Rembert Weakland, RIP. America's most destructive prelate

UPDATE: It gets worse - he was buried out of the Milwaukee Cathedral. How dumb are these people? What he did was much worse than McCarrick. He should have been buried quietly in a private ceremony.

At one time Weakland was a hugely influential Archbishop. Not mentioned below, he covered up for Fr. Lawrence Murphy, a pedophile accused of molesting more than 200 boys at a school for deaf children. Murphy, who died thinking he'd done nothing wrong (I remember the publicity), was checking on boy's circumcision while they were in the confessional...

See here from First Things - the whole article takes six or seven minutes to read.

Rembert Weakland, former archbishop of Milwaukee and the first American to serve as primate of the Benedictine Order, passed away earlier this week at the age of ninety-five. He had a remarkable ecclesiastical career: abbot of St. Vincent Archabbey in Pennsylvania at age thirty-six, primate of the world’s Benedictines at forty, and archbishop of Milwaukee for twenty-five years, from 1977 to 2002. He was also one of the most destructive, imprudent figures in recent Catholic history.

In 1977, Weakland was appointed archbishop of Milwaukee. One of his early acts was to take a lover, Paul Marcoux. In his memoir, excusing himself, he notes that he “missed the ready companionship of my fellow Benedictines.” Things with Marcoux went south after a few months, and Weakland sent him a letter shoving him off and moving on to better things, or, as he puts it in A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: “Somewhat on the rebound, I was caught up over the next few years in an effort to find an intimate relationship with another.”

As archbishop, Weakland courted not only lovers but controversy. A good specimen of his pastoral finesse is the op-ed he wrote for the Catholic Herald in 1988, distinguishing between pedophilia and ephebophilia and defending the practice of keeping serial sexual abusers in ministry: “Sometimes not all adolescent victims are so ‘innocent’; some can be sexually very active and aggressive and often quite streetwise. (We frequently try such adolescents for crimes as adults at that age.) Pastorally, such cases are difficult to treat.” These comments caused an uproar, making it evident that Weakland and his cronies were completely unserious about protecting children from priests. In his memoir he still attempts to justify it all, saying that his tolerant attitude toward ephebophilia “grew out of my experience in Europe and my travels around the world.”   

At the end of his tenure as archbishop, Weakland’s lover Marcoux returned, alleging not only a relationship but that Weakland had raped him. Weakland had the diocesan lawyers pay him $450,000 as part of a nondisclosure agreement. In what is probably the crown jewel in his tiara of effrontery and entitlement, he manages to blame this situation on his meager compensation as archbishop: “There was another way I felt hemmed in, held hostage by the Church. . . . I . . . never had monies sufficient for purchasing anything substantial of my own. . . . The fact was that as a bishop there was no way for me to take care of an extraordinary personal need. I had to fall back on my dependency on the Church.”

 

 

Comments

[Peter Marengo]

A true wolf in sheep’s cloth. I hope and pray that he repented.

[tom faranda]

See the update above. What is wrong with our so-called leadership?

[Peter Paul Lepre]

It is time that we run to Our Lord's Love and Mercy and sit before Him in The Blessed Sacrament... Our Lord waits for us to give us all the graces we need to address the scope and horror of this and all our problems... His angry and hurt because of malformed prelates cries out in justice yet this is still a time of Mercy and we must respond and run to Him now for all we need to listen to His Sacred Heart... '' Man will not have Peace until he comes to My mercy... Diary of Saint Faustina