The catholic church has always had a complicated relationship with homosexuality.
The central claim of Frederic Martel’s 2019 book In the Closet of the Vatican is that the majority of the church’s leadership in Rome are semi-closeted homosexuals, or more colorfully, “homophiles”.
So the omnipresence of homosexuals in the Vatican isn’t just a matter of a few black sheep, or the ‘net that caught the bad fish’, as Josef Ratzinger put it. It isn’t a ‘lobby’ or a dissident movement; neither is it a sect of Freemasonry inside the holy see: it’s a system. It isn’t a tiny minority; it’s a big majority.
At this point in the conversation, I ask Francesco Lepore to estimate the size of this community, all tendencies included.
‘I think the percentage is very high. I’d put it at around 80 percent.’
…
During a discussion with a non-Italian archbishop, whom I met several times, he confirmed to me: ’Three of the last five popes are said to have been homophilic, some of their assistants and secretaries of state too, as well as most cardinals and bishops in the Curia.
Apparently, this view of the church leadership is not an original one, and it’s not a new one. It’s not even one posited by independent investigators or enemies of the church. A reformist monk in the 11th century(!) named Peter Damian wrote a book documenting the prevalence of homosexuality within the church leadership called The Book of Gomorrah. Damian’s was an internal observation and critique of various kinds of ecclesiastical corruption, centuries before the reformation. Conversely, Martel’s book is an inquiry from an outside observer by way of long and exhaustive interviews, centuries after the reformation.
The Fraternal Birth Order Effect (FBOE) is a demographic observation that homosexual men are disproportionately likely to have older male siblings in populations for which sufficiently detailed data exists. The modern father of this literature is Ray Blanchard; he came up with the initial quantitative estimates of this effect in the 1990s. The maternal immune explanation for this has been written about before on LW and Scott’s written about it well on several occasions. If Damian and Martel are correct, under some not particularly severe assumptions, the FBOE predicts high ranking church prelates will be lower ranking in birth order than expected by chance. The rest of this post will be a statistical and demographic investigation into this claim.
Background
Given the power of gigantic modern datasets and analysis methods, it looks like Blanchard and his acolytes screwed up the statistics a bit, but were directionally correct. Recently, Ablaza et al. did a sophisticated analysis on 9 million people in the Netherlands and replicated the main finding. They also find the effect is not restricted to older brothers, but applies to all older siblings, and the effect is not restricted to men, but applies to women as well; it’s just largest in men who have older brothers. Here is the summary of this complicated regression analysis.
Adding one younger sister to an existing sibship is associated with a 13.8% decrease in the probability of entering a same-sex union (OR = 0.87, p < 0.001); moving one place down the birth order while keeping the number of younger and older brothers fixed is associated with an 7.9% increase in the probability of entering a same-sex union (OR = 1.08, p < 0.001); and replacing one older sister by one older brother is associated with a 12.5% increase in the probability of entering a same-sex union (OR = 1.13, p < 0.001).
So we have a rough estimate of FBO effect over a large and modern dataset. Can we see something similar in a not quite as large, not as modern dataset?
Data
You wouldn’t believe what you can do with computers these days. Huge amounts of badly-structured information can quickly be compacted into giant, clean, legible rectangles of numbers. The Vatican keeps pretty detailed biographical information about their prelates, and a few millennia after the water turned into wine, selenium turned a bunch of shitty biographical sketches into clean biographical data of hundreds of cardinals spread over centuries.
Remember, Damian thinks homosexual leadership in the Vatican has been ongoing for centuries, and Martel claims
Homosexuality spreads the closer one gets to the holy of holies; there are more and more homosexuals as one rises through the Catholic hierarchy. In the College of Cardinals and the Vatican, the preferential selection process is said to be perfected; homosexuality becomes the rule, heterosexuality the exception.
So we need to be looking deep through time and at the highest levels of the Vatican, which is exactly the dataset I assembled. The most relevant biographical facts required to mount this analysis are how big cardinals’ families were and their birth order in that family, when available. Most of those men came from very elite families. Most are nobles, with a lot known about their genealogy. Cardinals are the most accomplished and capable men in the entire catholic hierarchy; most of them are prominent enough to have wikipedia pages. They make the people who have climbed to the top of even large modern government bureaucracies look positively junior varsity.
In addition to keeping secrets, the catholic church is also excellent at keeping records.
The final assembled dataset looks something like this.
In total, we have 921 cardinals with some sibship size information, 792 with some birth order information, and 638 with definitive information about both. The data goes from the 15th century into the 21st century. I’ve checked in the data and the code I wrote to study it here.
Analysis
Suppose the FBOE is broadly observable in dispersed catholic populations, and suppose it’s biologically rather than socially-mediated. If Martel is right that 80% of the college of cardinals is actually not-so-secretly gay, we will observe cardinals late in birth order more often than expected by chance.
There are multiple related ways of quantifying this, and to ensure the conclusions are robust, I’m going to break this into 3 separate analytical specifications. The statistics reported in this section exclude the chauvinist 15th and 16th centuries since the data look like sons are much more preferentially reported than daughters during those times, and we don’t want to screw up the analysis in that way.
Expected versus Actual birth order, with missing birth order
The way the data ends up being structured, we often know the size of a given cardinal’s family when we don’t actually know his birth order. One way we can exploit this defect and waste no data is to come up with an expected birth order among all the catholic families who produce cardinals.
where N is the maximum number of offspring a catholic woman could possibly carry. In this specification, the probability mass function of the total sibship is estimated using all the data regardless of whether it has associated birth order data (hence “with missing birth order”). This expected birth order is calculated and can then be compared to the actual average birth order for the cardinals observed in the data. If the expected birth order is lower than the actual birth order, we could conclude the cardinals are lower in birth order than expected and the FBOE is in play.
The distribution of total siblings in these families is modeled as a negative binomial distribution.
Yes, devout catholic families who take it seriously enough to produce cardinals have a lot of children.
Using this negative binomial estimate’s pmf, the expected birth order for these cardinals is 3.68, and the average observed birth order is 3.31, which is the exact opposite of what a mostly gay Vatican combined with the FBOE would predict. These cardinals are actually older than you would expect compared to their siblings.
Expected versus Actual birth order, without missing birth order
Maybe there’s some weird relationship between when a cardinal’s birth order is being reported and how large his family size actually is. In this situation, we would not want to use all the sibship size data; we would only use sibship size when we know the birth order. This will remove any worry about selection bias at the expense of using less data. The only thing that changes here is the estimated pmf for the total sibship size.
Ugh. Using this specification, things actually get worse. The expected birth order increases further to 3.71.
Oldest sibling versus youngest sibling
Birth order can be complicated to correctly reason about, and maybe we’re missing something. Maybe birth order produces a weird effect in gigantic families. Let’s keep it simple: What’s the representation of oldest siblings among cardinals? What about youngest siblings?
22.3 percent of cardinals are reported as eldest children. That compares to 21.6 percent which are youngest children. Eldest children are still favored.
Discussion
Analytically combining the FBOE with a potentially closeted Vatican is a difficult synthesis. The literature on the FBOE is fundamentally based on linear regressions which model a relatively uncommon phenomenon: obligate homosexuality. It’s perhaps capable of answering how many more older siblings are needed to bump a man’s chances of being homosexual from 3 percent to 3.2 percent, but what if Martel is right and the Vatican is like a nightclub in Chelsea? How many more older siblings should patrons of the Chelsea nightclub have than all other men in New York? If the average guy on the street has a 3 percent chance of being gay compared to a guy in the nightclub who has an 80 percent chance of being gay, that’s an odds ratio of ~26. The regression coefficients in Ablaza et al. are all around 0.1, which means that the nightclub patrons are expected to have log(26) / 0.1 = 14.15 more older siblings than the man on the street, which is a stretch even if it’s a catholic gay nightclub.
Unfortunately, the FBOE only explains a small portion of how prevalent homosexuality is in large populations, but I still have a pretty strong conviction that if the FBOE is real and the Vatican is really closeted, we would be able to observe it in this data.
A few potential resolutions to this strange result:
The FBOE isn’t real, or it isn’t biologically mediated.
The Vatican isn’t all secretly in the closet.
I mentioned before that cardinals are all highly-educated men who have somehow made their way to the top of a giant bureaucracy, which is competence of a kind. If older siblings are actually more capable of that than younger ones, that could swamp any FBOE effect and make it invisible in the data.
I looked into the idea that elite families in past centuries would preferentially have their older children take an ecclesiastical path. In the biographical sketches there are even references for noble families preferentially grooming their second, but not their first sons to be clerics (“Luigi, the second son, was destined for a career in the church, unlike his older brother Mario who inherited everything”). However, the observed pattern of cardinals being older by birth order continues through modern times. Interestingly, there is evidence in the older data that second sons were preferred to be in the church compared to first ones.
There’s something about these giant families which diminishes the FBOE, though this doesn’t seem to make any sense, since I think most people involved in this literature believe the effect is cumulative.
Homosexuality in the church is a different mental phenotype than homosexuality outside of it, and the FBOE applies only to the latter.
Conclusion
I don’t see it. If the Vatican is secretly in the closet, it doesn’t appear in a long term dataset reported from an institution with a history of excellent record keeping. The fact that we’re looking at large and completed families keeps a lot of the issues that can come up studying birth order out of play. This is potentially an excellent dataset for studying this.
I was quite sympathetic to Martel’s thesis coming in and was impressed by the depth of work presented in In the Closet of the Vatican. Overall, pretty disappointed in the negative result
I kept waiting for you to discuss this point: in considering analysis of cardinals (as opposed to ordinary random people), what about the other relevant birth-order effects? Like the… first-born eldest birth order effect, where first-borns are smarter, more extraverted, stabler, higher-SES etc. All of which sounds exactly like the sort of thing you need to rise through an extreme hierarchy to the top.
After all, surely homosexuality is not the only (or even primary) trait the Catholic Church hierarchy is trying to select for?
On the other hand, we know that Jews are very prominent whenever you’re selecting for competence, yet almost no Cardinals are Jewish, suggesting that maybe competence isn’t that important to be a cardinal 🤷?
I can’t tell if this is a joke, but it’s very funny even if it’s not.
(it was a joke, yes 😀)
Although there’s at least a few Jewish born or half Jewish cardinals.
I agree that birth order inversely correlating with capability is the most plausible resolution of this puzzle, though I need to check the effect sizes more studiously, and am still haunted by the ghost of Judith Rich Harris.
As for the traits being selected, we obviously don’t know, though the idea is that selecting for homosexuality gifts the selectors an obvious manner of control of whomever makes it into the college of cardinals.
I would be surprised if that was the primary homosexuality-enriching step, given that reporting has always been that quite a lot of low-level parish-level priests are also gay. (Note, for example, how many of the sexual abuse scandal victims were boys/men.) I would guess that it operates fairly steadily at all levels, starting from simply which young boys opt for the priesthood (known to be a demand and difficult occupation even if the celibacy requirement is, for you, not so onerous) and operating from there; if I had to guess where the biggest enrichment is, it’d be at the ‘leaving your country for the Vatican’ step, given how notoriously gay the Vatican is. So going there suggests either that you are gay (and so the buggery isn’t a bug, it’s a feature) or you are highly ambitious and don’t mind it (or are willing to exploit it and again, not a bug but a feature).
I went to a Jesuit high school in the ’80′s. There were some priests who were, in the language of the day, “flaming” homosexuals. They ran the choir and theater programs, and it seemed pretty obvious that if they were outside the priesthood, they would have been gay. One of my classmates later became a priest, and he’s openly out to another alum who’s gay.
While this is anecdata, there was a wide river of Denial, usu assuming someone “couldn’t be gay” if they had taken the vow of celibacy. The Church’s sex negativity makes any open discussion nearly impossible, and it’s a hard pitch to heterosexuals that they should foreswear sex for their entire life.
Paul Pilgram, SJ, our principal, was later exposed as a pedophile, although he was not considered one of the “flamers” at our HS
Yeah, I think a lot of anecdata point to the fact that a pretty significant portion of the clergy are gay. The most interesting question in my view is how and why that portion might rise to very high levels ~80% once you get to Rome.
You could compare to other strongly meritocratic organizations (US Senate? Fortune 500 C-level employees?) to see whether the church is very different.
That would be tricky because you are comparing apples and oranges. Consider that for the USA, there are only 11 cardinals (of 252 worldwide), while there are 10x more federal senators at any moment (I don’t know if there would be more or less total: senators tend to be much younger but cardinals also tend to be long-lived), and I can’t even guess how many ‘Fortune 500 C-level employees’ there might be given corporate turnover and the size of many ‘C-suites’ - tens of thousands, maybe? So your suggestions span ~1-3 orders of magnitude less selectivity than cardinals do.
Maybe we could look a 4-star generals, of which there are under 40 total in the US? Not quite as selective, but a more similar process. (Or perhaps around as selective given the number of US Catholics, vs. US citizens.)
A sufficiently high band in the CCP could work.
I don’t know what you have in mind there. If they’re 80% gay, they can hardly threaten each other with exposure. At the most, the accusation would be a smokescreen, transparent to all the insiders, for those who already have the power to dispose of an enemy. Cf. the exclusion of Marine Le Pen from standing for President of France, on the grounds of an “embezzlement” which it appears that every party freely engages in.
Maybe my next substack post will be trying to analyze how the
exposeequilibrium changes as a function of thepercent_gayparameter.This is sort of content I come to LessWrong for.
What about if the Vatican is just a lot more asexual than the general population? That also seems credible.
Thanks for the study. In my opinion, there is a more direct evidence of how gay is the Vatican, or more exactly, the Catholic church in general. In the general population, victims of sexual assault are overwhelmingly female, and perpetrators are overwhelmingly male. Even in the rare cases where the perpetrators are female, contrary to what one might imagine, the victims are still predominantly female. However, when the perpetrator is a priest or another representative of the Catholic Church, the victims are predominantly male (for a recent and global scale study in France : https://www.ciase.fr/rapport-final/ ).
Since infantile death rates were much higher in previous centuries, perhaps the FBOE would operate differently back then; for example, if interacting with older brothers makes you homosexual, you shouldn’t expect higher rates of homosexuality for third sons where the second son died as an infant than for second sons.
Have you taken that into account? Do you have records of who survived to 20yo and what happens if you only count those?
It doesn’t look to me like non-surviving children are reported in this data, so no.
However, the reported results doesn’t change when you just look at it century by century.
If the FBOE is due to earlier pregnancies changing the chemicals present in the mother’s womb during later pregnancies, then the absence of non-surviving children from the data could actually be a problem with the data.
Aren’t non-surviving children as likely to make a cardinal higher in pregnancy order as they are to make him lower in that order?
No? If non-surviving children are absent from the data, then the birth position that we have for a cardinal (1st born, 2nd born, etc) is really a lower bound. A cardinal who our records show as a 2nd born might actually be a 3rd or 4th born, but cannot be a 1st born.
That’s true, but the probability mass function for total sibship size we estimate here would left-shifted if the non-survivors are absent. The reported family sizes would be smaller in kind.
I might be wrong that this would neutralize the effect you’re pointing out, but I think it does.
How about the culture in catholic countries were gays are mistreated and that the culture “demand” young men to to find a wife and get married? One way to opt out of marriage and condemnation for being gay, with your honor intact and that you do not have to reveal your preferences, is to go into priesthood.
Fun read. So, so many possible covariates. The causal web is very complicated here. Birth order affects lots and lots of other things, which can also affect the chance you become a cardinal. There are also lots of things that would affect the birth rate in a family and also affect the chance the children become cardinals.
Really enjoyed the post, but in the interest of rationality,
This question rests on the false premise(s) (i.e., model misspecification(s)) that homosexuality is only a function of birth order and that the Chelsea nightclub probability doesn’t stem from heavy selection. Relatedly, gwern notes that, “surely homosexuality is not the primary trait the Catholic Church hierarchy is trying to select for.” Maybe this was supposed to be more tongue-in-cheek. But identifying a cause does not require that it sufficiently explain something completely on its own.
I would bet pretty hard on option #3. The older the parents are at the time of conception, the lower the quality of their gametes, which can translate into various negative health and cognitive effects on the child.
I think Greg Clark has stated his new book will claim none of the observed status-related birth order effects commonly cited actually exist in a dataset with sufficient size and resolution.
It would be nice if you had the sexes of the siblings, since it’s supposedly only the older brothers that count, though I don’t really expect that to change anything.
Really the important thing is just to separate birth order from family size. Usually the way I think of this is, we can look at number of older brothers, with a given number of older siblings. I like this setup because it looks like a randomized trial. I have two older siblings, so do you, meiosis randomizes their sexes.
But I guess with the data you have you can look at birth order with a given family size, so we don’t have to worry about the effect of a larger or smaller family. I… don’t think this is what you did? Did I misunderstand something? It seems like if cardinals come from smaller families, that would show up as lower birth orders.
With 9 million people I’d just split it into categories by number of siblings, with your data I’m not sure.
It would be nice if you had the sexes of the siblings, since it's supposedly only the older brothers that count, though I don't really expect that to change anything.I wanted to do that but given the Ablaza et al. results where the effect exists for all older siblings, I decided it wasn’t worth the drop in power.