Devil in the flesh

Move over, Larry Craig, you of the wide stance: a Vatican official, caught on a hidden TV camera making advances to a young man and telling him that gay sex wasn't really a sin, says he was only pretending to be gay.

Monsignor Tommaso Stenico apparently hung around gay chatrooms and gay men a fair bit, but now says that he was gathering information about "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity." It was unclear what he was going to do with the information, but he is a psychoanalyst by profession. "It's all false; it was a trap," he said. "I was a victim of my own attempts to contribute to cleaning up the Church with my psychoanalyst work."

He was suspended by the Vatican this past Saturday, but spoke up vigorously in his own defence in an interview with La Repubblica. He is reported as saying that he had met with the young man and pretended to talk about homosexuality "to better understand this mysterious and faraway world which, by the fault of a few people — among them some priests — is doing so much harm to the Church."

I'm tempted to ask how one pretends to talk about anything, but no matter. Hearing the tortuous verbal twists and turns deployed by both Father Stenico and Senator Larry Craig, both of them denouncers of all things gay, and both caught, at least figuratively, with their pants down, one has to ask a more pertinent question: wouldn't it have been a lot less trouble in the long run just to come out?