In his long career, he was an intellectual touchstone for progressive Catholic reformers. But he resigned after an allegation and died  at 95 on Aug. 22

Robert D. McFadden

Rembert G. Weakland, a Benedictine monk who became a leading liberal voice within the Catholic Church and served for 25 years as archbishop of Milwaukee, resigning his post in 2002 amid revelations of a financial settlement with a man who had been his lover decades earlier, died Aug. 22 at a retirement centre in Greenfield, Wis.

For years, until his embattled final days in office, Archbishop Weakland was one of the most prominent American prelates in the Catholic Church. He was by all accounts a formidable intellect — he spoke six languages and was a musical prodigy who had studied at Juilliard as well as the seminary — and brought to his ministry a compelling personal story.

One of six children raised by their widowed mother during the Depression, he said the Catholic schools he attended in Pennsylvania were “undoubtedly” his “ladder out of poverty.” In the 1960s, he became head of the worldwide Benedictine order and, under Pope Paul VI, received an appointment to help institute the liturgical changes of the Second Vatican Council, which sought to modernize the centuries-old practices and positions of the church.

Paul VI also elevated Archbishop Weakland in 1977 to his post in Milwaukee, where he led the archdiocese’s nearly 700,000 Catholics. In that role, he continued to promote the liberalization of the church, at times clashing with the more conservative Pope John Paul II, whose papacy began in 1978. In a church publication, Archbishop Weaklandonce called on Catholic leaders to “avoid the fanaticism and small-mindedness that has characterized so many periods of the church in its history — tendencies that lead to much cruelty, suppression of theological creativity and lack of growth.”

To make up for the shortfall of priests, Archbishop Weakland supported the ordination of married men, a position rejected by the Vatican. He promoted expanded ecclesiastical roles for women and appeared to challenge the church’s opposition to abortion and contraception by convening “listening sessions” in which he invited women to discuss those and other matters.

He was perhaps most outspoken on social justice and particularly economic justice, helping shepherd a pastoral letter from U.S. bishops in 1986 that described poverty and income disparities in the United States as “a social and moral scandal.” The document, which also decried poverty abroad, implicitly criticized the Reagan administration by calling out the “serious distortion of national economic priorities produced by massive national spending on defence” instead of social programs.

“Every economic decision and institution must be judged in light of whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person,” Archbishop Weakland said when the letter was released.

Despite his disagreements with more conservative prelates, Archbishop Weakland remained a visible and influential force in the church until 2002, when, in accordance with church practice, he offered his resignation to the Vatican at age 75. That occasion, however, coincided with revelations of a relationship that he had had two decades earlier with a theology student at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

The former student, Paul Marcoux, by then in his 50s, appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and accused Archbishop Weakland of committing what he called date rape during their relationship. Archbishop Weakland acknowledged having had an “inappropriate relationship” with Marcoux but vehemently denied having ever committed sexual abuse.  In a 2009 memoir, “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church,”

Archbishop Weakland wrote that as archbishop, with authority over offending priests, he had handled their cases improperly.

“I had accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects [of abuse] on the youngsters,” he wrote. “Either they would not remember or would ‘grow out of it.’ ”

On Archbishop Weakland’s request, Pope John Paul II accelerated his retirement process and accepted his resignation shortly after he turned 75.

George Samuel Weakland was born in Patton, Pa., on April 2, 1927. (He took the name Rembert when he became a Benedictine monk.) His father, who ran a hotel that was destroyed in a fire, died of pneumonia when Archbishop Weakland was 5. His siblings at the time ranged in age from 6 months to 8 or 9 years.

Their mother, barely able to provide for her children, moved them to a home with no central heating.

“I just took it for granted all mothers would haul in the coal, and chop the wood,” the future archbishop told The Washington Post years later. “I remember those winters with her sleeping on the couch in the living room and keeping the fires going through the night.”

In the morning, he added, “we would run out of that bed, down, and of course the fires were always going and things were always the way they should be.”

A pastor at the local church noticed Archbishop Weakland’s musical talents and arranged free piano lessons from a nun. He was educated at Saint Vincent College, a Benedictine school in Latrobe, Pa., and was ordained as a priest in 1951. The Benedictine order encouraged his musical studies, sending him to the Juilliard School and eventually to Columbia University, where he received a doctoral degree in music in 2000. He led the Benedictine order from 1967 until his appointment as archbishop in 1977.

Archbishop Weakland wrote extensively in his memoir about his abiding struggle with his sexuality. He realized when he was in his teens that he was gay, he wrote, but “feared even admitting it to myself.” He allowed himself to pursue relationships with men after becoming archbishop, he told the New York Times, because of “loneliness that became very strong.”

He also expressed his regret about the church’s treatment of victims of sexual abuse by priests.“If I have any sadness, it is that we have made too little progress in understanding and helping victims regain a full life,” he wrote. “Too many seem to be left in anger.”

An intellectual touchstone for progressive Catholic reformers, Archbishop Weakland, over the course of a distinguished if often controversial half-century career, was head of the worldwide order of Benedictine monks for a decade, presided in a rocky tenure over the Milwaukee archdiocese’s 700,000 Catholics, wrote many books and was an influential voice among the nation’s Catholic bishops.

But after an ecclesiastical life that lifted him from poverty in a Pennsylvania coal town to one step below the College of Cardinals — he was the recipient of more than 35 honorary degrees, international acclaim as a voice for change, and even talk that he might someday be the first American pope.

In an interview with Laurie Goldstein, New York Times, May 14, 2009 , Weakland said: “’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?’

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

In the 1980s and ’90s, Archbishop Weakland had been a thorny problem for the Vatican. Addressing issues that troubled many of America’s more than 60 million Catholics, he championed new roles for women.

He also became a leading critic of America’s economic and social policies during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, drafting a landmark.

“We believe that the level of inequality in income and wealth in our society, and even more the inequality on the world scale today, must be judged morally unacceptable,” Archbishop Weakland told reporters in Washington in 1984 when he issued recommendations for sweeping changes to deal with hunger, homelessness and racial discrimination.

Archbishop Weakland had a depth of experience in world issues, and in literary and artistic matters, that was rare among bishops, whose backgrounds were often more parochial. He travelled widely in undeveloped countries, spoke six languages and was a gifted musician who once considered a career as a concert pianist.

But his church career took a different track. In 1967 he was elected abbot primate of the Benedictine order, in charge of some 12,000 monks. In 1977,

The archdiocese was a conservative, largely blue-collar community in a town known for breweries and bowling. His views were resisted by many parishioners and by the Vatican, where the long papacy of John Paul II favoured a conservative and centralized approach to doctrinal matters.

From 1957 to 1963 he taught music at St. Vincent College, where he became chancellor and board chairman. From 1967 to 1977 he led the Benedictine order, traveling widely and winning the confidence of Paul VI. He was popular with his 255 priests, granting them considerable autonomy over their 234 parishes.

His 1980s “listening sessions,” at which he let women air their views on abortion and birth control, prompted the Vatican to forbid the Dominican-affiliated University of Fribourg in Switzerland to give him an honorary degree in 1990. By then he already had 15 honorary degrees; he would collect 21 more before his homosexuality was disclosed.

After resigning, he lived in an apartment in Milwaukee. His plans to move to church facilities in Morristown, N.J., in 2009, and to Latrobe in 2014 fell through over publicity surrounding his homosexuality.

Archbishop Weakland was the author or co-author of a dozen books on topics including Catholic education and the church since the liberalizing Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. In 2009 he published “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop,” which discussed church reforms and also addressed his homosexuality. In the 2009 interview with The Times, which was conducted just before the book’s publication, he disputed the Catholic view that homosexuality was “intrinsically disordered.”

“If we say our God is an all-loving god, how do you explain that at any given time probably 400 million living on the planet at one time would be gay?” he asked. “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?’”