Weakland questions church teaching on homosexuality

Retired Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland, whose autobiography, “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church” (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company) is set to be published next month, in an interview with the New York Times, is speaking out on matters of sexuality.

“If we say our God is an all-loving god,” he 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?”

In the interview, speaking about the clergy sex abuse crisis, he blamed psychologists for advising bishops that perpetrators could be treated and returned to work, and he blamed the Vatican’s tribunals for spending years debating whether to remove abusers from the priesthood.