Retired Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland has said that his attempts to oust two sexual abusers from the priesthood were stalled by a protective church hierarchy.In a videotaped deposition released Thursday, Archbishop Weakland said his attempts to oust two sexual abusers from the priesthood were stalled by a protective church hierarchy.
He also attempted to spread blame beyond himself to court officers, his fellow bishops and the high offices at the Vatican, The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel reports.
A portion of Archbishop Weakland's deposition, taken over two days in June in a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, was released to the media last week.
In it, the archbishop, now 81, admitted that he transferred priests with a history of sexual misconduct back into churches without alerting parishioners.
In the testimony released last week by Jeffrey Anderson, the St. Paul lawyer who filed the suit, Weakland also acknowledged that reports of abuse were not turned over to law enforcement authorities, that some incriminating mental health records were destroyed and that bishops spoke in code in correspondence discussing abusers who had been moved outside their diocese.
Those statements prompted a call Thursday for a criminal investigation by a group known as the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).
Rita McDonald, a Marquette University emeritus professor of psychology who was long involved in archdiocesan affairs, was critical of Weakland for spreading the blame to others.
"He accepted some responsibility for what happened, but he never called the police," McDonald said. "There was always that caveat: 'You have to understand how things were back then.'
"Well, didn't you know it was sinful? Didn't you know it was a crime? What the bishops needed was a whistleblower in their midst, someone to say this is wrong and we have to tell the truth."
Weakland testified that he held a local church trial - a formal internal proceeding that he said had not been done elsewhere - to get rid of two abusive priests in the 1990s. The priests appealed to the Vatican against their removal from the ministry.
In 1998, Weakland testified, he went to the Vatican and met with officials in the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, a top church office then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI.
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