There’s a flourishing gay scene for priests in Rome, according to a new book due out soon.
Sex and the Vatican: a secret journey in the reign of the chaste, will publish testimonies from priests and from undercover reporting. Carmelo Abbate, an investigative journalist, authored the book which will be published in Italian and French.
Abbate spent months undercover documenting a “hidden world” in which heterosexual priests have children with women who can never be their wives, and gay priests of many different nationalities visit nightclubs in Rome and pay for sex with escorts.
“Priests of all nationalities divide their time between Via della Conciliazione (the main road leading to St. Peter’s basilica) and the party scene of Rome by night,” the book’s editors Piemme said in a press release.
Abbate said he is not anti-catholic or anti-clerical, but he aims to break the culture of secrecy surrounding the sex life of priests.
“The purpose of the book is not to shame Catholic clergy, it is to expose the hypocrisy and double standards of the Church,” Mr Abbate, an award-winning investigative reporter, told The Daily Telegraph.
“There are priests with children but the kids cannot talk to their fathers in public for fear of their situation being discovered.
“There is a culture of ‘omerta’ (silence) in which the Church pretends not to know about any of this. If the authorities do find out, they just cover it up so as to avoid any scandal.”
The book developed from an investigation conducted by Mr Abbate last year in which he used hidden cameras to film three priests attending gay nightspots in Rome and having casual sex, before donning their cassocks the next day and holding church services.
“At the time the Church said that these were just isolated incidents. I wanted to explore whether that was true and what I found was that the phenomenon is much, much wider,” he said.
Women who become pregnant to a priest told Abbate they were forced to have an abortion, or have their child put up for adoption. Some priests pay ex-lovers hush money to keep the partner quiet, while others, on the quiet, support their children through school.
“For a lot of priests, the Church’s teaching on sexual relations are a prison”, Abbate said.
Sources
- The Telegraph
- Canada.com
- Image; The BS Report