You Really Don't "Gotta Hand It To" Archbishop Weakland

I would like to amend my earlier remarks where I referred to him as "a bishop who literally never did anything wrong".

Dear friends: I have deleted my earlier tweets about the recent death of former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland. My original statement, "RIP to Archbishop Weakland, a bishop who literally never did anything wrong," was clearly a mistake, and I am grateful for everyone's constructive feedback. As many online were quick to point out, Archbishop Weakland had actually done a large number of wrong things, something I should have researched beforehand by typing his name into any major search engine and selecting one of the top twenty hits at random. I merely wished to commemorate a man who had served the church for decades.

My follow-up tweet in response to the backlash, “well does the occasional slip-up really erase all of the remarkable academic contributions Archbishop Weakland made in the field of musicology,” was, admittedly, also very poorly thought out. Yes, Weakland had studied at Juilliard and received a doctorate in music from Columbia - both of which are noted in his obituaries from the current Milwaukee Archbishop and at National Catholic Reporter - but as you all very quickly pointed out to me, he was also an incredibly important figure in covering up widespread sexual abuse by the priests who worked for him, perhaps permanently damaging the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and the credibility of the church’s moral leadership. Although you were all correct in pointing out that “this is like, the most famous thing he’s known for”, that was somehow omitted from both of the above obituaries, presumably in favor of the details on Weakland’s musical studies.

At this point, I definitely should not have attempted to “fix” things by tweeting out "Well was Weakland even a particularly egregious offender in the abuse scandal? Haven’t we all messed up from time to time?" This was also met with swift condemnation, and, in retrospect, the condemnation was deserved. It turns out that Archbishop Weakland shredded documents, destroyed evidence, moved priests around to avoid prosecution, and generally did everything he could to make sure abusive priests could keep being priests, which gave them access to a steady stream of people to abuse; these were all things that Weakland could do specifically because of his power as archbishop. Many of you pointed out to me that prolonged criminal activity that had a brutal ongoing impact on people's lives, enabled by the one man who had material power over the resources and personnel of his archdiocese, and thus the institutional power to do something decisive about the scandal, should perhaps be considered more than “messing up", and that a man who had been ordained as a successor to the Apostles and given the teaching authority of the Catholic church as well as significant material power over the personnel and resources of the archdiocese should perhaps be held to a slightly higher moral standard than the average lay Catholic, or maybe even just the same moral standard when it comes to “committing crimes”. Many of you also directed me to a quote from the Wisconsin anti-abuse organization Nate's Mission, affirming that "His commitment and loyalty to the church, including covering up sex crimes for decades, was strong as any member of the hierarchy of the American church. It was a colossal tragedy and failure that harmed a lot of children and destroyed a lot of lives." My response to one of you, "oh like YOU’VE never covered up widespread institutional abuse", was a clear rhetorical misstep at that point in the conversation.

Let me clarify: I was starting to get a little overwhelmed by this point, and I should have probably just logged off. Unfortunately, my next tweet was an attempt to try and one-up one of my critics, and I wrote “well, let's not speak ill of the dead, we'll never know for sure, it's not like there's video of him admitting under oath that he did all of this.” This was clearly an unforced error. I own that, that one is on me. As it turns out, Weakland did sit for a deposition in 2008, parts of which were released into the public record, and in that deposition, as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel put it, he "acknowledged that he never reported any suspected abuse while he headed the local church. He also testified that he never directly asked accused priests whether allegations were true and that he never discussed what he knew about instances of sexual abuse with his successor". When I attempted to respond by saying "we can't know why he made these difficult decisions, he might have had very good reasons", I definitely exacerbated the situation further, because Weakland was very upfront about the reasons for reassigning priests without telling anyone about abuse allegations, which were, verbatim: "no parish would have accepted a priest unless you could say that he has gone through the kind of psychological examination and that he's not a risk to the parish." When I said "well, that settles it, if he had acted differently, those priests might not have been able to keep their jobs", I did not anticipate such an immediate backlash.

I tried to pivot at this point, claiming “I’m sure that the archbishop was acting consistently with the standards of his time, and I’m sure that he also worked hard to extend compassion and understanding to victims of abuse at this time, and certainly would never have openly disparaged those victims, in writing, in his column in the archdiocesan newspaper, using language that sounds like he’s describing the cool talking dog voiced by Billy Joel in Disney’s Oliver and Company.” Sadly, this was another misstep on my part. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have chosen to say something that could be disproven so specifically. Because you all pointed out that in 1988, Weakland did, in fact, write a column in the archdiocesan newspaper in which he described sex abuse victims by saying "Sometimes not all adolescent victims are so ‘innocent.’ Some can be sexually very active and aggressive and often quite streetwise," and that perhaps this was a horrifying thing we should keep in mind when thinking about his legacy or argue that he did the best he could with what he had.

It was at this point that I attempted to save things by saying "whatever his participation in the coverup was, at least we can acknowledge that he had never been accused of sexual abuse himself". Wow, did I step in it. A real “open mouth, insert foot” moment. Again, I own that. I am taking responsibility and holding space for the people who are pointing things out to me which should have already been blindingly obvious. As I should have definitely known before tweeting out that last thing, Weakland's former lover - many of you had pointed out that him having a "former lover" was very bad just by itself - had accused him of date-rape. When I said "but whatever his personal failings, you cannot say that messing up like that affected the archdiocese materially", I really thought I was about to gain the upper hand in the online conversation.

Unfortunately, I had referred to sex crimes as “messing up" for the second time in ten minutes - which upset a lot of you, and I understand that now - and I had also been unaware, when making that last statement, that the accusation against Weakland absolutely affected the archdiocese materially, because Weakland had embezzled $450,000 of funds from selling church property and used it to personally settle his ex-lover's case out of court.

It's not clear to me, at this point, after repeatedly getting proven wrong, after it had become obvious that I had made an extremely ill-advised attempt to defend a man who was not only indefensible but actually one of the most indefensible people I could have attempted to defend, what I thought I could accomplish by continuing to post. But I did try to salvage things by posting “the man is dead now, can’t we finally forgive here? Aren’t we called to forgive each other as Christians? How else are we possibly supposed to talk about these men after they die?”

Weakland never went to prison or faced any criminal consequences. The Pope accepted his standard resignation at the standard age of 75, after which Weakland lived in relative comfort for 20 more years. Apart from having his name removed from an archdiocesan building, he never even really faced meaningful professional consequences. As the Sentinel-Journal's obituary pointed out, he spent his retirement "reading, playing the piano, attending the symphony and traveling." He did eventually pay back the $450,000 to the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, from money he made off of book sales and speaking engagements and fundraising, which of course meant that he was signing book deals and securing speaking engagements in retirement. And when he died this past week, people who should know better wrote obituaries that were glowing or, at their harshest, willing to briefly acknowledge his “complex legacy”.

It turns out that this isn’t actually about forgiveness nearly as much as it is about power, and how that power is still being used today. Weakland had power as archbishop that most of us don’t ever get - power to assign priests, power to investigate allegations, power to bring things to light, power to spend the archdiocese’s money - and he used that power to cover his own ass at the expense of innocent people, and because he did that, those people suffered, and they didn’t suffer metaphorically, they were sexually abused. When Weakland misused his power, somebody should have taken it away from him, and nobody did. After he retired, he wasn’t as active in public life, but he kept his archbishop title, continued saying Mass, still wore a pointy hat, still made six figures giving speeches. Because if you do all of those terrible things as a bishop, you still get to be a bishop in good standing. This is, perhaps, part of the reason why Weakland’s immediate predecessor also reassigned priests and misused church funds to cover up abuse. It is, perhaps, part of the reason why Weakland’s immediate successor also reassigned priests and misused church funds to cover up abuse. Hell, why wouldn’t he? The last guy got away with it! Weakland did bad things, and we can’t move on, because people are still doing the same bad things. Simcha Fisher pointed that out earlier this week:

"When Catholics responded with anger and disbelief at the omission [in the obituaries], the general response was: Well, obviously the sex abuse scandal was terrible, but maybe try harder to be like Jesus, who forgives this stuff. As if it were all over. As if the sex abuse scandal were in the past, and something that normal, healthy, grounded people had already long since gotten over. And this is why it’s still not over."

This is why it’s still not over. Bishops like Timothy Dolan and Thomas Tobin and Alfred Schlert all left paper trails showing how they enabled abusers in their dioceses, and they are still bishops, with no incentive of any kind to behave differently if more allegations arise. When they die, there will also be obituaries about their “complex legacies”, the next generation of bishops will read them, and they too will learn that there are no meaningful consequences for ignoring complaints, disparaging victims, or paying hush money. And they'll learn that if they use their power and status to do all of these things, they'll get to keep that power and status for as long as they like.

If any of the bishops want forgiveness, God is welcome to forgive them on whatever timeline God sees fit. But I’m not God, and if they want forgiveness from me or from lay Catholics in general, they can start that process by actually acting like they want anything to change. Until they start doing that, my only option is to wait for them to die, and when they die, I won’t have any problem speaking ill of them. Perhaps if there were more prominent people elsewhere in the church or in Catholic media who were willing to be more critical in situations like these, some currently-living bishops might start getting the message that they need to start doing something different.

As Kaya Oakes pointed out several years ago:

"Atonement is the first step toward understanding that survivors do not, in fact, owe abusers anything. Abusers owe their victims much. The idea that clergy abusers should be able to ask for forgiveness and then jump back into a clerical office is one that could further damage victims. Yet most of the clerics in the Catholic Church were allowed right back into situations where they continued their abuse. Victims, re-traumatized after learning that their abusers also abused others, cannot in fact do enough healing to be capable of forgiveness because atonement never happened. Expecting people to grant forgiveness to an institution that hasn’t made legitimate amends does not suggest that institution is capable of real change."

So yeah, big miss on my part with the tweets. Whoops.