Martel maintains he was able to enter in the "Vatican's closet" thanks to codes he understood that helped him to be introduced to this hidden gay world. However, it seems he never got into the Vatican proper, and, when looking at the Vatican from a key-hole, he did so with a negative prejudice.
Some examples:
Martel had a meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, in his apartment in the Ethiopian College, a building at the top of the Vatican gardens that is also home to Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, and was the home of the late U.S. Cardinal Edmund Szoka.
Sodano, Martel writes, "is locked up in his African ivory tower, with all his secrets. If the Garden of Eden ever existed, it must be like this little earthly paradise: when I go there, crossing a bridge, I find myself among impeccably tended lawns and fragrant magnolias. It's a Mediterranean garden, with pines and cypresses and, of course, olive trees. In the surrounding cedars I see purple-headed and mustachioed parrots, elegant and multi-coloured, whose mellifluous voices doubtless wake Cardinal Sodano from his slumbers".
The description might suggest that all of this "Eden" is part of the Ethiopian College. In fact, these are the Vatican's gardens, which occupy almost all of the Vatican City State's territory. The Vatican is the greenest state in the world, and the Ethiopian College is one of the buildings in its gardens.
One of Martel's guides into the closet of the Vatican is Francesco Lepore, a laicized priest and a Vatican employee at the office of Latin language at the Vatican Secretariat of State. Lepore left the priesthood after discovering his homosexuality.
Telling the story of Lepore, Martel underscored that "on 30 November 2003, the Neapolitan priest joined Domus Sanctae Marthae, the official residence of the cardinals at the Vatican – and the current home of Pope Francis."
Domus Sanctae Marthae is not the cardinals' official residence. It is a hotel that also hosts guests who have business with the Holy See. It becomes the cardinals' residence during the conclave, as determined by St. John Paul II in 1996. Though Pope Francis has also resided there since being elected, Domus Sanctae Marthae still functions as a hotel, and not as a cardinals' residence.
Martel's description of the episcopal ordination of Georg Gaenswein is also revealing of the lens through which the author reads the Vatican.
Benedict XVI's personal secretary, now prefect of the Pontifical Household, Gaenswein was ordained a bishop by Benedict XVI on Jan. 6, 2013. Together with him, Benedict XVI ordained Bishops Vincenzo Zani, Fortunatus Nwachukwu and Nicolas Henry Marie Denis Thevenin.
In Martel's view, that solemn celebration was merely Benedict XVI's homage to Gaenswein, described in a text filled with innuendos about the relationship between the two.
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Martel writes: "Benedict XVI insisted on giving the pastoral ring to His Bavarian Excellency Georg Gänswein in person, in a Fellini-esque ceremony engraved forever on the memory of the 450 statues, 500 columns and 50 altars of the basilica."
Then, Martel describes the celebration as if all other papal liturgical celebrations are not the same.
"First comes the procession, slow, superb, and choreographed to perfection; the pope with his huge topaz-yellow mitre, standing in a little indoor popemobile, a throne on wheels, travels like a giant the full 200-metre length of the nave to the sound of triumphant brass, beautiful organ sounds and the children's choir of St Peter's, straight as unlit candles."
The little indoor Popemobile was in fact the small wheeled device that Benedict XVI used since 2011 to "alleviate fatigue."
Martel goes on, saying that "the chalices are encrusted with precious stones; the censers smoke. In the front rows of this new style of episcopal organization, dozens of cardinals and hundreds of bishops and priests in their finest robes provide a palette of red, white and oxblood. There are flowers everywhere, as if at a wedding."
And yes, Vatican decorations are always like this, as are the ornamental stones on chalices.