Vatican police raided a drug-fueled gay-sex party at an apartment belonging to an aide of one of Pope Francis’ key advisers, according to a new report.
The Holy Father is “enraged,” since the home, inhabited by Francesco Cardinal Coccopalmerio’s secretary, belongs to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith — the arm charged with tackling clerical sex abuse, the Italian paper Il Fatto Quotidiano reported.
Cops raided the apartment in late June after neighbors voiced concern about multiple people acting strangely while streaming in and out of the residence, the newspaper reported Wednesday.
Once police were inside the apartment, they said they found multiple men engaged in rampant drug use and homosexual activity.
They then arrested the priest — an aide to one of Pope Francis’ key advisers — after taking him to a clinic to detox from the drugs he’d ingested.
The unnamed aide is now on a spiritual retreat in a convent in Italy, the paper said.
The aide’s apartment building is the same place where Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger lived for about 25 years before becoming Pope Benedict XVI.
Fatto Quotidiano described the building as “a perfect location to enjoy the extraterritorial rights [of the Vatican] without having to undergo neither the checks of the Italian State nor those of the Vatican City.”
Pope Francis “has decided to accelerate the retirement” of Coccopalmerio, who serves as president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, the paper said.
Coccopalmerio had recommended the secretary for a promotion to bishop — but his prospects aren’t looking good following this incident and two previous alleged drug overdoses, according to an International Business Times report.
“He had proposed his secretary to the episcopate. Fortune that they have not appointed him bishop. Now what would happen?” Il Fatto Quotidiano said. “Someone stopped this appointment before it was too late.”
The scandal comes just a week after the Vatican was rocked by sex-abuse allegations against high-ranking church official George Cardinal Pell.
Pell was charged with multiple counts of historical sexual assault offenses by Australian police.
The cardinal, who served as Pope Francis’ chief financial adviser and is Australia’s most senior Catholic, is the highest-ranking Vatican official ever to be charged in the church’s sexual- abuse scandals.
By Tamar Lapin
Source – The New York Post
