Biography
Archbishop Rembert Weakland entered religious life as a Benedictine monk and was then ordained to the priesthood. For several years, he was called to a ministry in church music, pursuing studies at the Julliard School of Music and Columbia University. He taught at St. Vincent College, and lectured throughout Europe and America. In 1967, Archbishop Weakland was elected Abbot Primate of the International Benedictine Confederation and became Chancellor of the International Benedictine College in Rome. In 1977, Pope Paul VI appointed him Archbishop of Milwaukee. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Turning Hope into Action" 
I want to begin with a passage all of you probably know by memory. It is so important that I begin talking about hope by reading St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, Chapter 8.

"We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as children, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."

It might seem strange that I am talking about hope because you find so many reasons for not hoping -- war, drugs, crime. I live in a city where, when you open the newspaper in the morning, you read about how many murders there were during the night. We have begun to keep track of those murders. It seems that there are so many signs today for saying there is no hope. That is why as Christians we have to think about, meditate on, and rev up our hope.

My first point will be this. If we place our hope in earthly things, then we have every reason to be disillusioned. The reason we can hope is simply because God loved us first. I would have to say that over and over again. We can hope because God loves us first, but not only that. God loves us in our sinfulness. If God waited until we were perfect creatures, God would have to wait forever. Our hope lies in the fact that God loves us. Because God loves us, God wants to be with us and share life with us. Our hope always rests on God's presence with us, in us, in our midst.

The next point, though, is this. Did you notice that St. Paul was saying that we are all groaning? I love that word "groaning." It means that somehow we don't have our act together, that things aren't quite right. That is why we are groaning. It means that things aren't quite the way they should be and it is all right for us to say that. It is all right to say, "I don't have my act together." That is part of God loving us in our nothingness. I would ask you to be OK towards yourself if you find that life just isn't the way you want it to be.

I have a suspicion that most of us confuse hope with expectations. First of all, we place too high expectations on ourselves. I find many people who have a very bad self-image because they have placed all these expectations on themselves. A lot of people place far too many expectations on others, especially on those around them, expectations on their spouse. Oh, the expectation levels on children.

I really pity young people today, especially teenagers, because of the expectation level put on them by parents and others. If you are like me, fourth in a family going to the same school where your sisters and brother went, every teacher said, "Oh, you're a Weakland. Therefore, you have to get all A's, etc."

I was interviewing a group of teenagers the other day. In the middle of this kind of Donahue Show, one little girl said, "Oh, my problem isn't my parents." She said, "It's everybody. Because I'm Vietnamese, they all think I have got to be brilliant in school." The expectation level that everyone puts somebody else on; the expectation level that we expect from God, that somehow God is going to make everything easy for us. We have to constantly readjust our expectation levels as we think about what it means for God to love us. Perhaps what we have to do is readjust our expectations constantly as we move ahead in life.

The next point I would like to make about hope is not to confuse it with human optimism. There are many people who are optimistic by nature. I am an optimistic person. It takes a lot to get me down. There are other people who by psychological makeup happen to be people who have to deal with depressions and lack of self-value. Whether you are on one side or the other side of the psychological scale doesn't matter. Christian hope is the same for all of us because it is built on God's love for us.

I announced that this talk was going to be about hope going to action and I haven't said a word yet about action. I think what happens is this. When we don't have hope, are depressed, and don't sense how much God loves us, we are unable to move and to do things. We become totally passive in life. We don't spread the Good News. We don't give hope. Instead we are always waiting and waiting and have enormous self-pity. When we have Christian hope, know that God loves us and is with us, then we are able to do things.

There is a proverb which is attributed to the Jesuits that says we should pray as if everything depended on God and then act as if everything depended on ourselves. There is a little wisdom underneath that proverb. It means that God expects us to do and not just sit there and be the object of other people's actions.

Now I have a Catholic story to tell you. It is about Jake and the lottery. Jake wanted to win the lottery and had all his expectations on winning it. Everyday he would go to church, light a candle and pray, "Lord, help me to win the lottery. I need that money. Help me to win the lottery." Finally, God whispered to him and said, "Look, Jake, at least go half-way and a buy a ticket."

The story has a moral. The moral is quite clear and simple; namely, we have to do our share. We have to be people of hope who get out there and want to help others with our hope.

I want to say something else that is the American temptation with regard to hope. When you and I are full of zeal, know God loves us, want everybody to feel that and to inspire others, what we do immediately is form a committee and then get a program started. That is so typically American. We seem to think that the way to do things is to program them. As Americans, you and I are great for that kind of solution.

I want to say a word about being a little cautious or a little bit pelagian, if I can use that word. It is one of those fancy words meaning the human person thinks, "Well, we can do it on our own without God." A little bit of that always sneaks in, especially among us Catholics and us Americans. There is a tendency to say, "Well, all we have got to do is mass our forces, get our things in order and we can solve all problems."

Every so often we have to pull back and remember again and again, it's God's kingdom and God's plan. We have to be willing and able to do everything we can in our power to make sure that we are listening to God and God's word.

I guess I have made it pretty clear that in regard to hope there are not quick fixes. As you and I move ahead we often think, "Well, we have got all our programs going; we have got all these good resolutions." Suddenly in the middle of it all, God throws us a curve. That happens over and over again in life. We have to learn somehow to adjust, if you will, to the impossible.

One of the wonderful aspects of the spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous is that we learn dependency on God and not to become totally frustrated with all those things that you and I simply cannot change. I say that with regard to hope. It is so easy to live with false expectations. You and I think that somewhere along the line we are going to be able to manipulate it all; to get it out the way we want. We have to pull back over and over again and say to ourselves, "It is God's kingdom; it is God who loves us; it is God who is going to do it." Then we are open and ready.

They tell the story about the wonderful, smiling John XXIII. Every night before he went to bed he would go into his chapel and his prayer was very short. "Dear Lord, I'm tired. I'm going to bed. The church is yours."

That is so important. It means that you and I so often in our lives simply have to say, "God, it is your kingdom. It is you who is going to solve this. It is you who is going to do all of this." We kind of then say, "Ah, yes." We're able to adjust more and more to what God wants of us.

My last point about hope is this. Hope is contagious. We all like to be around people who are hope-filled people. Strangely enough, in my own life and in my own relationships, those people that I liked to be around were not the people who were clowns. They were not the people who had no suffering or tragedies in their lives. They were the people who were able to remain hope-filled through all the tragedies.

I think of my wonderful Aunt Jenny out on the farm. She lost most of her children when they were quite young. Aunt Jenny with all her tears was a person of deep, deep hope.

I think of a great friend of mine who died not too long ago, a wonderful priest. They had given up on him; they had pulled all the plugs in the hospital. He was just left to die and he came back. He told me later it was because he knew that God loved him and he had more to do in life. He wanted to move ahead.

Hope is contagious. The more we are hope-filled, the more we are going to be able to touch the lives of others. Hope is a gift that is given to us because God loves us. We give it to others by being people who live with and in hope.

Interview with Archbishop Rembert Weakland
Interviewed by Orley Herron

Orley Herron: Archbishop, we share a common role. You are chancellor of Cardinal Stritch College and I am president of National-Louis University. We had a sight visit for renewal of accreditation at our University the other day. They asked a number of our faculty and staff, "If you could be president for a day, what would you do?" I am going to turn the tables on you and ask you if you could be Pope for a day, what would you do?

Rembert Weakland: I'm supposed to answer that I would resign, but I won't say that right off. I think the role of being pope today is a most difficult one. We are now not just Catholic by statement, but I think also in fact. We are Catholic in the sense that the Catholic Church now is in every culture and on every continent.

One of the problems we are facing as a church is how to bring together that enormous body and somehow enrich each other with the diverse cultural traditions. It is probably the first time in history when the Catholic Church is no longer just western culture identified with western civilization as it had been from the beginnings. We have to begin to pull together and learn what that all means to be Catholic.

I think if I were pope, I would try to see how I could begin to bring the world together. For example, the issue of women in the church. We in the United States have a serious problem because of the discontent of so many women in that their roles within the church are very restricted. At the same time, from Africa there is an enormous pressure to permit polygamy. So you see here two totally different groups that never come together. There seems to be no way in which they can talk. I think the Pope's role is somehow to permit those groups to come together and that is a long, long process at this moment in history.

My second idea that has to happen is that as we head toward the year 2000, there are problems that we are really going to have to face up to. You might call them the problems of science and modernity; the problems of how our faith relates to all those other truths out there. They are problems that went underground around the year 1900, the end of the last century, the beginning of this century. They just surface here and there a little bit. We really haven't sat down to take a look at all those problems and work them out in the kind of prayerful and intelligent way that we should. I guess we need more forums on how those problems can be addressed. Those would be the first things I would worry about if I were Pope for a day.

Herron: You really are on the cutting edge of your church. Is there is the revival going on in the Catholic Church that we see in some other denominations?

Weakland: I would say it is a great time for the Catholic Church. I expected our numbers might fall away in some of the older civilizations -- Europe, France, Germany, United States. That's true. But it is a moment of great revival probably because for the first time in history we see our lay people as church and those lay people are intelligent, well educated and eager to contribute, not just financially, but also their talents and their ideas. It is the first time in history we have had anything like that. We might be a little awkward about it but I think it is a good sign, a hopeful sign for the future.

Herron: Archbishop, what are you going to do about the declining number of people entering the priesthood?

Weakland: Pray. That's for sure. I don't think there is any other thing to do right now. We have to continue to pray.

We also have thought again about the role of the laity within the church. Many of the things, especially administrative tasks that priests were doing, can be done by lay people without any difficulty. It is a bit like the Acts of the Apostles. There was the question about the formation of deacons where the priests didn't have enough time to prepare their sermons and preach well. They gave other ministries over to others.

We are in a similar kind of role right now. Our priests want and need more time to prepare their homilies so that they do a better job and their counseling. We are going to have to let some things go. As we lift up those ministries, we are going to have to do some reshuffling and it is going to be great.

Herron: Thank you, Archbishop.