Former Marquette Theology Student At Center Of Milwaukee Scandal

Archbishop Rembert Weakland, former head of the Milwaukee archdiocese, said in an interview Monday that he wrote about his sexual orientation because he wanted to be candid about "how this came to life in my own self, how I suppressed it, how it resurrected again."

Called "A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop," the book is set to be released in June.

"I was very careful and concerned that the book not become a Jerry Springer, to satisfy people's prurient curiosity or anything of this sort," Weakland told The Associated Press. "At the same time, I tried to be as honest as I can."

Weakland stepped down soon after Paul Marcoux, a former Marquette University theology student, revealed in May 2002 that he was paid $450,000 to settle a sexual assault claim he made against the archbishop more than two decades earlier. The money came from the archdiocese.

Marcoux went public at the height of anger over the clergy sex abuse crisis, when Catholics and others were demanding that dioceses reveal the extent of molestation by clergy and how much had been confidentially spent to settle claims.

Weakland denied ever assaulting anyone. He apologized for concealing the payment. The Vatican says that men with "deep-seated" attraction to other men should not be ordained.

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Link (here) to a piece on the same subject in America from 2002

Marcoux said he came to Milwaukee in 1975 to study at Marquette University. He lived with Father Ken Metz on the east side of Milwaukee, worked at a chemical plant and volunteered at the Jesuit Gesu Catholic Church next to Marquette's campus.

Metz invited Weakland to dinner in September 1979, and Marcoux said he and Weakland hit it off immediately. They had a lot in common: Weakland, a pianist, had studied at the famed Juilliard School while Marcoux said he had studied voice at Boston University and at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Both men also admired Bernard Longergan, the Jesuit priest philosopher and theologian, considered by many to be one of the finest thinkers of the 20th century.

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