatment facilities in Italy are part of confessional communities and Vatican-owned hospitals. State facilities are chronically underfunded, receiving only €5 million this year.
The bulk of the public funding goes instead directly to Catholic projects through a system called otto per mille (“eight per thousand”). This is a tax that Italians can choose to allocate to the Church or the state, but many choose the former – and if no choice is specified, the funds go automatically to the Church. This year it was more than 70 per cent. The UAAR told me that this system yet again benefits the Church, but not necessarily those Italians receiving “treatment”.
“You cannot cure drug addiction with prayers,” Orioli said, pointing out that the confessional psychologists operating in these centres often follow unscientific methods. “These programmes escape public scrutiny on the kind of therapies employed and how they use public money,” she added. In 2023, the Vatican earned €1 billion from otto per mille. And starting this year, a decree by the Meloni government will redirect even more of this money to anti-drugs projects run by the Church.
The Church in crisis?
With little transparency, it is hard to understand the reasons behind what appears to be relatively widespread drug-taking in the Vatican. Some people believe it is just one symptom of more profound existential problems faced by the broader Catholic Church in the western world. A decades-long vocational crisis, with empty churches and a falling number of students training to be priests, has made life lonelier for the clergy.
Claudio (not his real name) told me he met with several priests and trainees after matching with them on dating apps, where they passed as laymen, between 2005 and 2010 in different Italian cities: Bari, Brescia, Milan – and also Lugano in Switzerland. He claimed some used MDMA and cocaine during sexual intercourse. “They seemed to be quite expert users,” Claudio said. They told him it was “like drinking wine”, a way of escaping reality, and reassured him that it did not affect their work; on the contrary, it helped them get through it. Nevertheless, Claudio sensed darkness. “There was always something very aggressive in their behaviour, some sort of desperate excess […] a stupor, an awful distress,” he said.
Hypocrisy and impunity are byproducts of this system. The Vatican, which did not respond to New Humanist’s request for comment, seems unwilling to face the legal consequences of the hard line on drugs it has helped to keep in place. It shields clergy from the harshness of Italian law, while refusing new approaches that might offer better handling of drug addiction.
After years of investigations into the abuses of the Church, Emanuela Provera now also believes that priests can develop addiction as a result of extreme psychological distress. “Their theological structure justifies this suffering,” she said. She also questioned whether clergy, perhaps unable to help themselves, are suited to supporting other addicts. She told me she sympathises with their pain, but now finds it too difficult to set foot in a church. “I would feel like an accomplice of an abusive system,” she said.