New Book Claims Four in Five Priests are Gay
A new book claiming that 80 percent of Vatican priests are gay is due to be published next week.
The Guardian reports that ‘In the Closet of the Vatican’ by French journalist FrĂ©dĂ©ric Martel details four years of reporting in a nearly 600-page book.
Bloomsbury, the publisher of the new book, promises a “startling account of corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the Vatican” which reveals “a clerical culture of secrecy which starts in junior seminaries and continues right up to the Vatican itself.”
The new book is due to be released on February 21 in eight different languages around the world.
Its release date coincides with the first day of a massive Vatican conference about sexual abuse within the Catholic church, which some worry may lead to critics again conflating the issue of sexual abuse with homosexuality.
As part of his research, Martel, a non-Catholic and openly gay man, conducted 1,500 interviews with an array of clergy members and diplomatic officials and spent time every month in the Vatican.
The Tablet, a Catholic news site, says that Martel argues in his book that the more vehemently a priest denounces homosexuality, the more likely it is that they are gay themselves.
The book reportedly conveys that some Catholic priests maintain long-term discreet homosexual relationships, while some partake in “high-risk” casual encounters.
Others, the book claims, are in denial about their homosexuality altogether.
The book also claims that while some 80 percent of Catholic priests are gay, they are not all necessarily sexually active.
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