Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 4 June
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
The Catholic Church, writes Frédéric Martel, is ‘a system built ... on the homosexual double life and on the most dizzying homophobia … Without this key for understanding, the recent history of the Vatican and the Roman Church remains opaque.'
How is Martel qualified to make such statements? He is an acclaimed academic and journalist in France, and the author of several widely translated books on contemporary culture and political science, including The Pink and the Black, On Culture in America and Global Gay. His latest book, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, is the result of four years worth of investigative journalism, including hundreds of interviews across many corners of the globe, in efforts to understand the scope and culture of homosexuality within the Catholic Church.
Many of his sources – including priests, cardinals, Vatican administrative staff and sex workers – have spoken to Martel about widespread clerical homosexuality under terms of anonymity. Their combined testimony paints a portrait of a bizarre culture of conspiracy and cover-up, with ramifications that extend way beyond the sexual identities of individual priests and into church policies on contraception, IVF and the handling of cases of sexual abuse.
The Vatican, as Martel describes it, is a place of surreal duplicity. But an investigation with mostly anonymous sources raises its own questions about double standards. Join Martel for a discussion of his remarkable book with Sally Warhaft in June.
Metropolis will be our bookseller at this event.
Featuring
Sally Warhaft
Sally Warhaft is a Melbourne broadcaster, anthropologist and writer. She is the host of The Fifth Estate, the Wheeler Centre’s live series focusing on journalism, politics, media, and international relations, and The Leap ...
Frédéric Martel
Frédéric Martel is a Researcher and Writer. He has a PhD in Social Sciences and four Master Degrees in Law, Political science, Philosophy and Social Science (University La Sorbonne). He has been visiting scholar at Harvard University and taught at Sciences-Po Paris and at the HEC’s Business School MBA in Paris.
He is the author of ten books, including On Culture in America (Gallimard, 2006), the bestseller Mainstream : On the Global War on Culture and Medias (Flammarion, 2010, translated in twenty countries) and Smart, on the internets (Stock, 2014).
As a journalist, Frédéric Martel is the anchor man of the weekly radio program Soft Power on French National Public Radio (France Culture/Radio France). He is the Reporter at large and a Foreign Affairs Columnist of Slate.fr
He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the ZHdK’s University in Zurich. He was a researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences-Po Paris and an adviser to the European Commission and has been a member of 'New Narrative for Europe', the cultural task force of the president of the EU.
His new book, In the Closet of the Vatican (Sodoma in other languages) has been published on Feb 21, 2019. The book has been translated in multiple languages (French, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and soon in German, Romanian, Slovenian, Croatian, Bulgarian and others).
In the Closet of the Vatican is a number one best seller in France, Portugal and the Netherlands. It has also been on bestseller lists in the UK, Italy, Canada, Belgium, Australia and has entered the New York Times bestseller list in the US.
Martel lives in Paris and travels, every week, around the world.