Sex, lies and videotape: turmoil at the Vatican*

· Official secretly filmed propositioning young man
· Bureaucrat claims he was investigating satanist plot

John Hooper in Rome
Monday October 15, 2007
The Guardian

The Vatican was last night at the centre of an unusually public sex
scandal after acknowledging it had suspended a senior official who was
filmed apparently propositioning a young man in his office.

Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, a capo ufficio, or section head, at the
Vatican ministry responsible for the clergy, insisted yesterday he was
not gay. He said he had posed as a homosexual to research a plot by
satanists.

The affair is the latest of several indications that the traditional
immunity enjoyed by the Catholic church in Italy over sex scandals is
gradually giving way.

The Pope's spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said on Saturday he was
unable to deny rumours that the Vatican had suspended one of its top
bureaucrats following a report shown on Italian television. A few hours
later a website identified the official as Mgr Stenico, a 60-year-old
official who ranks joint third in the hierarchy of his department, known
as the Congregation for the Clergy.

A programme broadcast on October 1 by La7 - the only national channel
not owned by Silvio Berlusconi or the state - included a sequence it
said had been filmed secretly in a Vatican office. The six-minute
sequence was said to have been captured by a young man who had come into
contact with a Vatican official via an internet chatroom.

He was invited to have sado-masochistic sex and arrangements were made
for a meeting in St Peter's Square. Unknown to the older man, the other
man, who said he wanted to expose the hypocrisy of the Catholic church,
arrived equipped with concealed video and audio recording equipment.

Television viewers saw the Vatican official sit alongside his guest and
say: "You're very good-looking."

"Thank you," replied the younger man, before putting it to his host that
he was about to commit a sin.

"I don't feel it is a sin," said the official. When the other man
insisted that it was at odds with the teaching of the church, the
Vatican official brought the conversation to an abrupt end.

When his guest bade farewell, saying "It's been a pleasure," the Vatican
official replied: "Not for me, because you don't fancy me."

Mgr Stenico acknowledged in several Italian media interviews yesterday
that he had been suspended.

But he told the Corriere della Sera newspaper that he "wanted to carry
out a study, probably for publication". He said he was a registered
psychologist and psychotherapist and his aim had been "to study how
priests are ensnared".

He added: "I really believe that there is a diabolic plan by satanist
groups who take aim at priests."

Father Lombardi said the Vatican had to act with the decisiveness and
severity called for by behaviour incompatible with priestly service and
the Holy See. Mgr Stenico's case is expected to be judged by a special
tribunal of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.