A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, Rembert G Weakland, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 2009

A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church

By Rembert G. Weakland
Philadelphia Inquirer
July 5, 2009

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment/books/20090705_In_defense_of_his_own_theology.html

From the book jacket

In a searching memoir sure to revive Catholic disputes, Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland recounts the pivotal decision he faced early in life: whether to become a monk or a musician. He chose the monastery, because, as he explains, "as a concert pianist, I would be an 'also ran' not the best."

That didn't stop him from studying piano at prestigious Juilliard or eventually earning a doctorate in music from Columbia University in the course of becoming an illustrious abbot, abbot primate of the entire Benedictine order, and, for 25 years, archbishop of Milwaukee.

Playing against type, therefore, he became a virtuoso public reformer as a monk, while his virtuoso musical talents were exercised mostly in monkish solitude.

As a gifted church leader, he became a beacon of liberal Catholicism for, among other things, his advocacy of a married priesthood, an enhanced role for women in the church, a greater role for the laity, and a shift of power downward from Vatican exclusivity.

After nearly 50 years of testing limits and rethinking theology, his world came crashing down. In 2002, he confessed to having paid hush money to a man with whom he had an affair of "several months" in 1979. He describes it in the book as "romantic infatuation on my part." He promptly resigned as archbishop after the affair became public knowledge.

Some conservative Catholics linked his departure to his theological liberalism, which presumably fostered permissiveness. Many liberals, on the other hand, fretted that Weakland's violations might overshadow his long advocacy of a more democratic church.

Weakland's affinity for monasticism's collaborative style, which resisted autocratic rule, conditioned him to embrace the Second Vatican Council's redefinition of the church in non-hierarchical terms as the "people of God." The new vision proposed "shared authority" between hierarchy and laity.

For decades, as he writes in detail, he carried that banner against the gathering forces of opposition that sought to retain the old top-down chain of command that demanded unquestioned loyalty to Rome.

Whereas the centralizing forces, led most forcefully by Pope John Paul II, insisted on what Weakland calls the "military" structure of total conformity, his view of the church, drawn from Vatican II, is mixed rule, as in the sharing of responsibilities between the federal government and the states in America.

Though he defends his reform agenda, he can be critical of his own leadership. He concedes, for example, that he made egregious mistakes in his handling of child abuse by priests in his archdiocese before the national scandal erupted. He relied on the mistaken rehab-counsel-and-return advice of an earlier time, he says, which wrongly focused on the abuser rather than the victim.

On the world stage, his position as a self-described "free spirit," visible, smart, and outspoken, made him a target of guardians of the status quo. In Rome, he says, he was regularly singled out for reprimand, often on the basis of accusations from U.S. Catholics.

Pope Paul VI had been his ally and father figure, Weakland says, citing one meeting in which the pope responded to Weakland's critics by giving him "100 percent support."

By comparison, his relationship with Pope John Paul II was strained. The pope was "stubborn," Weakland writes, and insistent on total obedience, qualities that clashed with Weakland's impulse toward dialogue, his disdain of authoritarianism, and his respect for differences.

As described by Weakland, the pope's response to Weakland's reports was barely more than a grunt, all the while not looking him in the eye.

He takes issue with John Paul for his treatment of those who disagreed with him and for his strong exercise of papal authority, but admires his spiritual qualities.

The memoir is never less than a fascinating insider's look at church politics. His observations are close-up. He esteems Paul VI's outlook and demeanor, but thinks the Pope's desire to avoid post-Vatican II schism made him an ineffective leader.

Much of Weakland's story deals with the struggle over authority in the church. The curia, the tightly knit bureaucracy (called the world's oldest) that runs the Vatican, fought to regain the control over the church that Vatican II had whittled away. With the support of the succeeding popes, curia cardinals reasserted Vatican control, tightening rules and punishing dissenters. Provinces of the church that were exercising what they believed to be new freedoms were told to desist and obey Rome.

Weakland was in the thick of those struggles, none more visible than in his assignment by the U.S. bishops to create a pastoral letter on the U.S. economy. The document decried growing poverty, endorsed unions, denounced worker exploitation, and urged cooperation among private and public sectors to help cure social ills. Days before it was made public, it was attacked by Michael Novak and former Treasury Secretary William Simon as an assault on the sanctity of free enterprise. William F. Buckley Jr. assailed Weakland as a socialist.

Weakland dwells less on the content of that or other such pastoral letters than on the right of national conferences of bishops to issue them. He had been a strong defender of that right as a natural responsibility of local bishops and a check on Vatican authority. Rome finally ruled that the conferences had no right to teach on their own.

Weakland's stand deepened his reputation as a rogue - a "controversial" figure and "the most liberal" bishop in America, in the eyes of the press. Long before he left Milwaukee in 2002, he recalls, "Rome had written me off."

"If I had a weakness," he writes wryly, "it was that I seemed unable to keep from uttering my opinions even when they were not welcome in high places."

Weakland's memoir is a vivid, insightful panorama of a life that began as the child of a mother on welfare in western Pennsylvania and took him through the most momentous decades of recent church history.

Elected head of St. Vincent Archabbey in 1963 at age 36, he was elevated four years later to abbot primate of the Benedictine order around the world. A decade after that, Paul VI named him archbishop of Milwaukee. Though rightist Catholics in his diocese regularly complained to the Vatican, Weakland sought to make the archdiocese into the more open, interactive model he cherished.

The scandal that brought him low was a moral lapse and a bungled response to it. Weakland's lover was then in his 30s. In the biggest mistake he says he ever made, Weakland succumbed to the man's demand for money to keep the affair quiet. With the assistance of a key archdiocesan finance office, he gave the man $450,000 from church building funds to settle out of court. Weakland asserts that the money was paid back by friends.

The book is Weakland's brief to prevent his enemies from exploiting the scandal to discredit his entire ministry. Denouncing ploys "to make someone's weaknesses, especially sexual, into a demeaning form of public entertainment," he adds, "I do not want my life to be used in such a way." He believes he has already lost his "good name."

His memoir captures a Catholic High Noon. It is not a defense of his sexual affair (which has nothing to do with priest child abuse), but a defense of the theology to which his life has been committed and to the cause of reform.

For starters, he writes, the church could make progress by ridding itself of arrogance, perfection, and omniscience. Otherwise, he says, "I am at peace with my God, with my church, and with myself."

His articulate case will be in the hands of his readers.