You already knew former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland had some same-sex leanings, given the sexual (and financial) scandal that led to his resignation in 2002 after a 25-year tenure. But now heâs got a book to sell! And nothing gets juicier than uber-conservative religious types coming out.
In A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop, Weakland, now 82, not only discusses the secret $450,000 payoff to now-former university student Paul Marcoux that led to his ouster, but also his failings to keep other predatory priests out of the flock by refusing to banish known abusers. (Weakland denied assaulting Marcoux and never admitted wrongdoing.)
Interestingly, newly installed New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan â whose anti-gay extremes has him promising to use his pulpit to get involved in keeping same-sex marriage out of New York â arrived from, you guessed it, the Milwaukee diocese.
Weakland released a statement to Catholics ahead of the bookâs publishing, warning them what was to come. So why publish now? Says Weakland: âWhat I felt was that people who loved me as bishop here, when they read the book will continue to love me. The people who found it difficult, I hope will be helped a little bit by the book. ⌠Some people will be angry about the book, others will support it.â
How about we take this to the next level?
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Itâs a sad coming out tale. And if you think about it, Weakland is set to profit from his crimes.
Dan
“And if you think about it, Weakland is set to profit from his crimes.”
He plans to donate the proceeds from the book to charity.
http://www.jsonline.com/features/religion/44756432.html
Helga Von Ornstein
Shameful. Disgusting. Opportunistic. I can sit here and go on and on. I find it out right disgusting this ex-vulture is/will be allowed to profit from this. He should be ordered to pay every dime made from this book back to the diocese he stole from to keep his “confused” trick quiet.
I personally do not believe in religion but I saw something over the weekend that stole my heart. I was in the bronx waiting for a bus when I noticed a very elderly lady standing alone in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary with a walker. She was holding a rosary and was saying her prayer. She stopped and was transfixed on the statue. The lady stood there silent for 5 minutes after she finished her prayer. Fatigued from standing forced her to sit on the bench I was sitting on. She stole my heart because I then realized that church was ALL that lady probably had.
When I hear of abuse by these “thou art holier than thou” hypocrites I find no sympathy for them at all. The catholic church is not falling fast enough for me. Though I do feel sorry for people like that poor lady who faithfully give because they have followed blindly the teachings of the church I think those farts should be prosecuted because of what they do behind the backs of the faithful.
Anytime a man to order to squelch his sexual desires trouble is soon to follow. Faith does not prevent men from dreaming of sex and waking up with erections. One does not need to be influenced by alcohol nor drugs to seek out sexual partners. These VULTURES are standing over their flocks looking for the cutest and weakest sheep in thier flocks and I clapp loudly with joy when it turns out they chose the wrong one.
John Becker
You are an idiot. I’m just as angry about Catholic hypocrisy on gay issues as the next person, but Weakland was not an “uber-conservative” by any stretch of the imagination. He was a pillar of the LIBERAL wing of the Catholic Church, NOT its ultraconservative faction. The REASON Tim Dolan (current NY archbishop) was appointed to Milwaukee was because the ultraconservative, homophobic John Paul II wanted a conservative/reactionary mouthpiece/Vatican hack (Dolan) to replace and push back against Weakland’s liberalism. Don’t be hating on Weakland; he’s one of the few people gay Catholics were able to call a friend. And please, DO YOUR HOMEWORK before you just start randomly slamming people. I applaud Weakland for having the courage to come out. While it unfortunately won’t prompt a serious dialogue in the Catholic leadership about sexual orientation issues (which it SHOULD, but they’ll just ignore it like they always do), it will at least get people thinking.
Cynthia Sturm
Whether he profits financially from this book is not the only issue. He can donate the profits and make it known that he did so in an effort to buy sympathy. All he is doing with this book is trying to assuage his own guilt. And by so doing, he subjects his former archdiocese and the Church as a whole to more embarassment. I guess he feels it is more important to put a better “spin” on his behavior than to create more controversy for the Church in Milwaukee and everywhere else. I also find it interesting that millions of divorced Catholics have lived with their “excomunicated” stigma for supposedly breaking their marriage vows, but the fact that Weakland broke his sacramental vow of celibacy is lost in the shuffle. The point is not if he has gay tendancies or not. Who cares is he is gay or straight. Who cares if anyone is gay or straight. It seems to me that the greater point is different standards for priests and lay. Weakland should again be ashamed for draggin the Church through the mud again!
John Becker
You’re wrong, Cynthia. Are you at all familiar with the specifics of the complaint? The only “mud” here is the celibacy breach. The man was well over legal age when all of this happened. And as for “sacramental vow of celibacy,” wake up. Priests are people too, and as such they have sexual orientations just like us. Hopefully this will spur a discussion about the frivolity of the celibacy requirement. My point, though, was that all the hysteria about Weakland was because he was in a relationship with a MAN. Get over it.
Cynthia Sturm`
I think the wake up call if for you John. I am well aware of the complaint. I was born a Catholic in Milwaukee 55 years ago and still practice the Catholic faith even though I disagree with some of the Church’s rules. Tell all the good people who divorced and remarried without paying off the Church to get an anullment and were denied full communion in the Church that Weakland’s “mistake” was no big deal. And if you had read my entire comment, you would have read that the problem was not that he chose to have sexual relations with a man. It was that he had sexual relatiion with anyone. I would think that even by the time he had risen to “bishop status”, he would still remember the vow of celibacy he took as part of the sacrament of Holy Orders. I agree that the church in Rome is way behind in clinging to celibacy for priests. It is also “off” on its clinging to the premise that women cannot be priests. But I didn’t realize that gave Weakland cartblanche to do what he did. And you seem to have glossed over the payoff he made to the “well over legal age” seminarian. I guess payaing “hush money” is not a big deal either. Like it or not, there is a double standard. If a priest sins, forgive him and maybe the Church will even pay his debt. But if you’re just a Catholic who was stuck in a bad marriage, prepare to buy your freedom yourself or go to the last pew in the church.
John Becker
Cynthia, it would appear that we are basically in agreement, then. Most of my (many) disagreements with the Catholic Church are in the areas of gender and sexuality — the ban on birth control, the prohibition of women/openly gay/married priests, the refusal to recognize the sacredness of same-sex unions, the ban on divorce and remarriage, etc. etc. I wasn’t saying that YOUR hysteria is because Weakland’s relationship was a same-sex relationship, merely that that was the chief reason for the public’s hysteria at the time; I stand behind that remark. And I completely agree that a double standard existed for priests; one of the silver linings of the whole sex abuse scandal is that by and large, priests have been taken off of their holier-than-thou pedestal and brought back down to earth like the rest of us, not necessarily in their own minds, but in the eyes of the greater Catholic community. You and I differ in two places, then. The first is in your use of the expression “gay tendencies.” This expression implies ambiguity, choice, etc., as though sexual orientation is some kind of fluid thing that can be changed/ignored/repressed at will. Perhaps this is the case for a very small minority of human beings, but it’s clearly not the norm. As such, I object to that term, as well as the term “sexual preference.” The second area of disagreement is the fact that Weakland’s relationship makes you angry. I couldn’t care less. The celibacy requirement, as we’ve both stated, might have made sense in the middle ages when the church was gobbling up tracts of land and didn’t want a wife and children to get in the way of any potential acquisitions, but it certainly doesn’t make sense now. However, we (divorced and remarried persons, LGBT individuals, etc) will all be dead, unfortunately, before the Catholic church gets its head out of its @$$. I’m technically excommunicated as well — I’m an openly gay Catholic man openly married to another man. But I still go to Mass and live my life as the person I was created to be, with a clean conscience. Weakland is probably telling his story to clear his conscience, and I applaud him for bringing up homosexuality in the Catholic Church and for FORCING people to at least address the issue of the church’s homophobia rather than looking the other way and pretending it isn’t there.
Cynthia Sturm`
Well we do agree that Weakland wrote this book to “clear his conscience”, your words, not mine. But I did not use the expression “gay tendencies”. I have never used that expression and never will. I have never believed that being gay or straight is a “choice” someone makes. We are who and what we were meant to be. And I do not consider any of my comments “hysteria”, again your word, not mine. I do not agree that Weakland was right to act on his sexual desire, gay or straight while acting as a priest or bishop or any religious who has not left their priesthood behind. If he felt that was the path he was meant to take, he should have done it the right way. Leave the preisthood and then pursue his relationship. And while the seminarian may have been “well over legal age”, I’m not naive enough to believe that the authority of Weakland’s position as a bishop did not play into the sexual relationship. I think you see homophobia where it does not exist because of your personal experience. You don’t know me and therefore you are not qualified to judge my feelings about heterosexuality or homosexuality. Please do not put words in my mouth. Weakland had a choice to make. I believe he made the wrong one. And that wrong choice was not that he chose to have sex with a man, it was that he did so while he was a priest/bishop. It was also a mistake to chose a subordinate, just as it is inappropriate for a teacher to have sex with a student. It’s that simple.
John Becker
Cynthia, with the hysteria, what is it that you don’t understand? I NEVER said you were being hysterical. I live in Milwaukee, too, so I saw all the coverage of Weakland’s “scandal” and the public’s reaction. That reaction, that witch hunt atmosphere, is what I refer to as “hysteria.” I should have worded my sentence in comment number 7 more clearly, and I’ll take this opportunity to clarify: when I used the word hysteria, I meant it to haveNOTHING TO DO WITH YOU. đ You did, however, use the expression “gay tendencies.” Take a look at comment #4, YOUR comment: “The point is not if he has gay tendancies or not.” Although misspelled, the word is clearly “tendencies.”
Clearly, another area of disagreement between the two of us is that while we both believe the celibacy requirement for priests to be ridiculously outdated, you believe they should still adhere to the outdated requirement while I believe that each priest should follow the dictates of his individual conscience. However, I should just tell you that I have worked in Catholic churches for my entire life, and if you think it is rare for a priest to have an adult sexual partner, you’re kidding yourself. I’m not necessarily saying it’s running rampant, but there are many, many, many priests, heterosexual and homosexual, who break their celibacy vows (with consenting adults; the negligibly small percentage of pedophiles are another issue entirely). Again, I’m not saying it’s a majority, but I am saying that a statistically significant percentage of priests have broken their celibacy vows.
Finally, I never called you a homophobe. I went back and re-read my comments just to make sure; I never even made that insinuation! I said that I believe that much the public’s initial shock about the Weakland “scandal” (back in 2002 when it broke) was due to the homophobia pervasive in the church and society. Again, nothing to do with you. I wrote about “the church’s homophobia,” which is very real; I make no apologies for calling the Catholic Church an institution characterized by and actively promoting homophobia, but here, as before, THIS IS NOT ME CALLING YOU A HOMOPHOBE.
So there we go. I think we’ve found it, the core of our disagreement. I don’t dispute the inherent conflict of the superior/subordinate relationship. However, I do not believe that conflict diminishes Paul Marcoux’s culpability/equal share of responsibility for the adult relationship to which he consented. Marcoux was not taken advantage of, not a victim of sexual abuse. Weakland, if anyone, was a victim of the sex-scandal hysteria of the time. Of course he made the wrong choice by attempting to pay Marcoux off. But the nature of their relationship itself was consensual and not one of perpetrator-victim. You’re from Milwaukee; you should know the facts.
J C Weakland
I appreciate John Becker’s corrections to this very slanted and uninformative article. I’m a relative of Rembert’s who left the church a long time ago, partly because of Catholicism’s ridiculous and hurtful attitudes toward homosexuality. I understand the hatred toward the Catholic Church that many gay people in particular have reason to feel. I share enough of those feelings myself. But it is important to recognize those within homophobic institutions who recognize, even in an equivocal way, the wrongness of that bigotry and who try to reform those institutions in liberating directions. As John Becker points out, Rembert pushed the church in a liberal direction, quite contrary to the reactionary movement of his successor–whom he did NOT appoint! So don’t lump him together with the Catholic uberconservatives or the Ted Haggard hypocrites in the protestant fundamentalist camp. There are plenty of reasons to criticize Rembert, most notably for his failure to protect children from pedophilic priests. But there are many things that Rembert has done which deserve praise and sympathy, and coming out as gay and talking about the painful loneliness of life in the closet is one of them.
andy1971
Why all this discussion, John Becker? Reading you, one could disserne that you feel justified by Bembert’s behavior. If you feel good about yourself, you don’t need anybody to justify you. As Cynthia stated it so simply, if you don’t believe in priesthood with all that comes with it, don’t go there. No one is forced. But if you deliberately decide to become one, as any honnest human being, honnest is required and expected from everybody, Rembert included. Yes or no question to John and JC Weakland: Did Rembert take a vow? Did he breach it? Did he misuse the church money? Did he lie for over 25 years (actually for all his life)? Did he lie his whole life to his church and people? That’s why for me he passes as a disfuntional mind, period. Look at him, a meserable old creature who spent he’s whole life in vain. I can’t even be angry with him, I feel pity for him.
brad evans
Weakland counter-sued a victim of one of his priest’s abuse for court costs, won, and kept the money (for the church). The man had been 12 when abused by a priest. Some compassion by Weakland!
He got 450,000 dollars simply by asking one man and only told other people about what he’d done after the guy he’d had sex with broke the agreement and went to the press.
Both he and his ‘victim’ (Paul Marcoux, a thriftless ecclesio-freak responsible for a church drama queen project called “Christo-Drama”) are to be scorned, not pitied. Both were adults, both were safe, both had no idea what to do with money except that someone else always ended up paying for their self-indulgence.
Gays should stay the heck out of church. They don’t want you there and it just gives you another excuse to go mincing around in silk and lace. Gays and religion deserve each other.