Supposedly, he loves to dish male colleagues with campy female nicknames. I had heard that he is a gossip, a social operator whose calendar is a blur of drinks and dinners with cardinals and archbishops, principessas and personal trainers. Yes, his plans had changed, he said, but he was leaving again the next day and would return only after I was gone.ĭuring the previous few days, I had heard a lot about this man. “How lucky for me: you’re here!” Startled, the priest talked fast. “I thought you were out of the country,” I said.
When we were alone, I spoke his name, telling him mine. Yet as I looked at the man more closely, I saw that it was definitely him. He had told me that he’d be away and couldn’t meet. My friends told me that this priest was gay, politically savvy, and well connected to the gay Church hierarchy in Rome.īut this couldn’t be that priest. He looked like a priest with whom I’d corresponded after mutual friends put us in touch, a man I had wanted to consult about gay clerics in the Vatican Curia. I had not met this man before, but as I entered the sauna, I thought I recognized him from photographs. Naked but for the towel around his waist, a man of a certain age sat by himself, bent slightly forward as if praying, in a corner of the sauna at a gym in central Rome.
