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In spring 2002, as the scandal over sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests was escalating, the long career of Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, one of the church’s most venerable voices for change, went up in flames one May morning. On the ABC program “Good Morning America,” the archbishop watched a man he had fallen in love with 23 years earlier say in an interview that the Milwaukee archdiocese had paid him $450,000 years before to keep quiet about his affair with the archbishop — an affair the man was now calling date rape.

marshmallow: I think we all knew that Weakland did not accept key points of Catholic teaching but it's nice to finally see it in black and white. Weakland essentially destroyed a diocese and had a far more widespread, pernicious influence on Catholicism in America thanks to his encouragement of the lavendar mafia who corrupted seminaries which in turn produced child abusers by the dozen and nearly bankrupted whole dioceses due to abuse settlements.

I wholly agree with your assessment, I would disagree only on one small point. What's scandalous is not how Weakland could rise to the position of Archbishop and do all this damage, while denying key points of Catholic teaching.

What's scandalous is how he got the promotion. Who promoted him? Who was he accountable to, who was his overseer? Who left him in the position, and why?

Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" "I don't know," he replied. "Am I my brother's keeper?"
-- Genesis 4:9

What's scandalous is how he got the promotion. Who promoted him? Who was he accountable to, who was his overseer? Who left him in the position, and why?

Alex, please. You've been on FR long enough to know that we Catholics have a problem within our Church. Since the 1950s at least, homosexuals have been trying to establish a presence in the Catholic Church. Part of this relates to the effort by Marxists to co-opt and weaken the Church from the inside.

In 1961, the Vatican issued a directive mandating that bishops not ordain those with homosexual attractions to the priesthood. But many liberal bishops in both North America and Europe didn't listen. Indeed, it's clear now that some of these bishops were homosexuals themselves.

All this is spelled out quite clearly in Michael Rose's book, Goodbye, Good Men:

We've spent the past 20 years trying to undo the damage wrought by these evil prelates and the Vatican has been quietly replacing the bad guys with good guys. But Satan has done a thorough job. In some places, like Milwaukee, Albany, Rochester, and LA, the bad bishop was appointed as a relatively young man, giving him decades to destroy his diocese.

You would do well to pray for those who are called upon to succeed these bishops because they have a monumental clean-up task ahead of them. And pray also that such satanic influence doesn't infest your own sect.

What's scandalous is not how Weakland could rise to the position of Archbishop and do all this damage, while denying key points of Catholic teaching. What's scandalous is how he got the promotion. Who promoted him? Who was he accountable to, who was his overseer? Who left him in the position, and why?

The mystery of iniquity at work, Alex. The mystery of iniquity............

Since the time of Judas, the Church has always harbored in her bosom, betrayers, apostates, heretics, fornicators and sundry other malefactors.

That's probably not the answer you were looking for, though. Here's another. When Weakland got the job in '77 he was likely a little more discreet. He says he never acted on his sexual impulses until he became a bishop. That combined with the likely probability that he's been favored/protected by other like-minded members of the the Church hierarchy. It's not called "the lavender mafia" for nothing.

Archbishop Jean Jadot was mostly responsible for suggesting the names of that batch of bad bishops. He died just a few months ago. Here is his obituary from the NY Times which gives a general overview of what he did in the 1970s:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/world/22jadot.html