The Pope's Gay Sex Scandal

Now there's a headline I thought I'd never get the chance to write.

Turns out that while Pope Benedict XVI has gone around the world campaigning against the rights of gays and lesbians to get married, he's overlooked the fact that his own ship isn't really in order. Namely, a senior member of the Pope's household, Angelo Balducci (officially called a "Gentleman of His Holiness"), has been at the center of a gay prostitution ring.

Doesn't sound very gentlemanly, does it? And the details are even more disturbing. Apparently Balducci regularly negotiated for truckloads of boys to be brought to him, including everyone from Vatican chorus boys to students studying to become priests. All within a five minute's reach of Pope Benedict XVI, of course.

Yes, groups like Catholic Charities in Washington, D.C. sacrifice all of their employees in order to protest gay marriage. Maybe they should be protesting their own mothership, which years after a sex abuse scandal rocked the Church, proves that the more things have changed, the more they've stayed the same for the institutional Catholic Church.

Police wiretaps allegedly tie Balducci to a whole lot of lurid affairs with young men in the Vatican.

"According to police, Balducci regularly contacted Chinedu Ehiem Thomas, a Nigerian man who sings in St. Peter's Cappella Giulia, to engage the sexual services of young male members of the choir, along with seminarians and undocumented immigrants seeking residency status," reports Gay News Watch.

If that's true, that means that a senior Vatican official was forcing young men to have sex with him, potentially in order to grant them status as a resident, or advance their careers within the seminary. Yuck.

And. It. Doesn't. Stop. There.

Wiretaps from police reveal that another Vatican assistant, Lorenzo Renzi, can be heard negotiating with a young man to go and have sex with Balducci.

"You'll get up to 2,000 euros ... Do not touch his balls. You need the money," reads the wiretap. "Put on some music, take out the [inaudible], swallow the Viagra, and adelante!"

Anybody else feeling completely speechless? Hypocrisy (Mark Sanford) when it comes (Newt Gingrich) to people (David Vitter) pushing family values (Ted Haggard) is nothing new (Iris Robinson). But the Catholic Church just succeeded in making nearly every other sex scandal in the history of the world pale in comparison.

Within the past year, the Pope and other high-level Catholic officials have said that gays and lesbians won't get into heaven, that Portugal sinned for legalizing same-sex marriage, that gay people are worse than climate change, that gay marriage threatens the fabric of humanity, and that lesbians and gays are an assault on the family.

And yet, while they're preaching one thing, Vatican officials are running elaborate gay prostitution rings and forcing young men to swallow Viagra before they dance in front of dirty old men. That's not only hypocritical. It's criminal.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons