Bannon's crusade to expose gays in the Catholic church didn't die with Epstein

"War Room" host Steve Bannon in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 30, 2024 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Frédéric Martel, the author of the 2019 international bestseller, “In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy,” told me over the weekend about the time he was invited to lunch by Steve Bannon, who asked him to come to Bannon’s palatial Paris hotel suite shortly after his book was published.

“I didn’t know why he asked me to come,” he said.

The meeting was arranged via one of Martel’s right-wing Catholic sources who was allied with Bannon. Martel, a journalist who covers the far right in Europe and is working on a new book focused on it, certainly had a professional interest in meeting Bannon.

“It was at the Hotel Bristol,” he explained to me by phone from Paris, “in a suite that costs 8,000 euros per night.” Per the exchange rate at that time, that would have been about $8950 per night. Forbes reports suites at the hotel begin at $3200 per night and go up to as high as $46,000 per night.

It was June of 2019. And he was surprised about what Bannon wanted from him.

“He said during the lunch that he wanted to make a movie about my book,” Martel explained, noting that he “wouldn’t have ever given that [permission] to Bannon.” But he offered Bannon a more polite truth. “I don’t have the rights to the book [for a film],” Martel said he told Bannon, as his publisher had already sold those rights.

That was the end of the discussion on the book, and Martel was perplexed because, as he explained, the book is “probably the most pro-Francis” book, and Bannon, a Catholic “traditionalist” connected to all of the most extreme radical right elements of the church, was working with his allies to take down Francis because of his progressive reforms and his criticism of populist right-wing governments, including Donald Trump’s.

“In the Closet of the Vatican” exposes the hypocrisy of a church hierarchy built up over many decades—including under the virulently homophobic Pope Benedict—which included many powerful closeted gay priests, monsignors, and cardinals who were publicly working against gay rights while privately leading lives counter to their pronouncements and harmful actions.

While exposing all of that might bring down some of the very people on the Catholic right Bannon was courting—many inside the church itself, among the clergy and the hierarchy—he clearly didn’t see the nuance. Bannon is all about chaos and destruction, and was laser-focused on hurting Francis’ leadership and influence. He asked his good friend Jeffrey Epstein for help in his project.

In the Epstein files there are thousands of text message exchanges between Bannon and Epstein, as Bannon sought the help of Epstein—a true globalist within the uber-wealthy elite—to promote his faux populist, supposedly anti-globalist movement across Europe.

As CNN reports:

Bannon had been highly critical of Francis whom he saw as an opponent to his “sovereigntist” vision, a brand of nationalist populism which swept through Europe in 2018 and 2019. The released documents from the DOJ appear to show that Epstein had been helping Bannon to build his movement.

Bannon, after being pushed out in 2017 as Trump’s national security adviser, was living in Rome, traveling to Paris, London, and throughout Europe, and asking Epstein to connect him to powerful people. Epstein offered the use of his jet and homes for Bannon’s travels, while Bannon offered media training and advice for Epstein to grotesquely help clean up the convicted pedophile’s reputation. And Bannon recorded many hours of interviews, 12 hours of which have been released among the files, for a documentary film he was making on Epstein, the aim of which no doubt was to promote a media makeover for Epstein.

Epstein’s jet, per the files, was unavailable when Bannon asked if he could use it to fly from Rome to Paris in one instance, but there is evidence in the files that Bannon stayed at a grand apartment where Epstein was living near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on that trip. Epstein invited Bannon to stay in a March 29th, 2019 text; Bannon said he was “Enroute,” and then Epstein texted someone else the next morning: “Steve Bannon is here with me.”

Bannon’s spokesperson told The New York Times that Bannon didn’t stay there (and that he never stayed at Epstein’s homes or flew on his plane) and decided to stay at a hotel instead. But the Times noted the spokesperson didn’t provide a receipt. My question would have been, even if that’s so, who paid for the hotel—again, Bannon’s spokesperson didn’t show the Times any receipt—and was it in fact the lavish Hotel Bristol, the same place where he met Martel later in June? After all, per the files, Epstein did offer to pay for a charter flight for Bannon when Epstein said his jet was unavailable. (There’s no indication as to whether he did or didn’t pay for a charter flight.)

Around that same time, Bannon expressed to Epstein his interest in making Martel’s book into a film and having Epstein fund it as executive producer.

“Have you read ‘in the closet of the vatican’ yet,” Bannon wrote, to which Epstein appears to reply ‘yes,’ amid chats about getting Bannon connected to global players.

“You are now exec producer of ‘ITCOTV’ (In the closet of the Vatican),” Bannon continued. “Will take down (Pope) Francis.The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother.”

It’s not clear whether Epstein was taking seriously the idea of the film—which Martel had already told Bannon was not going to happen—but Epstein, on April 1, 2019, did email himself “in the closet of the vatican,” and later, in June of 2019, he sent Bannon an article headlined, “Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose.”

The two were planning to meet in New York weeks later, on the first weekend of July. But on July 6th, 2019, Epstein would be arrested on sex trafficking charges in New York. On August 10th he’d be found dead in his jail cell. And obviously no film was made.

Bannon continued in his war against the pope, but a split developed that very summer of Epstein’s arrest and death between Bannon and some of his far-right allies. Cardinal Raymond Burke, an angry American MAGA foe of Francis’ (whom Francis would eventually kick out of his massive Vatican apartment, in 2023), had collaborated with Bannon in an organization working against Francis, Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a Rome-based think tank that aimed to create a “populist academy” in a monastery in Trisulti, Italy.

But Burke broke with Bannon in June of 2019, after he learned that Bannon wanted to make a film out of Martel’s book. Martel had gone public about his lunch with Bannon, and it didn’t sit well with Burke, who is portrayed in an entire chapter as a scheming and unrepentant nemesis of Pope Francis.

Burke and many of his allies in the church had much to fear about any film outing prominent homophobic closet cases in the church, bringing the book to a much wider audience. Burke put out a statement, resigning from DHI, where he’d collaborated with Bannon:

I have been made aware of a June 24 LifeSiteNews online article…entitled ‘Steve Bannon hints at making film exposing homosexuality in the Vatican’…
I do not, in any way, agree with Mr. Bannon’s assessment of the book in question, Furthermore, I am not at all of the mind that the book should be made into a film.

But other Bannon compatriots would later appear to draw both on the information in Martel’s book and on his research methods. In “In the Closet of the Vatican,” Martel discusses gay dating and sex apps like Grindr, Scruff, and Tinder, and how prevalent users were in and around the Vatican, even carrying out his own experiments with his researchers, using Grindr and other apps.

“According to several priests, Grindr has become a very widespread phenomenon in seminaries and priests’ meetings,” Martel reports in the book.

It may be a coincidence, but two years later, in July of 2021, in a story I covered extensively, a right-wing Catholic site here on Substack, The Pillar, used geolocation data from Grindr to force the resignation of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, the General Secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

As I wrote at the time, the right-wing editors of The Pillar:

“obtained” geolocation data of Grindr interactions from his phone — even claiming to have located him in a bathhouse in Las Vegas at one point — over a period of time going back to 2018.
And then they went to the Catholic bishops with the information — dates and times of Burrill allegedly connecting with various men on Grindr, and locations, including the bathhouse. Soon after, the USCCB announced Burrill had resigned because of “impending media reports alleging possible improper behavior.”

There was much speculation about where The Pillar got its funding and also about who purchased the geolocation information for it—information that would cost a lot of money. Grindr had previously sold information to third parties for advertising purposes (and stopped after it was criticized), believing there was no identifying information. But as I explain in my piece of the time in depth, technology experts say there’s a way for that identifying information to be found, and there’s no guarantee that third parties don’t turn around and sell geolocation data to more nefarious entities.

Almost two years after The Pillar’s actions, in March of 2023, The Washington Post indeed revealed that it was wealthy Catholics on the far right, the people in the same circles as Bannon, who paid for the geolocation data that The Pillar had “obtained.” They also sent the information to Catholic bishops:

A group of conservative ColoradoCatholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country.
The secretive effort was the work of a Denver nonprofit called Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal, whose trustees are philanthropists Mark Bauman, John Martin and Tim Reichert, according to public records, an audio recording of the nonprofit’s president discussing its mission and other documents…
…The Post has seen copies of two differentreports presented to bishops. One is from the Renewal group to a diocese and the other is the one that the Pillar presented to the USCCB about Burrill. The information in both is mostly about Grindr, although the reports also say they have used data from other gay dating apps Growlr, Scruff and Jack’d, as well as OkCupid.

Reichert is a former GOP congressional candidate. Jayd Henricks, executive director of the group Reichert and his rich buddies founded and which bought the geolocation information it gave to The Pillar, had, like Bannon, been a fierce critic of Francis.

All of these men are aligned in efforts against church reforms, whether working together directly or not. Hendricks has written for the orthodox World Catholic Report, which has also written glowingly about Bannon and his “populist nationalism” effort in Europe, describing it as “renewed appreciation for the nation-state and national sovereignty—and growing suspicion of the managerial elites in Washington, London, and Brussels.”

It’s not a stretch to believe that the Colorado wealthy right-wing Catholics got their ideas on using Grindr to help bring down church leaders from the attention brought to “In the Closet of the Vatican.” Nor is it a stretch to believe that they even worked directly or indirectly with fellow traveler Bannon, who was very much focused on the book and who had by then lost the convicted pedophile billionaire he was hoping would bankroll weaponizing the ideas within the book in the way The Pillar outrageously did.

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