For the last day or two, I have been In the Closet of the Vatican, that is to say, reading and reviewing the new book of that name by Frédéric Martel, and, I can tell you, it’s cramped in there. It’s a work that maintains the Church can only really be understood through the prism of homosexuality – or rather, of a gay cabal inside the Vatican – and M. Martel sees evidence of it everywhere. Let me just say that if you express an admiration for Caravaggio, he will have you down as homosexual, active or latent, in which case I too should be in that closet. An interest in Jacques Maritain – yep, the progenitor of Christian democracy – is deeply suspect, too.

And if any of his readers make it through all 555 pages – a shame, really, he couldn’t have stretched it to 666 – I shall be surprised; his publisher declared at the outset the book would have him assassinated, though he didn’t anticipate it might be by reviewers enraged at having to plough through a book of that inordinate length without an index.

But there are some interesting observations to be gleaned – though the author, with his sights set firmly on predatory prelates, ignores them – on the real crisis in the Church, which has nothing to do with homosexuality, at least not obviously. When Cardinal Walter Kasper meets M. Martel in his apartment, he points to a picture on the wall: “That’s my home village in Germany … There are bells, churches. At the same time, today, people don’t go to Mass very much and seem to be happy without God. That’s the big question. That’s what worries me. How to find the way of God? I feel it’s lost. We’ve lost the battle.” That, not the disproportionate number of nuncios who are gay, strikes me as the actual problem.