Former Milwaukee Catholic archbishop admits he’s homosexual

(Note: A reader describes hearing a lecture about music by Weakland in 1960.)

Paul Nachman writes:

Milwaukee’s homosexual former archbishop, appropriately named “Rembert Weakland,” is pictured in this article. The photo reminds me of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

There is something ineffably contemptible about so many religious “leaders” today. To call most of them third-raters would be to insult people who are truly third rate.

- end of initial entry -

Laura W. writes:

Notice how the journalist opens this story about Weakland with obvious sympathy:

“A Roman Catholic archbishop who resigned in 2002 over a sex and financial scandal involving a man describes his struggles with being gay in an upcoming memoir about his decades serving the church.”

His “struggles with being gay” would never be phrased as “his struggles with homosexual desires.” That would suggest Weakland is dealing with commonplace sexual desires rather than some sort of immutable psychological condition. I’d be interested to know whether Weakland extends any sympathy in his book to the many thousands of priests who have contained their sexual desires for women so that they could honor their vows. Why is homosexual lust less controllable than heterosexual? Why don’t priests who have affairs with young women score major book deals?

And what hubris in the title of Weakland’s book, “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church,” as if the spiritual journey of the Church as a whole were somehow comparable to his self-aggrandizing failure and unabashed sinfulness? Weakland. He sounds like a character out of Evelyn Waugh. It would be funny if it weren’t true.

Ron K. writes:

Paul Nachman wrote: “Milwaukee’s homosexual former archbishop, appropriately named “Rembert Weakland … “

Laura W wrote: “Weakland. He sounds like a character out of Evelyn Waugh.”

Actually, Ayn Rand came to mind, when I first heard his name years ago. Never mind her cardboard heroes; she drew as incisive a portrait of the 20th-century villain as anyone. Hers all had mushy, watery names to match their character: Ellsworth Toohey, Balph Eubank, Wesley Mouch. And “Rembert Weakland” is as perfect a real-life extension of this list—as a name, as a person, and, unfortunately, as a power.

Weakland was also a radical in the field of music. This, about his activities in 1966, from Wikipedia:

“Weakland has served as President of the Church Music Association of America. According to an account by Richard Schuler, a split emerged very quickly, with President Weakland taking sharp exception to the “reactionary attitudes in liturgical thinking” that he said were present at the Consociato meeting. He gave interviews to the press in which he regretted the failure of the meetings to include modern music and dancing in its liturgical agenda. His views did not prevail within the CMAA, and so his presidency was not to last.”

Monsignor Schuler covers Weakland’s musical subversion in some detail in his Chronicle of the Reform (in PDF here: www.musicasacra.com/pdf/chron.pdf )

” … so in the United States the liturgical revolution against the Roman rite and its treasury of sacred music was led by Archabbot Weakland as chairman of the Music Advisory Board of the Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy. [p. 21]

“Typical and perhaps most interesting of the innovations engineered through the Music Advisory Board by … Father Weakland was the ‘hootenanny Mass.’” [p.22]

Finally, he makes a connection few others do:

“The seventies were a decade of unrest for the whole world. In the United States the effects of the cultural revolution that began in China [!] and spread through Europe caused protests and strikes on college campuses that echoed down into high schools and other educational institutions generally.” [p.34]

The late Msgr. Schuler was no disinterested observer, but as strong a figure on the other side of the music wars as Weakland was on his. His own parish (to which I belong) is said to be the only one in America to offer a sung Latin High Mass every week of the year, half of those with orchestra. That’s Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Gounod.

It took decades of hard work to build that. The Weaklands want to replace it with “liturgical dance.” As the kids say, “That’s so gay!”

May 14

John Kundrat writes:

Circa 1959-1960 I was in early college and attended a lecture given by Dr. Rembert Weakland, a Ph.D. and Catholic Priest. It was one of a series of lectures given to students who were members of an academic honors society at the college I attended. I was actually at the time in pre-engineering and had little practical interest in the topic covered that evening, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring), but since I was a “good soldier” I went and listened.

I remember the lecture that consisted of much talk about such terms as “sound blocks” or some such, interspersed with brief musical examples from the Stravinsky piece itself. He was an impressive man as I remember him, large and with a commanding voice. I left the lecture thinking that I wasted two or three hours of listening to some type of propaganda, as I knew less about the piece after Weakland’s lecture than I had before.

It was about 15 years later that I understood what happened at that Weakland Lecture. At that time i read Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word about Modern Art. Weakland was doing to music what the critics in the Wolfe book did to Art.

May 14

Laura W. writes:

In response to Ron K. on Weakland:

Fascinating! So we have Weakland to blame for Taste and See, I am the Bread of Life, On Eagle’s Wings and the whole palpitatingly romantic pantheon of liturgical pop. The man has caused me and my family many hours of silent agony.

Nosy writes:

At least he’s a former bishop, unlike the situation in the Episcopal church. Although if efforts to reunite the Church of England with the Roman Catholic church succeed, some interesting problems for the Vatican could arise.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 12, 2009 03:01 PM | Send