Benítez's intersex condition

Benítez’s intersex condition is revealed at the moment his election is moving toward its public culmination, turning an apparently routine medical journey into a private history of bodily difference, religious doubt, and a decision not to undergo surgery. The disclosure establishes that he had considered treatment in Geneva but never received it; after learning the medical facts, he chose to remain as he was and continue in the ministry, a choice the late Pope knew and accepted when he secretly made Benítez a cardinal.

Discovery and Disclosure

The first clue is administrative rather than medical. Benítez had asked to resign as archbishop on health grounds and met privately with the late Pope in January. His resignation letter remained in the file at the Congregation for Bishops, accompanied by a note that the request had been withdrawn. A separate registry showed that the Pope’s account had paid for Benítez’s return ticket to Geneva. Because Benítez was a Philippine national, he had needed a visa; the application listed medical treatment, and his Swiss address was a private hospital.

That paper trail did not, by itself, disclose what treatment had been contemplated. Raymond O’Malley pursued the discrepancy after recognizing that Benítez might become a leading candidate in the election. The facility was not a general hospital but a clinic specializing in what it called gender reassignment. The distinction changes the meaning of the ticket and the Pope’s payment: the journey was connected to a question about Benítez’s sexed body and the possibility of surgery, not simply an unspecified illness.

Lomeli then confronted Benítez privately, insisting that his fellow cardinals should know the truth before the newly elected pope became a global public figure. Benítez answered that his situation had been unchanged since his ordination, his appointment as archbishop, and his elevation to cardinal. He had considered treatment and prayed for guidance, but had decided against it; there had been no treatment in Geneva. He named the procedures under consideration as surgery to correct a fusion of the labia majora and minora, and a clitoropexy.

A Body Unrecognized

Benítez described being born to very poor parents in the Philippines, where, as he observed, boys were more prized than girls. His genital variation made it easy for him to be taken for a boy, and his parents believed that he was one; he believed it too. The seminary’s modest way of life, with its aversion to uncovering the body, gave him no reason to suspect otherwise, and no one around him identified the difference.

The condition therefore remained undiscovered through his decades in the priesthood. Benítez said that he had observed his vows of chastity throughout his life. Only after he was injured in an explosion in Baghdad and taken to hospital was he fully examined by a doctor for the first time. The medical findings disclosed what neither his upbringing nor his formation had revealed. The scene makes the difference between his lived identity and a later clinical account explicit: the diagnosis arrived in adulthood, not as the confirmation of a suspicion he had long carried.

Crisis, Choice, and Ministry

The discovery was devastating to Benítez’s understanding of his religious life. He recalled being appalled when the medical facts were explained and feeling that darkness had fallen over him. He feared that his entire life might have been lived in mortal sin, and offered his resignation to the late Pope without initially giving his reasons. The Pope summoned him to Rome and sought to dissuade him; Benítez eventually explained the grounds for his resignation.

Together they prayed in the Pope’s room for guidance. Benítez first decided to have the surgery and leave the ministry. On the night before he was due to fly to Switzerland, however, he changed his mind. He reasoned that he was what God had made him and that correcting God’s handiwork would be a greater sin than leaving his body as it was. He cancelled the appointment and returned to Baghdad. The choice was thus neither a treatment already undertaken nor an uncomplicated refusal: it followed medical discovery, fear about sin, an intended departure from ministry, and a reversal made after prayer.

Benítez also looked back on his priestly ministry, which had been mainly among women suffering in some way, as perhaps an unconscious reflection of his natural state. He presented this only retrospectively and with uncertainty; at the time, he had no awareness of the connection. His account distinguishes what he later made of his experience from what he had understood while living it.

Secrecy and Significance

The late Pope knew the reason behind Benítez’s attempted resignation and his decision about surgery. Benítez said the Pope left the matter to him and prayed with him; after Benítez cancelled the procedure and returned to ministry, the Pope later made him a cardinal in pectore, fully aware of who he was. The secret appointment therefore rests on knowledge rather than concealment from the Pope, even though the truth remained unknown to the other cardinals until the election’s decisive moment.

The delayed disclosure also reframes the election’s public preparations. O’Malley recognizes the clinic’s purpose just as the cardinals may be moving toward Benítez, while Lomeli encounters the truth before the formal public presentation of the new pope. The condition is not presented as the consequence of treatment: Benítez had undergone none. Its significance lies in the conflict between the clinical possibility of altering his body, his fear that his condition invalidated his vocation, and his eventual conviction that he could remain both as God had made him and within the priesthood. The account leaves that decision rooted in Benítez’s own explanation, while showing how the private history becomes entangled with the scrutiny and expectations surrounding a papal election.