Weakland at the Keyboard

Rembert George Weakland, 57, chairman of the bishops' committee on the U.S. economy, had an early personal experience with poverty. His father, a hotelkeeper in Patton, Pa., died in 1932, when Weakland was five. His mother, who had five other children, scratched by on welfare for years un til she was able to go back to work as a schoolteacher. "To this day," Weakland says, "I can't look at brown corduroy knickers without getting sick, because if you wore those WPA clothes everybody knew you were on welfare."

As a 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 by the New York Pro Musica in 1958.

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.

In 1977 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.

In 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.

Admittedly no expert in economics, Weakland prepped himself by poring over college economics textbooks and works by Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith. Unveiling the first draft for reporters last week, Weakland said he hopes the eventual document "will challenge our Catholics to realize that religion isn't a Sunday-morning thing, that it's something that permeates all of their decision making." To those who dislike the preliminary text, he jokingly proposed a lesson from his town's most famous business: "In Milwaukee, for us the first draft is always the sign of better things to come."