Arch. of Milwaukee facing $3M deficit, forced to cut personnel & programs

Bleak times for the City of Festivals.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is facing a $3 million deficit in its current budget and will need to make substantial cuts in staffing and services for the fiscal year that begins July 1, partly because a deal to sell the Cousins Center fell through, an archdiocesan spokesman said Wednesday.

[The letter from Archbishop Dolan and] other information also have been posted at the archdiocese's Web site, http://www.archmil.org/, as part of Dolan's effort to share information with the region's 675,000 Catholics.

A clarification included for Milwaukee residents:

"... the archdiocese's ongoing $105 million Faith in Our Future capital campaign would not be used to balance the budget or to pay sexual abuse costs. It is intended to fund new programs and endowments at the archdiocesan and parish levels, and its funds will be held in a charitable trust outside the assets of the archdiocese."

An reminder not included for Milwaukee residents today, but published by Rod Dreherin 2002:

Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, the most liberal bishop in America, has been disgraced by the revelation that he paid $450,000 in hush money to buy the silence of an apparent former male lover.

... Weakland wears his dissent as a badge of honor.

"Members of the Roman Curia often referred to me as a 'maverick,'" the archbishop wrote in his archdiocesan newspaper column last May.

"The best compliment I received, then, came from a religious superior in Rome who said: 'Rome does not know what to do with Weakland. He is a free man.' I feel I have been able to maintain my own dignity and identity through it all."

... In the last few months, Weakland defied an order from the Vatican to halt his $4.5 million dollar extremely modernistic renovation of Milwaukee's historic cathedral, which was left ravaged by the procedure. One puzzled Catholic described the new stripped-down space as akin to "a fancy Baptist church with a very large communion table." (National Review Online, 5/24/02)

As Rod points out:

Neither Weakland nor the money-grubbing Marcoux are victims. The Catholics of Milwaukee are. Their archbishop's arrogance and selfishness in the seedy Marcoux matter has cost them nearly half a million dollars. But in truth, the intangible cost is much higher.

I would argue that the tangible costs of Weakland's dishonesty and parasitism, if today is any example, are also still rising much higher. This from a man who reserved a website for himself (at least in 2006).

Maybe adding a donation button to help out his beleaguered ex-diocese would be in order, for a start.