Rembert Weakland's Memoir A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Reflections (Part 2)

And now the continuation of my posting reflecting on Rembert Weakland's memoir A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: I ended yesterday's preface by noting that my reading of Weakland's book hadn't changed my view of him.  That's not entirely accurate.  I feel the need as I begin these reflections to note that the initial portion of his memoir, in which he talks about growing up in poverty in the small Appalachian town of Patton, Pennsylvania, moved me.  

In some respects, this is the most gripping portion of his autobiography, and the one that rings most true for me.  And that in itself may be commentary of a sort on what ecclesial power seems all too often to do to those who attain it, removing them from their roots in real-life, everyday communities and families, so that the foundations of their lives in those communities and families often end up feeling more real to anyone who follows the careers of these prelates than does their life as a bishop, cardinal, or pope.

Weakland writes about his growing-up years with perceptible (and credible) feeling, and what he has to say about his mother, left a widow with a large family of small children to raise when her husband died young, is profoundly stirring.  Throughout his memoirs, Weakland acknowledges again and again his and his siblings' tremendous debt to their mother, and it's clear that this strong, principled woman and her faith have significantly influenced him.

Reading this Bildungsnarrativ humanized Weakland for me--as, I suspect, it is designed to do.  It helps me understand Weakland as a man, whose foibles as a prelate presuppose a story of childhood privation and struggle.  It was, in fact, when I finally forced myself to read through the introductory material to this section that I mustered the energy to finish the book.  The story of Weakland's boyhood grabbed me, and it made me want to avoid arriving at snap judgments about why Weakland did what he did when he paid off Paul Marcoux.  This ground-laying narrative made me want to be as fair as possible to a fellow human being whose weaknesses and lack of wisdom are no more pronounced than my own, and on whom it is all too easy to pile condemnation now that we know the end (or, more precisely, penultimate chapters) of his story as a church official.

But then there's the church, and that's where the story heads after it tells its initial gritty, entirely believable tale of a bright, sensitive boy's Depression-era upbringing in an economically struggling Catholic family in small-town western Pennsylvania.  There's the church, on which the entire narrative focuses after its framing description of Weakland's growing-up years.

And it's when the narrative turns to the church that my heart sinks and I stop listening.   Because I'm not able to listen well, knowing where this story is heading.  To be more accurate: I am not able to believe.  I cannot believe, as Weakland launches into his account of becoming a Benedictine, studying in Rome, being made abbot primate, interacting with popes and curial officials, being made archbishop of Milwaukee, because he is describing the contours of a landscape that does not include me and does not intend to include me.  

This landscape has its charms.  It would once have attracted me.  Along with Weakland, I would once have been drawn to the sound of the Angelus bells, the kaleidoscope of muted colors the stained-glass windows of the chapel cast across the face of the altar, the heady theological ideas about aggiornamento and inculturation.

I want to believe, after all.  It's why I sacrificed much as a young adolescent to become Catholic.  It's why I studied theology.  I, too, wanted to believe, to serve, and, above all, to find a place within the family of the pilgrim people of God as Weakland himself did.

But along with many other Catholics now--quite specifically, along with many gay Catholics who recognize our sexual orientation as God's gift to us and others--I have discovered that the church does not intend to make a place for me.  And as I said yesterday, I now read these accounts of the Angelus bells, the muted colors of the stained glass, the heady theological ideas, the papal baciamanos with a succession of disgraced (and disgraceful) prelates, the "pastoral" leaders of my church in recent years, peering over my shoulder.

And how am I to believe in the bells, the altar, the stained glass, the magisterial proclamations, when I see those men's faces over my shoulder?  And when I recall that, as with Weakland, the church invested heavily in their lives, their future, their comfort, even as it chose, at an institutional level, to assure that Steve and I could not find jobs as openly gay Catholic theologians?  

That we would spend years of our lives with hardly any money coming in to sustain us and with no health insurance.  With no ability to save anything significant for our retirement.  And that we would eventually be driven to look for any work we could find outside Catholic institutions in order to keep body and soul together--while the "pastoral" leaders of the church doing this to us and others proclaim that they are on the side of workers' rights, economic justice, and the provision of basic health care for everyone in the world.

And so, when Weakland moves from describing his childhood to talking about his meteoric rise and similarly meteoric fall in the church of Vatican II, I begin reading his narrative of that rise and fall--and of the church that orchestrated it--as if there is a screen between me and the world he's describing.  The contours he's describing: I have a roadmap that shows them in similar places.  But the landscape he finds with his roadmap is not the one I inhabit as a lay Catholic, and, especially, an openly gay, partnered Catholic theologian.  

To Weakland, the church was, from the moment he moved towards religious life up through his years as archbishop of Milwaukee, a place of entrée.  Of power and privilege.  How can I forget, as I read his narrative, that the expensive international world-class musical and theological education he received was entirely paid for by the church?  Which means, it was paid for by me, though that same church has not made a place for me economically or vocationally.  While Steve and I scraped and saved and took any job we could find to put ourselves through grad school, as we prepared for vocations of proclaiming the gospel not unlike Weakland's own vocation as theologian, monk, or bishop.  How can I forget that the trips Weakland describes with such excitement, which he made around the globe as abbot primate, were paid for, ultimately, by the pilgrim people of God, who foot all the bills for the church and its pastoral leaders?

It may sound petty for me to say all of this, in quite this personal, confessional way.  I choose this rhetorical strategy for a number of reasons.  First, I've long since been persuaded by political and liberation theologians that theologians always need to avow the experiential (and socioeconomic) locations that their critical perspectives presume.  Otherwise, we may well be blinded by unacknowledged power and privilege as we think about theological issues and as we mount critiques.

I write--and I read Weakland's life story--as an openly gay, partnered Catholic theologian who has found himself shoved from his vocation and from economic (and social) life by the church in which I am called to exercise my vocation as a theologian.  And so I see and experience the world quite differently than Weakland does.  In particular, I see and experience the church differently than Weakland does.

And from where I stand (and this is the second reason I choose my confessional approach), the narrative of power and privilege that runs through Weakland's entire story of his life in the monastery, in Rome, in Milwaukee: that narrative is foundational for what he chose to do with Paul Marcoux.  Throughout his memoirs, Weakland writes--this is a recurring theme--that in hindsight, he would have done things differently.

Weakland writes again and again that he and other bishops lacked the knowledge they later came to have about pedophilia and how to handle inveterate pedophile priests.  He writes that it was only after the fact that he recognized that his payment of money under the table to silence Marcoux might have the appearance of a pay-off.  At the time he made the payments, he saw them as a legal transaction in line with any other legal transaction: business as usual.

And I have to confess, I am astonished by these claims, as I have been astonished by similar claims on the part of one bishop after another when they've been found protecting priests abusing children, and placing children in harm's way by transferring those priests.  It seems that what our bishops have not known and have not understood would fill many books.  Though we, the people of the pilgrim church, have footed the bill for the most expensive educations possible for these men who, once they gain ecclesial office, suddenly know little to nothing about some of the key principles that orient the behavior of most of the rest of us.

Like the principle that children are always to be protected from pedophiles.  Bottom line.  No discussion, no questions asked.  An unwavering foundational principle.

Or like the principle that children should always be safeguarded from inveterate child molesters, because abundant experience shows that inveterate pedophiles repeatedly molest minors.  Or like the recognition that paying hush money is paying hush money.  And that this action is even more reprehensible when it involves secret payments out of church funds, with no disclosure to their donors about how these funds are being used.

Power and privilege corrupt.  And power and privilege are everywhere in the story Weakland tells about his rise in the church, his life as abbot primate and then archbishop of Milwaukee.  Power and privilege blind.  And, in my view, they blinded Rembert Weakland to the consequences of his choice first to become involved with Paul Marcoux when Weakland is a vowed celibate who had not chosen to leave clerical life behind, and then to pay money to silence Marcoux when his former lover threatened to blackmail the archbishop.

I wish I could read this story differently.  I want to read Weakland's story differently, because he once represented hope for me.  I saw Rembert Weakland as one of the good guys, fighting for what is right and good in a church riven by intense ideological struggles between camps that, for the sake of clarity and to make things easier for me as I analyze these struggles, I often divide into the good guys and the bad guys.  Knowing full well that real life is never so simple, and that, as my great-grandmother constantly drummed into the heads of her children and grandchildren (who saw that I learned the lesson, too), "There's good in the worst of us and bad in the best of us, so it little behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us."

The Weakland story has taught me something I had already learned through painful experience as I tried unsuccessfully to survive as a Catholic theologian in the post-Vatican II church.  This is that the "liberal" wing of the church is every bit as much part of the problem in creating and sustaining the serious structural disintegration the Catholic church now faces as is the "conservative" wing.  The abuse crisis has roots running to both camps, and it is simplistic to see that crisis as a manifestation of only one side or the other.

While it's entirely true that the "conservative" faction in the church deliberately halted the reforms of Vatican II, and has enjoyed dominance in the structures of the Catholic church for a number of decades now, that faction could never have exercised its considerable power without the considerable complicity of "liberal" church leaders and "liberal" theologians.

Who are every bit as much infatuated by power and privilege as are their brothers and sisters on the other side of the ideological divide that runs through the church.  The unbridled exercise of that power and privilege, whether from a liberal or a conservative ideological stance, has corrupted many of the top leaders of the Catholic church, and it has corrupted the intellectual elite that specializes in interpreting the actions and words of those leaders to the rest of us.  

And there will be no viable, effective solution to the serious structural disintegration the Catholic church now faces until its pastoral leaders and intellectual elite confront these questions of power and privilege far more forthcomingly than they have yet confronted them.  As, meanwhile increasing numbers of us continue and will continue to become pilgrims from, not in, the pilgrim church due to the lack of transparency and accountability among those leading our church.

Pilgrims from and not in the pilgrim church, since the landscape that the pilgrim church is traversing, whether described in "liberal" or "conservative" terms, has little or nothing to do with the landscape that many of us who once thought of ourselves as pilgrim Catholics walking with the pilgrim church traverse in our everyday lives, which are not insulated by clerical power and privilege (and by the power and privilege accorded to clerical hangers-on in the Catholic church).  And since the roadmap provided to us by those clerics and their hangers-on turns out to have one dead end after another--regardless of whether those offering us the map are liberals or conservatives.

For parts one and three of this series, see here and here.