Even as the cardinals cluster in their crisply pressed crimson party frocks and white pinafores, ready for the solemn conclave and the white smoke, the Holy See resembles the German Democratic Republic in its last, doomed days.
Spies from the Vatican secret police scour the corridors searching for priests performing acts that priests are not supposed to perform. The daily business of the Vatican, it seems, is not so much solemn prayer as having it off on a grand scale, and on a fairly ambidextrous basis at that. Is nothing sacred?
Informants and counter-informants gush to the media that at least half the clergy are homosexuals and the other half are playing straight. The Vatican, it seems, is collectively in heat, whichever way you consider matters.
One ex-Dominican monk claims that almost a majority of the recruits to Catholic seminaries are principally engaged in seeking gay heaven. Another quite senior cleric states that he sees nothing wrong in particular with an endless round of parties at which sex in one form or another is the prize attraction, since ‘everyone in Rome knows about it.’
Italians wipe their eyes in amazement. Never before has so much dirt come out in the wash, moreover on the eve of the enthronement of a new Vicar of Christ. It comes at a time when Romans especially are being asked to believe many previously unbelievable things before colazione.
Next door in the secular state, a former standup comedian hailing from Genova has thrown into utter confusion the usual game of musical chairs which are par for the course after an Italian election.
The mop-headed, perpetually frenetic Beppe Grillo finds himself an international rock star to millions around the world who reject old fashioned, sterile party politics conducted principally for the benefit and enrichment of the insiders. That would be funny in itself, were it not for the new reality that his home-made 5 Star Movement is now in terms of straight votes, the largest party in Italy.
Grillo has burst from the skies like a brilliant glowing meteor. Behind him glitter the hundreds of thousands of meteorites, first time voters, young professionals and disaffected establishment deserters, lured to the banner of change and reform. They dance in his wake, mesmerized by this hirsute Pied Piper with his spell-binding promises of glasnost and perestroika to cleanse the ordure which unquestionably clogs the Italian political system.
Occupy Italy then, just as Gorbachev promised to Occupy the Soviet Union, so long as the Communist party remained cock of the heap? Not quite.
Grillo reminds me much less of Gorbachev than Benito Mussolini. When the mask slips, we see that Grillo indulges in the same mass wooing of crammed, adoring piazzas perfected by Il Duce. His monologues, which seem to slip so easily from the tongue are – like Mussolini’s – carefully crafted. Another significant point specific to Italy. Like the old demon Blackshirt, Grillo appreciates the nature of Italy as an essentially feminine constituency, so he offers a form of idol worship that Italians best understand.
Mussolini came to power not quite sure what to do with it. He was still a socialist when he first arrived in parliament. The fascism emerged as a process of natural evolution. Foremost Il Duce required an obedient party machine, the basic component of any autocracy.
Grillo is close to power but has yet to explain what he intends to do with it. His agenda is more like a lucky dip. His manifesto is the monologue which begins with the overthrow of a rotten system but fails to describe the miraculous balm that will transform Italy into a model democracy of informed citizens.
But Movimento does indeed present some of the developing images of an essential ‘party machine’ which makes me wonder if there are indeed invisible hands at work behind the stage scenery.
At the very least the stato secreto will penetrate Movimento in order to guide its future direction and possibly plant troublemakers. This is exactly a reprise of the penetration of the Italian Left in the 1970’s and 80’s. In contemporary circumstances, Grillo’s travelling circus is the biggest show in town and thus accumulating swarms of enemies.
The transition from monologue to demagogue is all too easily accomplished, so long as the process is allowed to get that far. This should not be taken for granted in the Italian climate.
The CIA used to boast that it had bought every election since WW2 (though it seems to have rather slipped up with the latest). Italia is unquestionably a rump of choice real estate shared with important global shareholders such the Deep State, NATO, the European Union, the Roman Church of course, and the Stars and Stripes.
Italian troops serve in America’s foreign wars and the region around Verona bristles with the largest collection of US nukes to be found anywhere in Europe. Italian intelligence has always been a hand in glove collaborator with the intelligence services of foreign powers.
That’s a whole lot of cargo to be shifted by the Grillo bandwagon.
Given that he has an authoritative knowledge of modern Italian history, the Great Leader will remember that in the 1970’s the bullet and the bomb were put to work by secretive underground forces to scare Italians with the myth of the Red Peril hovering in their midst. This was Black Flag or copycat terrorism.
The nightmare heresy of the historic compromise – a peace pact sealed between the Christian Democrats and Enrico Berlinguer’s electorally soaring Eurocommunists – died with its foremost advocate, the former conservative premier Aldo Moro, shot to death in mysterious circumstances in Rome in 1978. This is an uncomfortably close analogy to the risk that Mr. Grillo may now be taking.
If he is seduced into a leading office in order to guide the path to a new electoral system, he will need eyes at the back of his head. He may need them in any event.
The so-called ‘years of lead’ (anni di piombo) overlapped with famous financial scandals that overwhelmed the Vatican’s Bank of Religious Works. It emerged that some of the biggest hoodlums in Italy and the US were in cahoots with the sacred piggy bank.
Now here’s a curious co-incidence. Beset as it already is with the shenanigans in the Holy See, connected to apparently industrialized pedophilia attributed to Catholic prelates around the globe, the Vatican has been dragged afresh into a new round of scandals at the Sacred Bank.
Allegations of money laundering (which my book, see below, describes as perpetually endemic) led to the Bank of Italy recently sealing the pocket state’s ATM machines. Without a doubt St. Peter’s Pence has been sprayed in all directions for centuries, and nothing has changed.
The prospect of two popes in Rome at the same time is inevitably bound to inspire visions of schisms that have riven the church in the past. Perhaps never more so than now, given that the columns of St. Peter’s may not only be cracking, but crumbling. The problem is, again, the Sex Bomb.
The new incumbent will foremost have to confront the contents of the top secret report marked For Your Eyes Only, prepared by Cardinal Julian Harranz, the out-going Benedict’s chief papal enforcer, following the famous scandal of the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, who stole highly confidential papers from the Pope’s private apartments.
These papers were alleged to describe the preparations of the Roman Curia to defend the church against a tsunami of potentially very costly global abuse allegations leveled at thousands of priests.
The church typically reacted by downplaying the correspondence as merely private letters, in which case, why was it necessary to isolate Gabriele in a tiny cell just four metres by four for weeks on end? The Inquisition comes to mind. He eventually confessed and promptly absolved by Benedict. This is always the Roman way.
There will be one cardinal short at the conclave. Cardinal Keith O’Brien, principal prelate of the United Kingdom, has resigned having become the target of abuse allegations. When a Church Redcap of this stature is shot down, big troubles are clearly ahead for he who will be next to wear the red velvet slippers, which so far as Rome is concerned, are presently the warmest in town.
Defusing the Sex Bomb that now threatens to explode with mighty force beneath the Lateran State is clearly impossible unless the Curia is prepared to abandon many deeply held practices of centuries, such as priestly celibacy, the repressed role of women in the church and the equation of homosexuality with sin.
It would require all the energy of a radical Vatican Council and the sweeping away of accumulated prejudices which clearly sit awkwardly with the reality that sex is clearly as popular among the clergy as with everyone else.
I fear this is as unlikely as the Second Coming any time soon. The College of Cardinals is intrinsically conservative, politically incestuous and determined above all to preserve its own sacred rites and practices. Chief of these is to raise from among themselves each new Father of the Faith.
This, in ecclesiastical terms, is a self-renewing ritual, which goes to the heart of Catholicism. The Church will not abandon this binding liniment, in which case it is probable that the Church will itself be abandoned.
Schism, then, is potentially the order of the day in the Vatican and the Italian Parliament. According some grace to Mr. Grillo, it appears that Rome will, for a time at least, enjoy the privilege of three popes in town at the same time.
Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative).
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