Salon.com > Margaret Spillane

The witch hunt against Archbishop Weakland

Sat, 25 May 2002 19:29:00 +0000

Anyone tuning in to ABC's "Good Morning America" Friday began the day with a sickening tale: What host Charles Gibson called "serious new allegations of sexual misconduct in the Catholic church." Unlike the Boston Globe's months of investigative reporting involving Cardinal Bernard Law, the misconduct reported by the network's correspondent Brian Ross did not involve pedophilia. Instead, Ross reported that one of the country's most respected and reform-minded Catholic leaders, Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, stood accused of attacking a male graduate student nearly a quarter-century ago, and paying $450,000 in hush money in 1998.

ABC reported that Paul Marcoux, now 54 years old, charged that around 1980, "he was sexually assaulted by the archbishop when he went to him seeking advice on entering the priesthood." Marcoux himself was even more explicit: "He was sitting next to me and then started to try to kiss me and continued to force himself on me and pulled down my trousers, attempted to fondle me. Think of it in terms of date rape." The story was incendiary. Within hours, Archbishop Weakland -- the leading voice within the American Catholic hierarchy for democratization, acceptance of gays and other social-justice reforms -- had accelerated his planned retirement. It seemed the logical next chapter in a season of church scandal.

“Good Friday is dead”

Fri, 18 Feb 2000 09:00:00 +0000

"Keep your nerve," Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, used to remind his allies in Northern Ireland's Republican political circles during particularly edgy moments leading up to the Good Friday peace accords signed in 1998.

But Wednesday afternoon, Adam's own patience sounded profoundly frayed. Britain had suspended Northern Ireland's promising new power-sharing government and the Irish Republican Army withdrew from disarmament talks. British and Irish prime ministers held crisis meetings at Number 10 Downing Street, to try and restore the suspended government.

The talks reportedly bore little fruit. "The institutions have been torn down and the Good Friday Agreement has been torn up," Adams said outside in exasperation. By Friday, leaders from all sides were booking flights to Washington for White House meetings next week.

The current crisis is the most profound since the IRA's current cease-fire began in 1995. Adams and his IRA-allied Sinn Fein are at loggerheads with suspended First Minister David Trimble. Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party provoked the current crisis by threatening to withdraw from the government altogether if the IRA did not satisfy Trimble's personal deadline for a disarmament timetable.

What made peace possible in Ireland?

Mon, 06 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

It was the end of a workday at the chief port on Ireland's southern coast. People were moving nimbly through the light rain, going about their business, hardly sparing a glance for the military spectacle they had to step around on the sidewalk: Eight Irish soldiers with their semiautomatics at the ready.

This was closing time at the Cobh bank, a routine handover of the office cash-box common to businesses the world over. But on this particular occasion, the familiar Securicor transport van had arrived amid a phalanx of Land Rovers from which those soldiers piled out. After the van picked up its cargo, the whole parade moved a half-block down the street and repeated its performance at Cobh's small post-office on the town's waterfront, before zooming out of town under police escort.

At the opposite corner of the island and across the border in Northern Ireland, TV crews from all over the globe were this day unloading their own heavy artillery, preparing to broadcast the momentous event initiated at midnight Thursday: Ulster's first power-sharing government, marking the presumed end of the 30-year conflict known as the Troubles. Seated side by side at Belfast's Stormont Castle Thursday were representatives of Sinn Fein, the electoral ally of the Irish Republican Army, and Protestant Unionists to whom Sinn Fein and the nationalist aspirations of Northern Ireland's Catholics have generally been anathema.

A death foretold

Wed, 17 Mar 1999 20:00:00 +0000

Less than a year ago Rosemary Nelson of Lurgan, Northern Ireland, told me she worried that her three children might see her murdered, just the way the children of a fellow human rights lawyer, Pat Finucane, had seen their father gunned down at the dinner table back in 1989. The worry would not go away. Just a few weeks ago, when Nelson was leading demands for an inquiry into alleged collusion between British security forces and loyalist paramilitaries in the Finucane assassination, she asked Prime Minister Tony Blair's office for protection. She was denied it, causing her to lie awake nights contemplating scenarios of her own violent death.

On Monday, Nelson was murdered. After a weekend fishing trip with her husband, she was heading for work when a bomb strapped to the underside of her car tore her legs off and ripped through her abdomen. Her 8-year-old daughter, Sarah, was on lunch break in her school yard, less than 50 yards away. Nelson's sister, a teacher at the same school, spoke with Rosemary as firefighters cut through the twisted metal that pinioned the victim. Nelson lived two hours longer.

Northern Ireland: Who will police the police?

Wed, 20 May 1998 19:00:00 +0000

While I was in Belfast during the summer of 1995 -- right in the middle of the Northern Ireland cease-fire that miraculously lifted bomb-sniffing dogs and armored soldiers from everyday life there -- the Northern Ireland Office bankrolled a series of festive billboards. Splashed across the signs were the closing words of native son Van Morrison's "Coney Island": "Wouldn't it be great if it could be like this all the time?"

On TV spots, Morrison's "Days Like This" played over images of two little boys -- one Protestant, one Catholic -- frolicking together near the magnificent North Antrim coast. "Everything falls into place with the flick of a switch,/Yes my mama told me there'd be days like this."

Belfasters, in war or peace one of the most extroverted and friendly urban populations anywhere, appeared to be enjoying their city with gusto, gleefully driving through that summer's spectacularly Mediterranean weather on downtown streets that only months earlier had been a labyrinth of barricades and police checkpoints. Jokes abounded about how the Royal Ulster Constabulary, interrogation artists who had distinguished themselves as compressors of skulls and testicles, were now self-consciously shuffling around like beat cops, pointing out faulty taillights and writing parking tickets.

Cajun Mardi Gras

Fri, 27 Feb 1998 20:00:00 +0000

At dusk, flooded rice fields extend out beneath giant prairie skies like black mirrors on either side of Highway 97, broken only by white plastic floats marking submerged crawfish traps. With over 200 miles of elbow room east to New Orleans or west to Houston, this is the heart of rural Acadiana: Cajun country.

Out of the dark leaps a lighted sign. The parking lot of DI's restaurant by the roadside is jammed with cars; a steady stream of people -- neighbors even though their houses are separated from one another by those glistening rice fields -- moves through the door. A smaller number assemble on one side of the parking lot, by a long wooden wagon hitched to a pickup truck. The wagon is lined with benches and hand-painted in brilliant red, yellow and green: TEE-MAMOU MARDI-GRAS. Clustering around the wagon, they talk among themselves in quiet, purposeful tones. Most are garbed in pajamalike costumes stitched from vivid scraps of fabric and heavily fringed along the seams and hems; on their heads are capuchons -- tall, pointed caps such as those worn by ladies of a European court centuries ago. In their hands, not yet on their faces, are masks crafted of pieces of window screen, with designs meticulously painted on, so that the face of the wearer flickers behind the terrifying or comical grimaces.