Many who have written on the needed characteristics of the next pope have said such things as “The next pope needs to call the bishops to proclaim the faith boldly; to restore respect for the sacraments; to unify the polarized elements of the Church.” Few pundits note that purging the Church of the Lavender Mafia, of the homosexual priests and bishops who run the Church, is arguably the most important and the most difficult of all tasks a new pope will face.
Pope Benedict failed to do the cleanup because he was old, frail, and sick—but even more so because the resistance to his efforts was so strong. Pope Francis, through appointments and his protection of bishops accused of sexual abuse and cover-up of abuse, has only strengthened the Lavendar Mafia. See the recent article by Damian Thompson on Francis’ favorable treatment of predators.
Undoubtedly, many Catholics are still oblivious to the dominance of the Lavender Mafia in the Church. The sex abuse crisis has opened the eyes of many, since bishops have been so lax in dealing with sexual abuse. Their weak response shows us that they are not healthy heterosexuals; for if they were, they would be enraged about the abuse in the Church and society and would not have let hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children to have “gone missing.”
I have written about this problem before. In short, after Vatican II there was a huge exodus of heterosexual priests and seminarians for a variety of reasons (some claim as many as 20,000); the priesthood was becoming more of a social-work profession and that didn’t require ordination. Also, many believed the Church was going to permit married priests. Ironically, this led many heterosexual men to leave the priesthood or seminary and get married; they believed that once the requirement of celibacy was lifted, they could return. The homosexuals remained and expanded their ranks by promoting each other, recruiting homosexuals, and rejecting heterosexuals.
Let me pause and say that, undoubtedly, there are and have been priests and bishops who are tempted to homosexual acts who have remained chaste and served the Church well. I suspect they are not simply good men but truly holy men; to resist the temptations that the devil and his minions within the Church must have presented them requires supernatural virtues. I admire them beyond words. They are not the Lavender Mafia. And it goes without saying that many priests and bishops are not homosexual.
There is quite a lot of evidence to support the presence of a homosexual underground in the seminaries and priesthood: indispensable is the book by Fr. Donald Cozzens: The Changing Face of the Priesthood (2000), wherein he prophetically maintained that the priesthood was becoming a gay profession. Richard Sipe worked on the topic for years and wrote many books (listed on his website); he concluded that in the early-21st century, 30 percent of the U.S. bishops were active homosexuals. Frédéric Martel, in his sensationalist but nonetheless revealing In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy (2020), said that the Vatican was overrun by homosexuals. While it is too scurrilous for most, Tom Rastrelli’s Confessions of a Gay Priest: A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary (2020) provides a graphic description of his journey through seminary.
In 2019, Pope Benedict, speaking of the ’60s and ’70s, famously said, “In various seminaries homosexual cliques were established, which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries.” Pope Francis, largely considered sympathetic to LGBTQ+ issues, shocked the Italian Episcopal Conference by saying, “there is too much ‘frociaggine’ [faggotry] in seminaries.” (Pope Francis later apologized for his use of the term.)
Thus, there is every reason to believe that at least in first-world countries the percentage of homosexual bishops is high. Just consider the fact that Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, a certified Mason, was in charge of appointing bishops worldwide from 1973-1984. His legacy is impressive.
It is impossible to estimate how many of the cardinals participating in the conclave have either been accused of being active homosexuals or of covering up for homosexuals. SNAP (The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) submitted to Cardinal Parolin a list of six of the papabile cardinals who have “either enabled or concealed sexual abuse committed by Catholic Clergy”: Péter Erdő from Hungary, Kevin Farrell from the United States, Victor Manuel Fernández from Argentina, Mario Grech from Malta, Robert Francis Prevost from the United States, and Luis Antonio Tagle from the Philippines. A rainbow cloud hangs over the heads of the cardinals from the United States, either for their own suspected homosexual activities or for cover-up of abusive homosexual priests.
The good news is that things are getting better—for instance, fewer homosexuals are entering seminary, in part because homosexuals no longer need to “hide.” One article reports that before 1980, only 59 percent of newly ordained priests claimed to be heterosexuals; after 2010, 89 percent do. Given those statistics, it is not surprising that only 34 percent of priests ordained before 1980 thought homosexuality to be always wrong; after 2020, 80 percent do.
But change in the episcopacy will not come soon or easily: the seminaries of the decades from the ’60s through the ’90s, and perhaps beyond, produced the bishops we have today; and they will do their best to reproduce themselves—today’s bishops appoint the next round of bishops.
