Ex-Archbishop Speaks About Catholic Church and Homosexuality

[Daniel]

An autobiography by a retired archbishop...who is gay.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us...pagewanted=all

Ex-Archbishop Speaks About Catholic Church and Homosexuality

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: May 14, 2009

In spring 2002, as the scandal over sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests was escalating, the long career of Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, one of the church’s most venerable voices for change, went up in flames one May morning.

On the ABC program “Good Morning America,” the archbishop watched a man he had fallen in love with 23 years earlier say in an interview that the Milwaukee archdiocese had paid him $450,000 years before to keep quiet about his affair with the archbishop — an affair the man was now calling date rape.

The next day, the Vatican accepted Archbishop Weakland’s retirement.

Archbishop Weakland, who had been the intellectual touchstone for church reformers, has said little publicly since then. But now, in an interview and in a memoir scheduled for release next month, he is speaking out about how internal church politics affected his response to the fallout from his affair; how bishops and the Vatican cared more about the rights of abusive priests than about their victims; and why Catholic teaching on homosexuality is wrong.

“If we say our God is an all-loving god,” he said, “how do you explain that at any given time probably 400 million living on the planet at one time would be gay? Are the religions of the world, as does Catholicism, saying to those hundreds of millions of people, you have to pass your whole life without any physical, genital expression of that love?”

He said he had been aware of his homosexual orientation since he was a teenager and suppressed it until he became archbishop, when he had relationships with several men because of “loneliness that became very strong.”

Archbishop Weakland, 82, said he was probably the first bishop to come out of the closet voluntarily. He said he was doing so not to excuse his actions but to give an honest account of why it happened and to raise questions about the church’s teaching that homosexuality is “objectively disordered.”

“Those are bad words because they are pejorative,” he said.

Archbishop Weakland’s autobiography, “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church” (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), covers his hardscrabble youth in Pennsylvania, his election as the worldwide leader of the Benedictine Order and his appointment by Pope Paul VI to the archbishop’s seat in Milwaukee, where he served for 25 years.

“He was one of the most gifted leaders in the post-Vatican II church in America,” said the Rev. Jim Martin, a Jesuit priest and associate editor of America, a Catholic magazine, “and certainly beloved by the left, and sadly that gave his critics more ammunition.”

In an interview at the Archbishop Weakland Center, which houses the archdiocesan cathedral offices in downtown Milwaukee, Archbishop Weakland said the church opened itself to change in the 1960s and ’70s after the Second Vatican Council but became increasingly centralized and doctrinally rigid under Pope John Paul II.

Archbishop Weakland was among those who publicly questioned the need for a male-only celibate priesthood. He also led American bishops in a two-year process of writing a pastoral letter on economic justice, holding hearings on the subject across the country.

A later effort by the American bishops to issue a pastoral letter on women was quashed by the Vatican, he said, because the Vatican did not want to give the national bishops conferences the authority to issue sweeping teaching documents.

The archbishop said it was partly because of his strained relations with Pope John Paul II that he did not tell Vatican officials in 1997 when he was threatened with a lawsuit by Paul J. Marcoux, the man with whom he had a relationship nearly 20 years before and who had appeared on “Good Morning America.”

Mr. Marcoux said then that he had been deprived of income from marketing a project he called “Christodrama” because of Archbishop Weakland’s interference. Archbishop Weakland said he probably should have gone to Rome and explained that he had had a relationship with Mr. Marcoux, that he had ended it by writing an emotional letter that Mr. Marcoux still had and that the archbishop’s lawyers regarded Mr. Marcoux’s threats as blackmail.

But, the archbishop said, a highly placed friend in Rome advised him that church officials preferred that such things be hushed up, which is “the Roman way.”

“I suppose, also, being frank, I wouldn’t have wanted to be labeled in Rome at that point as gay,” Archbishop Weakland said. “Rome is a little village.”

Asked if he had regrets about the $450,000 payment to Mr. Marcoux, he said, “I certainly worry about the sum.”

The morning in 2002 that Mr. Marcoux surfaced on national television, Archbishop Weakland said he phoned the pope’s representative, or apostolic nuncio, in Washington — Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo — who, he said, told him, “Of course you are going to deny it.”

Archbishop Weakland said he told the nuncio that while he could deny emphatically that it was date rape, “I can’t deny that something happened between us.” (Archbishop Montalvo died in 2006.)

Archbishop Weakland is still pained that his scandal, involving a man in his 30s, became intertwined with the larger church scandal over child sexual abuse.

But at the time, many Catholics in Milwaukee said they were angrier about the secret settlement with Mr. Marcoux than with the sexual liaison.

Archbishop Weakland and the Milwaukee archdiocese are also the target of several lawsuits accusing them of failing to remove abusive priests, allowing more minors to be victimized.

In the interview, he blamed psychologists for advising bishops that perpetrators could be treated and returned to work, and he blamed the Vatican’s tribunals for spending years debating whether to remove abusers from the priesthood. In one case, he said, the Vatican courts took so long deciding whether to defrock a priest who had abused dozens of deaf students that the priest died before a decision was reached.

“The concern was more about the priests than about the victims,” Archbishop Weakland said.

In Milwaukee, Peter Isely, the Midwest director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said Archbishop Weakland ultimately failed his people.

Mr. Isely pointed out that while Archbishop Weakland was waiting for the Vatican courts to defrock abusive priests, he allowed them to continue working in ministry without informing parishioners of their past. And he said the $450,000 payment was particularly galling to victims because many received “no compensation whatsoever.”

In June, Archbishop Weakland, who has been living in a Catholic retirement community since his resignation, is moving to St. Mary’s Abbey in Morristown, N.J., where he said he would be closer to his family in Pennsylvania and grow old in the care of a community of Benedictine monks.

[Gennee]

I remember the scandal but not all of the particulars. Why the diocese would hush up all this is appaling. If they knew about priest who were pedophiles, then the church neglected its duty to defrock them.

It's amazing that Archbishop Weakland being gay was more important than ridding the church of abusive priests and pedophiles. The diocese failed the people, not the archbishop.

Gennee

[Dakota]

I feel sorry for all of the children who were abused by Catholic priests. I've never understood why the Catholic Church is so bent on banning gay priests and on keeping priests celibate, while covering up the child sex abuse scandal at the same time. It makes me sad.

[Gennee]

Originally Posted by Dakota

I feel sorry for all of the children who were abused by Catholic priests. I've never understood why the Catholic Church is so bent on banning gay priests and on keeping priests celibate, while covering up the child sex abuse scandal at the same time. It makes me sad.

Celibacy is not a principle found in scripture. It was instituted by the Catholic Church under the premise that one will serve God more fully if not married. I believe they use 1 Corinthians 7 as a guideline. The apostle Paul never said that a person shouldn't marry. He did desire that people could be as he was but he also stated that not it was not wrong to marry.

Gennee

[u-dog]

Actually Genee, the reason that they instituted celibacy (in about the 11th century) was to keep Bishop's seats from being passed from father to son in the way that fuedal lands and titles were. The 1 Corinthians passage was just rationalization.

[Daniel]

Agree with you U-dog. The genesis of celibacy has its roots in keeping families from claiming church property as their own. What a world...what a world!

Curious it is then, that Boswell records that this is the same period (11th-12 century) that the Church was performing a marriage ceremony between two priests.

Sounds like they wanted to keep everything in the family....a gay one! Yes...I am stretching things a bit I suppose. But it's an interesting juxtaposition, is it not?

[pianoplayer66]

Curious it is then, that Boswell records that this is the same period (11th-12 century) that the Church was performing a marriage ceremony between two priests.


Where is the documentation for this? This is worth reading! I didn't know about this before.

[Daniel]

Originally Posted by pianoplayer66

Curious it is then, that Boswell records that this is the same period (11th-12 century) that the Church was performing a marriage ceremony between two priests.


Where is the documentation for this? This is worth reading! I didn't know about this before.

The documentation is in Bowell's tome Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Boswell, John, Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, (New York: Villard, 1994) [British title: The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe]

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/index-bos.html

These are serious academic works, highly researched and now considered reference volumes on the subject of same-sex sexuality in medieval Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boswell

Boswell was the author of the ground-breaking and controversial book Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980), which, according to Chauncey et al. (1989), "offered a revolutionary interpretation of the Western tradition, arguing that the Roman Catholic Church had not condemned gay people throughout its history, but rather, at least until the twelfth century, had alternately evinced no special concern about homosexuality or actually celebrated love between men." The book was crowned with the American Book Award for History and the Stonewall Book Award in 1981.

He is known primarily, however, as author of The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (New York: Villard, 1994), in which he argues that the adelphopoiia liturgy was evidence that the attitude of the Christian church towards homosexuality has changed over time, and that early Christians did on occasion accept same-sex relationships.

Rites of so-called "same-sex union" (Boswell's proposed translation) occur in ancient prayer-books of both the western and eastern churches. They are rites of adelphopoiesis, literally Greek for the making of brothers. Boswell, despite the fact that the rites explicitly state that the union involved in adelphopoiesis is a "spiritual" and not a "carnal" one, argued that these should be regarded as sexual unions similar to marriage. This is a highly controversial point of Boswell's text, as other scholars have dissenting views of this interpretation, and believe that they were instead rites of becoming adopted brothers, or "blood brothers". Boswell pointed out such evidence as an icon of two saints, Saints Sergius and Bacchus (at St. Catherine's on Mount Sinai), and drawings, such as one he interprets as depicting the wedding feast of Emperor Basil to his "partner", John. Boswell sees Jesus as fulfilling the role of the "pronubus" or in modern parallel, best man.

~

Although Boswell's earlier works did much to break down the taboo surrounding the serious study of homosexuality in American academia, by the end of his life Boswell was out of step with the main current of scholarly opinion. During the late 1980s, the influence of Michel Foucault's writings led to the emergence of a social constructivist view of human sexuality which emphasised the historical and cultural specificity of sexual identities such as 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual'. Despite Boswell's friendly relations with Foucault, he remained adamantly opposed to the French theorist's views, which he characterised as a reemergence of medieval nominalism, and defended his own strident essentialism in the face of changing academic fashions. Since his death, Boswell's work has come under criticism from medievalists and queer theorists, who – while acknowledging his personal courage in bringing the issue of sexuality into the academy – have pointed out the anachronism of speaking of 'gay people' in premodern societies, and have questioned the validity of Boswell's conclusions. Several other scholars, including Terry Castle and Ruth Vanita, have followed in Boswell's footsteps, building up the field of lesbian and gay studies (as distinct from queer theory), and demonstrating that categorizations of humans by sexual predilection much predate the nineteenth century (where Foucault and his followers wrongly place it), both in the West (as in Plato's Symposium) and in other cultures (e.g. India).

Boswell's work remains virtually unmatched for its erudition, immersion in the sources, and precision.

I could not agree more!

Written by a much missed scholar at Yale: Boswell died of AIDS in the 90's, not living to benefit from protease inhibitors. An immense loss!

[Neon Genesis]

Originally Posted by Gennee

Celibacy is not a principle found in scripture. It was instituted by the Catholic Church under the premise that one will serve God more fully if not married. I believe they use 1 Corinthians 7 as a guideline. The apostle Paul never said that a person shouldn't marry. He did desire that people could be as he was but he also stated that not it was not wrong to marry.

Gennee

Not only is it not mentioned, but 1st Timothy 3:2-5 says that bishops can have wives

The saying is sure:* whoever aspires to the office of bishop* desires a noble task. 2Now a bishop* must be above reproach, married only once,* temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, 3not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. 4He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way— 5for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church?

If the Catholic church still accepts 1st Timothy as literal scripture, then they're preaching the opposite of 1st Timothy.

[BishopIoan]

Originally Posted by Gennee

I remember the scandal but not all of the particulars. Why the diocese would hush up all this is appaling. If they knew about priest who were pedophiles, then the church neglected its duty to defrock them.

It's amazing that Archbishop Weakland being gay was more important than ridding the church of abusive priests and pedophiles. The diocese failed the people, not the archbishop.

Gennee

Gennee. hi after a long absence!
I have never understood this myself. I am semi-retired but if a gay priest came to me and wished for me to be his bishop I would have no problem with it. The Friends' Catholic Communion has a zero-tolerance policy towards pedophiles. Upon applying, the priest or ordination candidate must submit a crime check--we do not take people with felonies on their record, most of all sexual crimes such as rape, child molestation, etc. If a priest is accused of such a crime, he is suspended pending trial and if found guilty, is promptly defrocked.

How on earth being a gay man is worse than being a rapist or child sexual abuser is more important and major grounds for defrockment is beyond me. I feel awful that so many children have been abused by those who should hve been a safe person.