Archbishop Weakland admits relationships with several men, questions immorality of homosexual acts

May 15, 2009

In an interview with The New York Times, retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland admitted relationships with several men while he served as Archbishop of Milwaukee and questioned Catholic teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts.

“If we say our God is an all-loving god,” the archbishop said, “how do you explain that at any given time probably 400 million living on the planet at one time would be gay? Are the religions of the world, as does Catholicism, saying to those hundreds of millions of people, you have to pass your whole life without any physical, genital expression of that love?”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 2357) teaches:

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered." They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

The Catechism also identifies homosexual acts with “the sin of the Sodomites”-- one of the sins so grave as to cry to heaven for vengeance (nos. 1867; 2357, fn. 141).

Archbishop Weakland also denounced the Church’s teaching-- repeated authoritatively in a 2003 document-- that homosexual inclinations are objectively disordered. “Those are bad words because they are pejorative,” he said.

 

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Further information:

• Ex-Archbishop Speaks About Catholic Church and Homosexuality (New York Times)
• Leader of Milwaukee archdiocese ‘caught off guard’ by Archbishop Weakland’s homosexuality admission (CWN, May 14)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992, 1997)
• Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition To Unions Between Homosexual Persons (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 2003)