Romans always love a Vatican scandal. But what if this time they’re right?

The people of Rome have always liked to believe the worst of their bishop. When I was a correspondent in Rome more than 40 years ago, I was constantly assured by its citizens that the Pope not only had the evil eye but was known for a fact to be living secretly in the Vatican with a male ballet dancer. These were absurd rumours. Not only did Paul VI have rather dull eyes; he was also a cautious, unexciting fellow, a dry bureaucrat who had served for decades in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State before becoming archbishop of Milan and, after that, pope. I doubt if he had ever met a ballet dancer. Probably the juiciest scandal that occurred on his watch was the sudden death of the reputedly austere French Jesuit theologian, Cardinal Jean Daniélou, in the home of a Paris prostitute in 1974.

But now the Vatican is engulfed by real scandal. Pope Francis, who was elected only last March, informed visitors himself recently that there was a ‘gay lobby’ inside the Vatican, thus lending credence to reports that had appeared in the Italian press about Vatican officials holding ‘bunga bunga’ parties with under-age male prostitutes and exposing themselves to blackmail from outside the Vatican’s walls. And as I arrive in Tuscany for a summer holiday, I pick up a copy of the weekly news magazine L’Espresso to find it has a cover story adding to the Pope’s woes. Written by a Vatican expert, Sandro Magister, this claims that the man the Pope has appointed to be his personal representative at the Vatican Bank, an institution now being investigated for money-laundering, corruption and fraud, is a prelate with a lurid homosexual past.