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One might think that former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland had a flair for the dramatic. In 2002 at the height of the pedophile priest scandal, he was being blackmailed by a former lover, outed in public and forced to step down in disgrace on the eve of his scheduled retirement at age 75. Would sound contrived on a soap opera, but the good bishop is anything but dramaclergy, as is quietly apparent on every page of his memoir “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church." Weakland sets the record straight about his life and the various crisis in the Catholic church hierarchy and lights no incence or pulls any punches.

Weakland didn’t so much as have a crisis of faith as much as he had a crisis of catholic politics. 'Pilgrim' is a soul-searching expose that reveals the inner struggles of a devout Benedictine monk at odds with the Vatican on a number of issues including the ordination of women and schizophrenic church views on homosexuality.

Even though Weakland publicly apologized for the affair, admitting that he sinned by breaking his vows of celibacy, he speaks about his sexual identity as a gift from God, as part of one’s true self. He rejected modern church doctrine that homosexuality made him “objectively disorder(ed)” (1986) and reasserted in 2004 when the emergency synod characterized gay life as “intrinsically evil.” The bishop's response in finally accepting his sexuality -“I felt no diminution in God’s love.”
Bishop takes Queen's Knight. I wonder if Rome knows?