Influential former US bishops’ official lauds Weakland’s memoir, excuses homosexual encounter

September 30, 2009

Dolores Leckey, who worked for the US bishops’ conference for two decades and headed the offices of the laity, marriage and family, youth, women, and lay ministry, has written a review lauding disgraced Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland’s recent memoir. “[W]hen I heard the radio report on May 23, 2002, that he had had an affair with a man decades earlier, and that in 1998 there had been a cash settlement of $450,000, two thoughts converged,” she recounted: “one, that he fell in love, probably for the first time, and that falling in love has a way of humanizing us; two, that nobody in church leadership-- bishop, cardinal, whoever-- should have free access to large sums of money.” Ms. Leckey retired from the bishops’ conference in 1997 and is now a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

 

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Further information:

• The Bishop’s Tale (America)
• Archbishop Weakland: I didn’t know clerical abuse of children was a crime (CWN, May 19)
• Archbishop Weakland admits relationships with several men, questions immorality of homosexual acts (CWN, May 15)