REMBERT WEAKLAND-CORRUPT ARCHBISHOP OF MILWAUKEE

"Many orthodox Catholics have wondered for weeks why the sex-abuse scandal has hit America's more conservative bishops — Law of Boston and Egan of New York — hardest. Not any longer: Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, the most liberal bishop in America, has been disgraced by the revelation that he paid $450,000 in hush money to buy the silence of an apparent former male lover.

...The alleged ex-lover, Paul Macoux, is calling his decades-old encounter with Weakland "sexual abuse," but from what we know now, that's not the case. Macoux, 54, was at least in his late 20s when he began a relationship with Weakland, and from an 11-page, handwritten 1980 "Dear Paul" letter Weakland wrote to Macoux, it appears that the archbishop and his paramour had a consensual relationship, one that Weakland ended when he decided to begin honoring his vow of celibacy.

The letter reveals Weakland, archbishop of Milwaukee since 1977, to have been in "deep love" with Marcoux, who comes off as a manipulative grifter who looked to the archbishop, 21 years his senior, as a sugar daddy. Responding to Marcoux's apparent request for more money to fund a personal project, Weakland tells him that the $14,000 he had already given Marcoux "is really my personal limit."

"I feel you are putting me in an impossible situation here," the archbishop wrote. "I consider all that Church money as a sacred trust; it represents the offerings of the faithful and I must be accountable to them for how it is all spent. There are hundreds of requests on my desk for funds for worthy causes, for inner-city projects, to the elderly, to the handicapped, etc."

Yet 18 years later, facing the threat of a civil suit by Marcoux, Weakland directed his archdiocese to fork over $450,000 to buy Marcoux's silence. On Thursday, Milwaukee County Attorney Michael McCann told reporters Weakland had confessed to him that he had had a "troubling" relationship with an adult male, and was afraid he was going to be extorted because of it. McCann now says he will consider appointing a special prosecutor to find out where the hush money came from.

..."The best compliment I received, then, came from a religious superior in Rome who said: 'Rome does not know what to do with Weakland. He is a free man.' I feel I have been able to maintain my own dignity and identity through it all."

Here's a tiny portion of what the Free Man of Milwaukee has meant for the Church in his city: He directed Catholic schools there to teach kids how to use condoms as part of AIDS education, and approved a graphic sex-education program for parochial-school kids that taught "there is no right and wrong" on the issues of abortion, contraception and premarital sex. He has advocated for gay rights and women's ordination, bitterly criticized Pope John Paul II, denounced pro-lifers as "fundamentalist," and declared that one could be both pro-choice and a Catholic in good standing."
National Review

"Weakland also writes about his failures to stop sexually abusive priests. In a videotaped deposition released last November, Weakland admitted returning guilty priests to active ministry without alerting parishioners or police.

"Any deposition is just a part of a whole picture and that picture has not been painted yet. And anybody can take out of that any sentence they want," Weakland said in the interview.

"I try to deal with this, I hope in an honest way, admitting my weaknesses in not being able to see this earlier, but at the same time doing what I could confront it."

Advocates for abuse victims said that Weakland's cover-up of his own sexual activity was part of a pattern of secrecy that included concealing the criminal behavior of child molesters."
Huffington Post

I thought that perhaps, in light of the current sex scandal in the Church, and particularly the problems surrounding Father Murphy and the media's attempt to tie the Pope to them, it would be good to take a look at the then Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland. Much has been made of the two letters sent to Rome by the Archbishop in 1996, 19 years after he took over the archdiocese and forty years after the abuse started. The media, and the New York Times in particular, have attempted to portray Weakland as a crusader for the children, as a man acting in a selfless and holy manner, only to be rejected by Rome or, more importantly, by Cardinal Ratzinger himself.

In reality Weakland was a corrupt, homosexual modernist that did nothing about Father Murphy or the kids he harmed for 19 years as Archbishop. It was only when allegations of abuse in the confessional surfaced that the case was forwarded to Rome because the authority to deal with this abuse lies in the CDF. Weakland could no longer contain it.

Weakland was a darling of the leftist media in this country because he was one of them in political inclination, lifestyle and in the way he managed his archdiocese. In the stories that have been published of late he is treated as some sort of hero instead of the sexual degenerate he was. We see no reporting on his history as Archbishop or his payoffs, from Church funds, to his gay lover. We only see the saintly Archbishop fighting against the oppressive powers of the evil Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome.

The excerpt from the article below comes from the New York Times and is written by Laurie Goodstein, who, and I'm sure this is just a coincidence, is one of the writers, along with Maureen Dowd, at the Times that is currently heading up the pogrom against the Pope. Note the sympathy shown Weakland in the article below. Goodstein glosses over the payoff to his gay lover while focusing on Weakland's loneliness, his intellectualism and his belief that the teaching of the Church on homosexuality is wrong (couldn't the case for a conflict of interest be made here?).

The modernist, progressive, Marxist bent of the media, especially the at the Times, can no longer be tolerated. It has become a weapon of destruction aimed at the institutions that support our society. It is being used by those that seek a Marxist Utopia to weaken and eventually eradicate all that can create a barrier to their Satanic dreams. The entire paper has become an editorial, with reporting designed to sway opinion, not convey fact.

Since we have freedom of the press, that's OK. They can do what they want. Let the market decide. Unfortunately, since the Times is the paper of record, the dribble it publishes is passed on as fact through so many other media outlets that the story becomes gospel through sheer repetitive power. And since most professional journalists today either can't or are not allowed to do their job, balance is nowhere to be found.

"Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee was one of the Catholic Church's most venerable voices for change until 2002 when he resigned amid revelations that he had used church money to pay a $450,000 settlement to a man with whom he had had a relationship years earlier.

Archbishop Weakland, who had been the intellectual touchstone for church reformers, has written a memoir scheduled for release in June 2009. In it he speaks out about how internal church politics affected his response to the fallout from his romantic 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.

On ABC's "Good Morning America" in 2002, the man the archbishop had fallen in love with 23 years earlier said the Milwaukee archdiocese paid him $450,000 years before to keep quiet about the affair.

Archbishbop Weakland 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." He said he was probably the first Catholic bishop to come out of the closet voluntarily."