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Monday, February 18th, 2019

Four in five Vatican priests are gay, book claims

Author:     Harriet Sherwood
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Tue 12 Feb 2019 11.47 EST Last
Link: Four in five Vatican priests are gay, book claims
Stephan:   The ongoing crisis over sexuality in the Roman Catholic Church just never seems to end, but this takes it all to a new level.  As the Guardian describes it, this "French journalist’s book is a ‘startling account of corruption and hypocrisy." I have been asked why I continue to cover this story? The answer is because Roman Catholics make up 16 percent of the world's total population, and  50 percent of the world's Christians.

Pope Francis leads a mass for priests in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
Credit: AFP/Getty

Some of the most senior clerics in the Roman Catholic church who have vociferously attacked homosexuality are themselves gay, according to a book to be published next week.

Eighty per cent of priests working at the Vatican are gay, although not necessarily sexually active, it is claimed in the book, In the Closet of the Vatican.

The 570-page book, which the French journalist and author Frédéric Martel spent four years researching, is a “startling account of corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the Vatican”, according to its British publisher Bloomsbury.

It is being published in eight languages across 20 countries next Wednesday, coinciding with the opening day of a conference at the Vatican on sexual abuse, to which bishops from all over the world have been summoned.

Martel, a former adviser to the French government, conducted 1,500 interviews while researching the book, including with 41 cardinals, 52 bishops and monsignors, 45 papal ambassadors or diplomatic officials, 11 Swiss guards […]

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1 Comment

  1. Rev. Dean on Monday, February 18, 2019 at 1:27 pm

    It’s no wonder we have so much trouble with the immoral attitudes of priests and their bad relationships with children; rapes and other terrible misconduct they induce upon the poor children they abuse. It is a shame they do not actually believe in the Christian bible which they are supposed to understand, yet do not abide by.