Funeral plans announced for former Milwaukee Archbishop Weakland
The Archdiocese of Milwaukee has announced funeral plans for former Archbishop Rembert Weakland, who died Monday at 95.
Weakland, a Benedictine monk, served as Milwaukee archbishop for 25 years before stepping down in 2002 after a public fall from grace.
The current archbishop, Jerome Listecki, will celebrate a funeral Mass at 4:30 p.m. Aug. 30 at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, 812 N. Jackson Street, Milwaukee.
Visitation will be held at the cathedral from 12 to 4 p.m. that day.
Weakland will be buried in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, at St. Vincent Archabbey, where he attended high school, college and seminary and eventually became archabbot.
He suffered a series of serious illnesses and died earlier this week at Clement Manor, a Greenfield senior living center, the archdiocese said.
After retiring, Weakland lived at a Wilson Commons, a secular senior living complex near Wilson Park in Milwaukee, before moving to Clement Manor.
As an archbishop, Weakland left a complex legacy.
Nationally, he was considered a leader among the American clergy in the years after Vatican II. He championed an expanded role for women and the laity in the church, and made no secret that he thought the door should be left open to ordaining women.
Although he disliked the label, he was routinely referred to as the most liberal bishop in America.
In Milwaukee, Weakland became known for building bridges with other religions and reaching out to Catholics who felt disconnected from their church. He spoke out on issues facing everyday Catholic families — sex education, workplace dignity, social justice, financial pressures.
Near the end of his Milwaukee tenure, he shepherded a radical remodeling of the interior of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist to modernize and reconfigure it.
Weakland retired in 2002 after news broke that he used $450,000 in church funds to buy the silence of a male lover who years later broke that deal and accused him publicly of date rape. Weakland maintained that the relationship was consensual.
He had submitted his retirement paperwork in April when he turned 75, as required by church law. The pope accepted his resignation a day after news of the scandal broke in May.
His resignation came as the public was beginning to grasp the scope of the church’s global crisis involving the sexual abuse of minors. Weakland, who protected abusive priests and at least initially treated complaints about them with disdain, came to be a face of the crisis in southeastern Wisconsin.
He admitted in a state court deposition that he shredded copies of sex abuse documents, failed to notify law enforcement officials and moved sexually abusive priests from parish to parish without warning members of their histories.
In 2019, in response to pressure from church abuse victims and faithful, the archdiocese removed Weakland’s name from the pastoral center at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist and from a bas-relief inside the cathedral depicting Weakland shepherding small children.