Oliver Hadlee Pearch turns his lens to the flagrant, in our faces hypocrisy of the Vatican and the Catholic Church worldwide on the topic of homosexuality. Carlos Nazario styles the cast in ecclesiastical-inspired menswear, heavy with the drapes of sartorial concealment, in ‘Angels in America’ for Vogue L’Uomo Spring 2019.

One assumes that the relaunched publication is long-seeped in knowledge about the Vatican’s hypocrisy on gay rights and women’s rights. I have no knowledge — and have never inquired — about the magazine’s position on this critical topic. A Google search brings up no first 5 pages commentary directly associated with the Vatican scandals from Vogue L’Uomo. The women’s magazines generally are doing noticeably better in talking about this difficult topic.

The editorial’s name ‘Angels in America’ is derived from Tony Kushner’s award-winning, brilliant two-part play about homosexuality in America in the 1980s and the rise of AIDS.

In a major in-depth look at homosexuality in the Catholic Church in advance of last week’s Vatican meeting on the sex abuse of children by church leaders, the New York Times estimated that at least 30 to 40 percent of the American Catholic clergy is homosexual, based on interviews with priests themselves. Other estimates are much higher. To the best of my knowledge, there is no such claim about Catholic nuns, although their illegal behavior generally may not warrant estimating. On Feb. 7, 2019, Pope Francis admitted that priests and bishops have sexually abused nuns, but the ones who are my friends have loud voices and help us to move forward on ending abuse by the Catholic Church on multiple fronts.

As an international women’s rights activist, I have furor over many topics with the Catholic Church, but probably no issue disturbs me more than the refusal of the Vatican to relax its refusal to embrace condomns in Africa. Millions of wives and future children are needlessly infected with the virus from AIDS-infected husbands. Because women have no authority of their own in the church, poor women and children worldwide are condemned by the Catholic patriarchy to suffering, disease and death.

The Trump administration has also embraced this anti-women position, closing health clinics all over Africa if they dispense condomns or even tell women where they can find condomns. Note that gay priests, bishops and cardinals do not challenge the Catholic Church on this mandate and official doctrine. Their own suffering over being closeted as gay men in the church does not translate, in most cases, to sympathy for others deadly impacted by the strict nature of the Catholic yoke on women’s lives. ~ Anne