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	Rembert the Gutless By Rod Dreher Beliefnet May 15, 2009 http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/05/rembert-the-gutless.html In today's New York Times, the retired ultra-liberal Catholic Archbishop of Milwaukee, who stepped down a few years ago after it was revealed that he paid off a former male lover $450,000 in church funds to keep quiet about their affair, continues his narcissistic bloviating: 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. Shorter Rembert: God can't be loving if He expects people like me to be chaste, and the Catholic Church is mean because it describes my condition in a way that hurts my feelings. I have so little patience for this kind of thing. I concede that it's an extremely difficult thing to face the prospect of living your whole life without the possibility of sexual love. Any heterosexual Christian who is unlikely to marry lives with this too. Up until the day before yesterday, all Christian churches everywhere have taught since the beginning that the only licit form of sexual expression is between a man and woman bound in holy matrimony. Period. Hetero or homo, anything outside of that is sin. Period. Some innovative churches have talked themselves into believing otherwise. But the teaching of Scripture, and of the Catholic Church (which is not, of course, binding on non-Catholics, but is binding on Rembert), is quite clear. It is the height of arrogance to presume that only we Americans, in the late 20th and early 21st century, have finally figured out what God must have meant about sexual ethics. Besides, how is it that a gay archbishop who by his own confession had multiple homosexual affairs, and in one of them paid his lover nearly half a million dollars -- money that he stole from the Church, mind you -- now suddenly becomes an authority on what Catholic teaching should be, or a moral authority on anything? Where is the integrity? You know what would require real courage by him in this culture? Defending the teaching of the Church he purports to believe in and serve. The Christian life means dying to self. That means dying to anything that keeps us from fulfilling God's will, and becoming like Christ. If any one of us -- straight or gay -- has no trouble dying to himself, then we are overlooking something important in our own lives. Christianity is not for the egotists; it is the negation of ego, and paradoxically, it's proper fulfillment. Mercy on sinners -- and all of us are sinners -- does not require that we deny that sin is sin. One reason why homosexuality is breaking apart churches is not because of bigotry; it's because traditionalists rightly understand that if the churches yield doctrinal and Scriptural orthodoxy on this point, even out of a sense of compassion (and truly, anyone who doesn't feel compassion for a gay or lesbian Christian facing a lifetime of chastity hasn't thought seriously enough about the Cross these brothers and sisters in Christ are asked to carry), then the churches have given away far, far more than they can afford to. We do not have the right to judge Scripture and Tradition; Scripture and Tradition judge us. I understand, of course, that there are Christian traditions that take a different view. The Roman Catholic tradition is not one of them. To justify his own sins, the ex-archbishop wishes to change 20 centuries of authoritative Catholic teaching about sexuality and anthropology. Why not just become an Episcopalian, and leave the people who believe that the Catholic Church is what she claims to be -- the authoritative teacher of the faith handed down to the Apostles -- alone to work out their salvation in obedience to Catholic truth? Rembert is a fraud. But this is not news. Writing in 2002, after Abp Weakland's exposure, the always-pungent John Zmirak pondered the tragedy of the once-promising Weakland's life and ecclesial career, and how Weakland had done so much damage to the Church with his various "reforms." But even now, Zmirak said, Weakland could see what he had done, and repent. Seven years on, it appears that far from repenting, Rembert is still having a pity party. I'll give him this, though: he's probably telling the truth about the Church hierarchy's inability to deal honestly and forthrightly with the problem it has of sexually active gay clergy. From the NYT story: 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.) I have absolutely no trouble believing that. Denial has been the way the Church hierarchy has dealt not only with the abuse crisis, but with the fact that so many of its clergy and episcopate are gay, and not celibate (this, alas, is not just a Catholic problem -- we Orthodox suffer from it too, worldwide, as a recent scandal in Greece showed). Weakland admitted that he'd shuffled priest sex abusers from parish to parish, without telling parishioners -- just like so many other Catholic bishops did, even conservative ones. What we may never know, though, is what role his fear of blackmail by his gay sex partners may have played in his decision to sacrifice the safety of Catholic children to keep up appearances. Over to you, Michael S. Rose. As I wrote in National Review in 2002: The stories related in Rose's book will strike many as incredible, but they track closely with the stories that priests have told me about open gay sex and gay politicking in seminaries. The current scandal is opening Catholic eyes: As one ex-seminarian says, "People thought I was crazy when I told them what it was like there, so I finally quit talking about it. They're starting to see now that I wasn't." Goodbye! Good Men links homosexuality among priests with theological dissent, a connection commonly made by conservative Catholics who wonder why their parish priests have practically abandoned teaching and explaining Catholic sexual morality. But one veteran vocations-team member for a conservative diocese cautions that Catholics should not assume that theological orthodoxy guarantees heterosexuality or chastity. "You find [active homosexuality] among some pretty conservative orders, and in places you'd not expect it," he says. "That's what makes this so depressing. You don't know where to turn." An especially nasty aspect of this phenomenon is the vulnerability of sexually active gay priests and bishops to manipulation via blackmail. Priests, psychiatrists, and other informed parties say they encounter this constantly. "It's the secrecy," says Stephen Rubino [a prominent New Jersey lawyer who has represented abuse victims] "If you're a bishop and you're having a relationship, and people know about it, are you compromised on dealing with sexually abusive priests? You bet you are. I've seen it happen." [Emphasis mine -- RD] Longtime observers predict that in the coming weeks, bishops and priests will be forced to resign under fire after their closeted homosexual lives, including sexual abuse, become public. The disgraced pederast former bishop of Palm Beach, Fla., is probably not alone. If this happens, the Vatican will face mounting pressure from the Catholic rank-and-file to take action. As Fr. Greeley has written, "The laity, I suspect, would say it is one thing to accept a homosexual priest and quite another to accept a substantially homosexual clergy, many of whom are blatantly part of the gay subculture."
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