Excerpt from “In the Closet of the Vatican” Released Ahead of Book Launch

Yesterday, Bondings 2.0 reported on a new book about homosexuality and the Vatican that will be released this Thursday.  Ahead of its publication, the National Catholic Reporter released an excerpt from the book Inside the Closet of the Vatican by Frédéric Martel.

In the excerpt, the author identifies some key themes which will be developed throughout the book and explains a bit about his interest in the topic. Martel writes at one point:

“I’m not the first to discuss this phenomenon. A number of journalists have already revealed scandals and affairs within the Roman Curia. But that isn’t my subject. Unlike those Vaticanologists, who denounce individual ‘excesses’ but in such a way as to conceal the ‘system’, I am less concerned with exposing these affairs than with revealing the very banal double life of most of the dignitaries of the Church. Not the exceptions but the system and the model, what American sociologists call ‘the pattern’. The details, certainly, but also the great laws – and there are, as we will see, 14 general rules in this book. The subject is: the intimate society of priests, their fragility, and the suffering bound up with forced celibacy, which has become a system. So it is not a matter of judging these homosexuals, even the closeted ones – I like them! – but of understanding their secret and collective way of life. It is not a matter of denouncing these men, nor of ‘outing’ them while they are alive. My project isn’t about ‘naming and shaming’, the American practice of making names public in order to expose them. Let it be clear that for me a priest or a cardinal should not be ashamed about being homosexual; I even think it should be one possible social status among others.”

To read the full excerpt, click here. To read yesterday’s post which includes more details about the book’s contents, as well as reviews and reactions from some LGBT advocates, click here.

Check in with Bondings 2.0 each day this week for Editor Francis DeBernardo’s reporting from Rome during the Vatican’s summit meeting on clergy sexual abuse.

Robert Shine, New Ways Ministry, February 19, 2019

2 replies
  1. Richard Boyle
    Richard Boyle says:

    I wonder how soon this book will be “weaponized” by the right-wing, both in Church circles and outside, to further an anti-LGBTQ agenda in any number of ways?

    Reply

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  1. […] Extracto de “In the Closet of the Vatican” publicado antes del lanzamiento del libro […]

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