Eighty percent of priests working at the Vatican are gay, a new book claims.
“In the Closet of the Vatican,” by French journalist and author Frédéric Martel, is being pitched as a “startling account of corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the Vatican” by its British publisher Bloomsbury.
It’s being published in eight languages across 20 countries next Wednesday — opening day of a conference at the Vatican on sexual abuse expected to draw bishops from all over the world, the Guardian reported.
The book claims gay priests adhere to an unspoken code called “the closet,” with one rule of thumb being that the more homophobic a cleric was, the more likely he was to be gay, the Guardian reported.
Another controversial assertion is that Colombian Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo defended the church’s positions on homosexuality while hiring male prostitutes, the news outlet reported.
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 and more than 200 priests and seminarians, according to the Tablet.
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