Since taking the job, he has managed to sleep “with 10 girls”, he tells me, but the obligation of celibacy is a nuisance. Girls and homosexuals, as stated, are the two problems that the Swiss Guard faces at the Holy See. “No selfies, no profiles on social media,” Nathanaël confirms to me. However, Nathanaël isn’t on Instagram or Facebook, and there is no photograph of him on Google Images, according to a strict Vatican rule that imposes extreme discretion on the Swiss Guard. At our initial meeting, he told me his first name (altered here) and his telephone number his surname was revealed to me only subsequently, and inadvertently, when I entered his details on my smartphone and his mobile number was automatically ‘matched’ with his Google + account. Tall, with a long face, charming, Nathanaël was clearly very sociable. For reasons I shall not go into here, he did agree to talk to me in the end, and we developed the habit of meeting at the Café Makasar, in the Borgo, only a few minutes’ walk from the barracks of the Swiss Guard, but far from the places frequented by either Monsignori or tourists and hence discreet in a way that suited both of us. I would later learn that this was one of the rules imposed on the Swiss Guard. I contacted Nathanaël again some time later, on another stay in Rome, and then I encountered his polite but firm refusal to see me again. So I was surprised to see him a few days later in the red, yellow and blue ‘gala’ uniform: he was a Swiss Guard! A Swiss Guard with a toolbox! The blue overalls that he wore that day made him look like an ordinary Italian worker. He wasn’t shy we fell into conversation.Īt first I thought that Nathanaël was one of the contractual staff who intervened within the Vatican if things went wrong. I was a bit lost in the maze of stairs and he showed me the way. I met Nathanaël by chance, when I was staying at the Vatican.
The scarcity of the former and the omnipresence of the latter. Swiss Guard Nathanaël encountered two problems at the Vatican: girls and homosexuals. Frederic Martel, author of 'In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy'
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