Word: weakland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...teenager, Weakland was torn between two vocations. After making a creditable soloist's debut, performing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 with a local orchestra, he considered a musical career. Instead, he became a Benedictine monk at St. Vincent's Archabbey in Latrobe, Pa., in 1945. Nonetheless, he kept up his music, earning a master's degree in piano at New York City's Juilliard School and doing doctoral-level work in musicology at Columbia University. He also transcribed medieval works into modern notation for the Play of Daniel, a heralded music-drama introduced...
...Weakland was elected arch-abbot of St. Vincent's at a youngish 36. Four years later he was chosen abbot primate of the Benedictine Federation, the Rome-based international coordinator for 220 monasteries with 10,000 priests and brothers...
...Weakland was appointed Archbishop of Milwaukee. Instead of holding a traditional welcoming banquet for parish priests and wealthy Roman Catholic laymen, Weakland had a dinner for the city's poor. He also sold his predecessor's mansion and moved into a modest apartment in the cathedral rectory. Its one luxury: a Mason & Hamlin grand piano, which he tries to play daily...
...Milwaukee, Weakland has protested police brutality against blacks, endorsed church sanctuary for refugees from Central America, and advocated equal rights for homosexuals. He not only gave nuns and laywomen key staff positions but also at one time mused openly about the theoretical possibility of women priests; that may be one reason he is now looked on with disquiet by some Vatican officials. When Pope John Paul II tried to dampen dissident U.S. theologians, Weakland remarked that the Pontiff "probably doesn't quite understand the American approach to pluralism...
After the bishops launched the economics project in 1980, Archbishop John Roach of St. Paul, who was then president of the hierarchy, gave Weakland the sensitive chairmanship because of his high standing among colleagues. The four other bishops who joined him: Atlanta's Thomas A. Donnellan, Peter Rosazza of Hartford, Conn., George H. Speltz of St. Cloud, Minn., and William Weigand of Salt Lake City...