French author Frédéric Martel said Tuesday that homosexual priests, bishops, and cardinals in the Vatican make up a “silent majority,” insisting he was aided in researching his upcoming book on homosexuality in the Church by a clerical “gay network.”

In an interview with the Italian daily Il Messaggero, Martel said he believes that the Church became “structurally homosexual” when it adopted celibacy for its priests.

Nonetheless, the Vatican is a “gay-friendly zone,” notes the author, who is openly gay and an LGBT activist himself, adding that the Church’s ban on homosexual seminarians is “antiquated” and needs to be thrown out.

Martel’s explosive, 576-page exposé, titled In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, will be released on Thursday in 8 languages, the very day that Pope Francis has convoked leading bishops from around the world for a Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse.

Regarding Pope Francis, Mr. Martel told Il Messaggero he “started to love this pope” when he realized that the pontiff had fallen into “a trap set by the extreme right-wing Americans” and was the victim of “homophobic, rigid cardinals.”

The book will be favorable to the pope, the author insisted.

“No liberal, gay-friendly author coming from the Catholic French left would write a book more positive about Francis than this one,” he said.

This week the Catholic Church in Belgium released a report on clerical sex abuse showing that 76 percent of priests’ victims were males, mirroring patterns of chiefly homosexual abuse in other countries.

The Belgian report resembles a study released last September by a sexual abuse commission in Germany documenting more than 3,500 cases of clerical sex abuse involving “mostly male minors” between 1946 and 2014.

The most comprehensive report on clerical sex abuse ever written in the United States, the 2004 John Jay report, found that 81 percent of the victims of clerical sex abuse were male and 78 percent of all victims were post-pubescent.

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