ARTICLES

The New Yorker Bishop

WEAKLAND DISMISSES CONSERVATIVES AT SF LECTURE

By George Neumayr

The "Amish solution" is characteristic of homeschooling families, said Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland at a University of San Francisco lecture on January 25. "There is a tendency in many Churches to be anti-modern.... That is not going to work." Addressing a crowd of largely aging Catholics on the subject of ecumenism, Weakland said that he is tired of conservative Catholics using the Pope's phrase "culture of death." "I wish the Holy Father hadn't invented it...."

Resistance to the world undermines ecumenism, said Weakland. Catholic "identity" and Catholic obtuseness are also obstacles. "We just keep going.... We don't analyze the present situation.... We need to have an extra antenna...." "Discerning the spirit" requires a "sense of what is going on" in the world.

The Church must Americanize her approach and structures in order to grow, said Weakland. "We haven't yet integrated some of the basic desires" of the American people. "Participation" is "basic to our American culture...The second value in our culture which I think is very serious is fairness. Until the Church is able to get processes not just for theologians but for everyone so that they get a fair hearing, we will not be credible. We will not be seen as a just church. All of these are positives of American culture."

Weakland made special note of the Church's alleged sins and backwardness. "The wounds of the crusades still affect all of us." "We are a funny group of people because we were the ones who resisted the Enlightenment...It takes us a few centuries to get there."

He got the crowd giggling with a story about a Lutheran pastor who came to him in a state of astonishment, wondering why the Vatican would publish a "document on indulgences." Said Weakland, "We do confound them... Vatican offices contradict each other."

Weakland praised the Lutherans in particular for teaching him about the "gratuitousness of grace." The pre-Vatican II Church taught him "pelagianism," a heresy that rejects the need for grace, he said. "I was a pelagianist through and through.... I had to memorize the [Rudyard Kipling] poem 'If'... and I went to graduation after graduation...and was told that there was nothing I couldn't do if I wanted to do it."

Weakland fretted about the "politicization" of Catholicism, but in the same breath said that "welfare reform" should be a central issue in ecumenical talks with other religions. He mocked the notion that Catholics and evangelicals share a lot in common because of their mutual disregard for the homosexual agenda. Dealing with evangelicals "has not been and is not easy." He added, "It is important that they be a part of what we do," because they have the "numbers and the importance," growing like wildfire in North and South America.

He advocated "underground ecumenism" and dismissed conservatives who worry about preserving "identity." "I'm tired of arguing about things that don't really count." He "laughed" when he attended an "installation of a bishop" where the choir sang an anti-Catholic Methodist hymn. "They sang a Methodist hymn--the one that has the Whore of Babylon in it.... I laughed. I thought this is great."

At the conclusion of the talk, Nancy Nielson of the Northern Council Interfaith Council, offered a "blessing," prompting one woman in the audience to wonder to the Faith why a laywoman, instead of a bishop, would offer a blessing. Nielsen instructed the crowd to grab the "hand of the seedplanter next to you" and pray to the "painbearer."

Weakland's carping at conservatives is nothing new. The subject of a long, flattering article in the pro-abortion New Yorker magazine, he once referred to the Pope as a "ham actor" and complained about his Polish "stubborness."

Orthodox Catholics in his diocese have long noted the fecklessness and scandal in Weakland's twenty-plus years as archbishop of Milwaukee. "That he would set himself up as an expert on the future of the Church is a joke," says one Catholic. "He can't even run his own diocese. We have lost numerous parishes, vocations are anemic. We went a couple years where there was only about one vocation--this is in an archdiocese which once had 270 parishes. The liturgies here are clownish. His parochial schools rob children of the faith. And then he gets mad at people homeschooling?"

James Hitchcock, a leading Catholic intellectual, told the Faith that Weakland has "certainly positioned himself, perhaps more than any other American bishop, in public disagreement with Rome.... Archbishop Weakland in a way has thrown caution to the wind and over the years has seldom missed an opportunity" to criticize Vatican policy.

Hitchcock calls Weakland's stance towards conservatives "an irrational animosity." His ecumenism is "compassionate" and "open" towards everyone except traditonal members of his own communion. "He detests pro-lifers and has [hardly] missed an opportunity to slam the pro-life movement."

Indeed, Weakland has held "listening sessions" with women who support abortion, after which he called pro-lifers "unloving," said Hitchcock. The New Yorker shortly thereafer ran the fawning profile of him, which was no suprise to Hitchcock. "He is the non-believer's perfect image of a bishop."