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In the spring of 2002, with the Catholic clergy abuse scandal unfolding nationally, Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland called his priests together for a strategy session at the Cousin’s Center on the city’s South Side. The hastily called meeting came with only two days’ warning, but there was a big turnout of nervous priests and archdiocesan officials.

Many recall it as a gloomy winter day though it was nearly May. And Weakland’s message couldn’t have been darker. “Gentlemen, don’t underestimate this,” Weakland warned. “This is the greatest crisis to hit the church since the Reformation.”

Five hundred years earlier, the Reformation had split Christianity in two, dividing it into Catholic and Protestant spheres. The prospect of something so ominous again hitting the church left the priests shaken.

As Weakland and the priests began holding listening sessions to hear what Catholics had to say about the sexual abuse crisis, the scandal hit home with double force. The archbishop himself was implicated in a personal cover-up and forced to admit that he had sold church property to pay $450,000 in apparent hush money to a former theology student, Paul Marcoux. Marcoux told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the archbishop had sexually assaulted him in 1979; Weakland denied that but confessed to an illicit affair.

In a televised service at the Mater Christi Chapel at the Cousin’s Center, the gaunt 75-year-old former archbishop addressed his entire community, apologizing five times for the pain he’d caused. In somber, sometimes faltering tones, he begged forgiveness for his sinfulness.

“It was devastating. I don’t think we as clergy ever dealt with the heartache, the sadness we all felt,” says Fr. Tony Zimmer, pastor of Milwaukee’s St. Charles Borromeo Parish. “It was very hard getting in front of the people and discussing that. Those were hard homilies to give.”

In the almost five years since, the crisis has all but lived up to Weakland’s warning. The U.S. Catholic Church has spent more than $1.5 billion in settlements, therapy for victim-survivors and abusers, attorney fees and other costs related to sexual abuse of minors by priests or deacons.

Although some rather forgiving Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions have helped the archdiocese avoid liability for nearly all of the sexual abuse suits brought against it, Milwaukee has still spent more than $22 million, selling off property and slashing administrative staff to settle with more than 110 victims. Over $11 million of this settled two California cases involving former Milwaukee diocesan priests. The potential damages in those cases – resolved this fall – had threatened to bankrupt the archdiocese.

Nationally, 4 percent of diocesan priests have had credible sexual abuse accusations filed against them, involving more than 9,000 child and teenage victims. In Milwaukee, 43 out of 1,245 present and former clergy have been identified as abusers.

Trust in the moral authority of the church has plummeted. Three-fourths of Catholics surveyed by Georgetown University say the scandal has “hurt the credibility of church leaders who speak out on social or political issues.”

Across the country, the church is reeling from the scandal, and Milwaukee is no exception. The 10-county archdiocese has always been a bulwark of the church, where 30 percent of the population identify themselves as Catholic, compared to 22 percent nationally. Milwaukee is the 20th largest of 186 American archdioceses, and as recently as the early 1990s, it led the nation (along with Cincinnati) in the percentage of parishioners attending Mass regularly: 40 percent.

But in the wake of the abuse scandal, many local Catholics have withheld donations, stopped attending Mass or simply dropped out. “I’ve had people tell me: ‘When the bishops get their house in order, then I’ll listen to them,’” says Fr. Brian Mason, archdiocesan associate vicar for clergy.

Today, only 29 percent of southeastern Wisconsin’s 674,736 Catholics attend weekend Mass, according to archdiocesan figures. Mass attendance was already falling, but it has plummeted since Weakland’s confession.

The abuse scandal has exacerbated the problems of a church that was already irrelevant to many young people. “We have a big challenge,” says Fr. Kenneth Mich, pastor of Good Shepherd Parish in Menomonee Falls. “We haven’t been able to convince the 18- to 35-year-olds to have active church lives.”

The number of couples married in the Milwaukee archdiocese has fallen by an astonishing 42 percent since 1989. That could lose the church two generations: the couples and their future children.

Meanwhile, the archdiocese has far more churches than priests to serve them, a decline accelerated by the defrocking of abusive priests. Whole sections of the archdiocese have seen big declines in the number of parishioners. Tough decisions need to be made to consolidate and merge parishes.

Yet amid the darkness are rays of hope: growth in parishes in exurban areas and Hispanic city neighborhoods, parishes where creative priests and lay leaders have figured out how to sell the faith to consumerist Catholics and build their congregations, and a new archbishop, Timothy Dolan, whose considerable pastoral and public relations skills have left many feeling more optimistic.

Dolan will need those skills as a divided archdiocese fights over how to adapt to changing cultural conditions, which people it will serve – and how. For much of its history, Milwaukee’s heavily Catholic archdiocese was seen as a national leader. Can it rebuild that reputation?

Even before he’d arrived in Milwaukee on June 24, 2002, newly appointed Archbishop Timothy Dolan worried about what he would face. He’d never even run a parish, and he was about to take over the 20th largest archdiocese in America, with the fifth-largest number of members of religious orders in the country.

He’d earned his doctorate in American church history and knew Milwaukee as an icon of German Catholic culture, the top of “The German Triangle” that included St. Louis and Cincinnati. He’d also read about “the feistiness of its German priests and their rebelliousness against the [mainly Irish] Catholic Hierarchical Church in the U.S.,” he says now.

Milwaukee’s first four archbishops were all German speakers who served 87 years, from 1843 until 1930. They resisted the dominant English-speaking hierarchy of the American church and promoted parishes with strong ethnic identities.

That was a different era, of course, but here was a modern Irish American representative of Catholic orthodoxy walking into an archdiocese known as a liberal hotbed of rebellion against Rome.

“I had this stereotype of Milwaukee as radically different from the rest of the church in America,” says Dolan. Others had warned him of “rebellious priests” and an archdiocese that had “drifted to the edge of Catholic orthodoxy.”

Archdiocesan insiders, meanwhile, had their own stereotypes. Dolan heard the rumors that he was this “gun-slinging Roman appointee sent to clean up the diocese.” He was indeed well-known in Rome, where he had spent seven years as rector of the Pontifical North American College beginning in 1994 (the only administrative job he’d held). And he was well-connected in Washington, D.C., serving five years as secretary to the Apostolic Nunciature, the pope’s personal representative in the United States.

Dolan knew most of the U.S. archbishops, but not Weakland, and he feared they’d agree on nothing. So when Weakland offered to brief him on his new archdiocese, Dolan was relieved. “The obvious sincerity of Archbishop Weakland’s promise to co-operate,” he says, gave him solace.

But as Weakland began apprising him of the difficulties he’d face in the job, Dolan’s stereotyped misgivings about Milwaukee began to be replaced by more realistic but equally worrisome concerns.

When Dolan went to bed that evening, his first official day as archbishop-elect, it was in the converted Cream City brick stable Weakland had made his home. Dolan had trouble sleeping. Still nervous about the prospect of his first press conference the next day, he rose at 4:30 a.m. and sought the small chapel Weakland had shown him earlier, tiptoeing so as not to wake his sleeping predecessor. But when the new archbishop entered the chapel, he found the old one already there, kneeling in prayer.

“That had a really profound impact,” Dolan says now, “because whatever differences I might have with him, the similarities were striking. We both began our day the same way, in prayer before the tabernacle.”

After that, Dolan says, “My anxiety just sort of melted away. It was like a miracle.”

Fr. Javier Bustos was a 28-year-old Venezuelan philosophy instructor recruited by the Milwaukee archdiocese in 1995 to become one of its first “imported” Hispanic seminarians. In Rome, where Bustos would ultimately complete three years of doctoral study focused on sexuality and celibacy, he met more than 100 priests and archbishops from America. He was amazed at their reaction to his being from Milwaukee. “People looked at me like I was a weird animal or something,” he says.

He must be some kind of “liberal sexual revolutionary,” Bustos recalls them suggesting.

Milwaukee hadn’t always been so infamous. During much of Weakland’s tenure, it was seen as a leader in the training of lay ministers, including women; in reaching out to other religious dominations; and on social justice issues. In fact, Weakland had drafted the U.S. Bishops’ 1986 Pastoral Letter on the Economy.

“When he would stand up at the bishops’ meetings, it would always get quiet. They knew he’d say something worth hearing,” recalls Milwaukee Auxiliary Bishop Richard J. Sklba.

Even on less weighty matters, Milwaukee was a leader. The archdiocese began paying priests a decent salary but expected them to pay rent for living in the parish rectory and either clean for themselves or contribute toward a housekeeper. “It let every parish understand what a priest really costs” and became a model for others nationally, says Sklba.

But the openness of Weakland and Sklba to change could also cause tension. In 1976, the executive board of the Catholic Biblical Association of America asked Sklba, who’d earned his doctorate in scripture in Rome, to convene a task force of prominent scholars on the role of women in early Christianity. Their 1979 report found that “women were clearly in leadership in all kinds of ways in the early church,” says Sklba, suggesting no historical or religious reason not to ordain women.

But by the time the report was published, John Paul II had become pope and the church was moving in a different direction. Sklba, then still a priest, says he was pressured to tone down the report. He refused and almost wasn’t appointed a bishop, says Bustos. (Sklba confirms that he refused to tone down the report but would not discuss almost being denied the appointment.) In his office, as a bittersweet reminder, Sklba keeps a statue of the prophet St. Jeremiah shown in stocks and “punished for saying the truth.”

Over time, Weakland, too, got in trouble with Rome. A 1990 photo appeared in The New York Times showing him holding a “listening session” with women from his archdiocese who’d had abortions. Weakland believed he acted in the spirit of Vatican Council II’s call to open up dialog, but this blurred instead into the perception that he somehow endorsed abortion. Outraged Vatican officials forbade the Dominican-affiliated University of Fribourg in Switzerland from granting Weakland an honorary degree.

Fallout from the photo gave Weakland a reputation “for being wild,” says Sklba.

“Milwaukee fell out of step,” says Fr. Tom DeVries, who spent several years working for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in the late 1990s. “The church was thinking, ‘What did Vatican II throw out that we needed to keep?’” But that re-examination of traditions didn’t happen here, he adds.

In August 2003, not long after the clergy abuse scandal erupted, Milwaukee roiled the waters anew when 163 of its priests signed a letter endorsing optional celibacy as a way to address the priest shortage.

“A lot of people around the country said, ‘Oh, those priests in Milwaukee.’ Some people thought all 160 who signed would get married if it was allowed,” recalls Fr. Mason, who facilitates priest placements for the archdiocese. But that was not the goal, he notes. “It was an open letter to the U.S. bishops that asked, couldn’t we at least begin the dialogue?”

This added to the perception of Milwaukee as a radical outpost “isolated from the rest of the world,” says Bustos. “When Archbishop Dolan came here, he helped us reconnect with the rest of the church.”

Milwaukee was indeed different, Dolan found. Weakland had appointed women to run three of the archdiocese’s four main departments, including chancellor Barbara Anne Cusack and Noreen Welte, director of worship and pastoral services. “You don’t find high-ranking lay women in most other dioceses in the U.S.,” notes Bustos.

In fact, the cabinet Dolan inherited was mostly lay men and women. “This diocese really had learned the lesson of Vatican II about building a strong spirit of lay collaboration,” says Dolan.

Dolan also found pastors still giving general absolution rather than forgiving sins only in individual confessions. “Ninety-five percent of the dioceses settled that 20 years ago,” says Dolan. “You can’t give general absolution [except in emergencies].”

When Dolan asked his priests to change this, “There was no rebellion,” he says. Ironically, Dolan later discovered Weakland’s decade-old writings explaining the same thing – that the experiment with general absolution had ended. But Weakland had been patient, allowing time for the teachings to evolve.

Dolan expected to find the archdiocese’s schools in shambles, having been told that Weakland was “anti-Catholic schools.” But Weakland, in the face of criticism for telling schools they must support themselves, had actually protected them, says Dolan. Thus, while Catholic schools in Boston and Chicago that relied on diocesan subsidies closed when the money was diverted to handle the sexual abuse scandal, Milwaukee’s remained strong.

Not long into his tenure, Dolan decided that the stereotype he’d held about Milwaukee was wrong. So was his “caricature” of Weakland, Dolan says. “This was kind of a mainstream [arch]bishop. I didn’t detect any wild-eyed radical.”

Dolan, in fact, invites Weakland to all important archdiocesan events. Weakland, meanwhile, has refused any invitations to talk to the media, not wanting “to be a pest to the present archbishop,” as he puts it.

The differences between the two leaders’ style is vast. Weakland was a thoughtful speaker and writer, while Dolan’s weekly e-mail on church matters lacks weight. “Dolan’s is much more folksy,” says Fr. Ed Eschweiler. “Bright people don’t find enough substance there.”

Weakland’s braininess also showed up in his handling of the overwhelming paperwork of the complex, multimillion-dollar archdiocesan organization. “Weakland would take in tons of information and read everything and take a long time making a decision. With Dolan, it’s amazing how fast he sizes things up. He’s a quick read but not the same depth. Some would say he’s like Reagan or Bush,” says Fr. Jeffrey Haines, pastor of St. Frances Cabrini in West Bend.

But while some question Dolan’s depth, all seem impressed with his gregarious warmth and outreach abilities.

“He’s so joyful,” says Haines, noting that Dolan patterns himself after John Paul II, the man who appointed him early in his tenure.

Dolan told his staff he wanted to go to fish fries and parish festivals; he wasn’t one to sit behind a desk. On his outings, he displays a fondness for the devotions many older Catholics associate with the 1950s – novenas, devotions to the Sacred Heart, intercessions to Mary. “He wears them on his sleeve, much more than Weakland did,” says Haines.

“Archbishop Weakland was one of the finest intellectuals in the church, but Archbishop Dolan is the most pastoral man I have ever met,” says Welte. “He’s able to connect heart to heart with people.”

The introverted Weakland hated to call people he didn’t know, Welte says, but when Dolan heard that one of Welte’s colleague’s brothers was headed for surgery, he phoned the ailing man to offer encouragement – before and after the operation.

When someone at an archdiocesan meeting mentioned an ailing mother, Dolan visited her at the hospital right after the meeting ended. “Not many archbishops would do that,” says Welte.”

Dolan meets any victim of clergy abuse who asks to see him, she says. “The blessing of having him here is that he bears no personal guilt himself.”

In Whitewater, Dolan met with irate parishioners of St. Patrick’s, where he had removed Pastor James Godin for a confirmed incident of sexual abuse involving a minor years earlier. “The people were brokenhearted by his removal,” remembers Haines, who followed Godin as interim pastor. “They said, ‘Can’t you see he’s reformed?’” But Dolan told them he had no choice but to enforce the U.S. Bishops’ Agreement removing any priest with even one substantiated offense.

Even in handling the worst of the abuse crisis, Dolan seemed to thrive. “He has a constant, chaotic, haphazard cheerfulness. It was an awful moment, and we really did need that,” says Sklba.

As for his dealings with the priests, Dolan doesn’t “bark orders,” says Fr. Steve Avella, a diocesan priest and Marquette University professor who wrote a history of Milwaukee’s archdiocese. Dolan’s style is in keeping with an archdiocese whose past leaders were generally less top-down and more consultative than archbishops elsewhere, says Avella.

As for Dolan, he was heartened to find that Milwaukee’s priests weren’t the unruly mob he’d been led to expect. “I found a really dedicated group of priests eager and willing to work with me,” he says.

What “feistiness” Dolan did encounter was largely of his own making, such as when he issued a new policy allowing diocesan officials to conduct random audits of any priest’s personal computer – not just those facing abuse allegations. Most priests learned of the new plan not from Dolan but in a new policy manual mailed to them. A vociferous uprising resulted.

“We as clergy were saying, ‘Don’t lump us all together,’” says Fr. Zimmer.

Dolan backed off. He now faults his “impulsive tendency to get things done quickly.”

All told, Dolan found an archdiocesan structure with many strengths, but some weaknesses. First among the latter, he says, was that “we were kind of Johnny-come-latelies to stewardship, which is a nice-sounding word for raising money. People here are very generous with their parishes, but there was never a real effort to raise money for the archdiocese.”

Along with more donations, Dolan needs more parishioners and more priests. The solutions will not be easy.

The old german-speaking archbishops of Milwaukee placed an emphasis on ethnic culture that created strong churches: German, Polish, Irish, Italian, Slav and other parishes often less than a mile apart. Parents were required to send their children to Catholic grade school under pain of sin, or get their pastor’s dispensation.

But as the number of nuns and women religious who subsidized Catholic education with their cheap labor declined, parish schools began closing, even as the old neighborhoods changed. “The parishes preserved the ethnic character of the diocese but left behind a white elephant once ethnicity faded,” says Avella.

Today, the archdiocese is a mixture of growth and decay. “Imagine a giant doughnut and place it on top of a map of the metropolitan area,” says Welte. At the center, where the hole would be, there is an explosion of Hispanic Catholics. On the city’s South Side, the number of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, natives of the Caribbean and South America is expanding fast.

“We didn’t see it coming. We don’t have enough priests who speak Spanish. Or, more importantly, an openness and understanding of their spirituality,” says Fr. Ed Eschweiler, a diocesan priest for more than 50 years who’s now retired.

As a result, it’s often Pentecostal and fundamentalist storefront churches that welcome immigrants in their own language and with their own music, according to Dean Hoge and Aniedi Okure in their book, International Priests In America. Seventy percent of U.S. Mexicans are Catholic, but 25 percent now identify themselves as Pentecostals.

Hispanic growth has come in the suburbs, too. “There are 31 parishes with 200 or more Spanish-speaking members,” says Fr. Bob Stiefvater, the archdiocese’s vicar for Hispanic ministry. That includes eight parishes in Walworth County, seven in Racine County and parishes in Kenosha, Waukesha, Fond du Lac, West Bend, Sheboygan, Hartford and Beaver Dam, not to mention on Milwaukee’s North Side.

“Almost 20 percent of the archdiocese’s Catholics are Hispanics, and it’s the fastest-growing part,” says Stiefvater. Astoundingly, about one-half of active teens and young adults in the church nationally are Hispanic. “Hispanics are the future of the Milwaukee archdiocese.” But that means a poorer church, he notes, given the relative poverty of Hispanics.

On the outer edge of Welte’s imaginary doughnut, Catholicism is also booming in the fringe cities of exurbia. “It’s like the 1950s again,” says Fr. Curt Frederick, the archdiocese’s vicar for clergy, referring to that prime period of Catholic growth. “Waterford has doubled in 10 years. Wind Lake has a new church, ditto for Dousman. In Oconomowoc, St. Jerome’s will have to build a new church. In Waukesha, St. William’s has over 2,000…crowded into four weekend Masses in a church that seats 900.”

In West Bend, a city of 30,000, three Catholic parishes minister to more than 5,000 families. When Highway 45 expanded to four lanes, this became a booming exurban area, says St. Frances Cabrini pastor Haines. “Having three Catholic schools in a town this size is amazing. There’s a vibrancy and excitement.”

Catholics are moving west, Welte says, but they’re also moving south to Oak Creek, Franklin, Burlington and Walworth County and north to Cedarburg, Grafton and Port Washington.

The heart of the archdiocese, Dolan says, has moved outward. He helped elevate its most important devotional site, Washington County’s Holy Hill, to minor basilica status and has made a point of

Meanwhile, Catholicism has declined at a shocking rate in the first ring of Milwaukee suburbs, the dough of that imaginary doughnut and once the sweet spot of the archdiocese. A city the size of West Allis has eight catholic parishes but only “about as many Catholics as you’ll find in two parishes in Dousman or Oconomowoc,” says Dolan.

Even with the Hispanic and exurban growth, the total number of registered Catholics in the archdiocese last year fell by 20,000, the first decline in its 163-year history. And Mass attendance has plummeted.

“That’s the elephant in the room that nobody’s talking about,” Dolan concedes.

By 2000, Mass attendance here was declining by 1 percent a year. After the clergy abuse crisis hit, the decline more than tripled.

“Some people just stopped going to church. They distanced themselves,” says Fr. Frederick. “It was the breach of trust.”

Many Catholics were angry when priests facing abuse allegations weren’t removed from the ministry immediately, and some were angry when they were. The faithful returned the archdiocese’s fundraising envelopes with profanities scribbled across them.

“‘I wouldn’t give you and your pedophile priests a dollar,’” read one, recalls Diane Knight, executive director of Catholic Charities. “But we didn’t get nearly as many of those letters as the archdiocese did.” Indeed, the percentage of Catholics donating to U.S. archdiocesan fund drives dropped from 38 percent in 2002 to 29 percent in 2005.

As an associate pastor in Waukesha when the crisis erupted, Fr. Mason says he had one person write a letter saying, “I’m not going to be part of a church that allowed abusers to be a part of it”; another family that had a relative abused simply left the church. This was happening across the archdiocese.

The 2005 Georgetown University poll commissioned by the U.S. bishops found just one-third of Catholics gave them a positive rating for their handling of abuse accusations – no higher a percentage than a similar poll found in 2002. Dolan says there’s “a great sense of frustration” among the bishops that all of their efforts to help victims and prevent future abuse and their “thousands of apologies in front of the cameras” haven’t improved how they’re viewed.

Nearly three of four Catholics said the issue has “hurt the credibility of church leaders who speak out on social or political issues.” Even among those who attend Mass weekly, two-thirds said the crisis has undercut the church’s moral authority.

Even some priests share this feeling. “I think there are some bishops who should be in jail, beginning with [former Boston] Cardinal [Bernard] Law,” says Mason. “I don’t believe the bishops have held themselves accountable in the same way they have held priests accountable.”

Fr. Mark Payne, pastor of St. Veronica’s on Milwaukee’s Southeast Side, says his fellow priests have talked about the “need to replace all of the U.S. bishops. They’re not seeking advice, they’re just telling us ‘Do this. Do that.’ They’re not connecting with where the people are, on medical research, on family values.”

The bishops may never get traction with their apologies until they begin discussing these issues, says psychotherapist A.W. Richard Sipe. Sipe, a former Benedictine monk, was an expert witness in more than 95 civil suits involving clergy sexual abuse and wrote the book A Secret World, based on 25 years of research on celibacy.

“Pedophilia is not the crisis but a symptom of the human sexuality crisis,” Sipe told the National Catholic Reporter. “The laity wants all these questions re-examined and re-discussed – from contraception, homosexuality, masturbation and sex before marriage to sex after divorce, even abortion…The laity is questioning the church’s reasoning. This questioning is so compelling that nothing can turn it back.”

The aging of the Catholic population has created another challenge. Survey research shows that baby boomers attended Mass less than their elders, even before the clergy abuse crisis. And those younger than baby boomers are even less likely to attend.

“The Catholic Church is a communal experience, and we’re in a world that stresses individuality,” says Fr. Dan Pakenham, 67, pastor of St. Mary’s Parish in Elm Grove. “This is a central issue because the Catholic Church is a communal church gathered around the tradition of the Eucharist. If that doesn’t happen, there is no church.”

Pakenham identifies two big groups of Catholics, one being “cultural Catholics,” those raised in the church who have fallen away. Their numbers may have been increased by the clergy abuse scandal, he says.

A second group of “good Catholics” wasn’t as affected by the crisis and does practice its religion yet may not see Sunday Mass as an obligation.

The combination of Catholic dropouts and Catholics moving to newer suburbs has driven both the decline in the older suburbs and the increase in exurbia. As a result of such social change, the clergy abuse scandal and fierce disagreements over how modern the church should become, there is a vast range of parishes and priests in the archdiocese. Southeastern Wisconsin’s Catholics aren’t all singing out of the same hymnal.

There are parishes like St. Mary’s in Elm Grove known for a more formal worship and traditional devotional exercises – the rosary, stations of the cross and novenas. Others, like Good Shepherd in Menomonee Falls, are centered around a liberal 1960s social justice theme.

There are parishes run by lay women and men, by ordained deacons or even by priests who were once married. Fr. Tom DeVries, pastor of Mequon’s Lumen Christi Parish, was a married Dutch Reform minister who divorced and became a Catholic convert and priest. Fr. Jim Connell was once a husband and certified public accountant in Chicago. Now he is pastor of Holy Name and St. Clement parishes in Sheboygan.

There are parishes of dirt-poor Catholics used to taking orders and others full of doctors, lawyers and corporate executives used to giving them. There are parishes with self-appointed “liturgy Nazis” who pounce on a priest if he adds something as innocent as “enjoy this glorious day” to the approved text. And there are parishes where a pastor asks a lay minister to speak and “share her faith” at the time of the homily even though only ordained males are officially allowed to preach.

Meanwhile, throughout America, the bishops are enforcing an updated version of the liturgical rulebook, the Roman Missal, which requires a return to kneelers in church. Scores of local churches were built without them since the reforms of Vatican II, but now kneelers are again required. To some churchgoers, it feels like the return of the pre-Vatican II, 1950s church.

Dolan has been somewhat flexible on these rules. He gave one financially struggling church three years to get kneelers installed and exempted another that had only chairs and no pews for attaching kneelers.

The new rules also require lay Eucharistic ministers to keep a distance from the altar until after the priest consecrates the bread and wine. Bishop Sklba, a member of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy, says the rule addresses a European blurring of lines between church and state. “You had cases there where the priest would play a minor role in the Mass compared to the mayor and other officials,” he notes. But in America, the rule seemed to banish lay ministers to the edges of the altar just when they’re needed most, in the middle of the priest shortage.

Fr. Mike Witczak, rector of St. Francis Seminary and an expert on liturgy, says the changes in the Missal were meant to recapture “a lost sense of reverence.” Dolan concedes some complaints about the new rules but says he also hears from many who want more orthodoxy. “The 1950s were a time of amazing growth and excitement,” he says.

Dolan has tried to walk a tightrope. “Dolan hasn’t made a lot of changes in the faculty, academics or theology being taught at the seminary,” says Fr. Bob Stiefvater, vicar for Hispanic Ministry. But “he doesn’t move far from Rome and the U.S. bishops. He wants to be in union with them.”

Dolan’s view: “I don’t wait for a mimeograph from Rome telling me what to do. That’s just not true. The real church is bottom-up. The church’s real life is the parish. All the things we extol about Vatican II started in the 1950s.”

But, he adds, “the church is always moving forward.”

Some complain the bishops have paid undue attention to issues like kneelers because this is easier than confronting tough issues like the priest shortage, celibacy and the role of lay people.

“We are arguing about when to sit or stand, and all the big issues of re-establishing trust are not being acted upon,” says Zimmer. “People are saying, ‘Does the Lord really care about this little stuff or whether we have just, righteous people?’”

Fifty years ago, the U.S. Catholic Church actually had a surplus of priests. The Depression and World War II brought what historian Avella cites as an unprecedented influx of vocations. There were so many priests, he says, “the archbishops almost didn’t know where to go with them all.”

This made it easy to serve the expanding church of the post-World War II era. In 1956, enrollment in archdiocesan schools rose nearly 10 percent, the 10th consecutive annual increase. That year, the archdiocese built 37 new Catholic schools and ordained 48 new priests at St. Francis seminary, where 279 candidates for the priesthood crammed into space for 190. With visions of even more student priests in the future, the seminary added a new residence hall, chapel and student cafeteria.

But by 1995, this complex was serving few seminarians. Just one was ordained in 2002 and five in 2006. The once-grand cafeteria, with lovely draperies and stained-glass windows, is now a parking garage.

Only in one brief period, from about 1940 to 1960, did Americans produce enough homegrown priests, Catholic historians say. In the 20th century, many of America’s priests came from Ireland. By the late 1990s, 16 percent of priests were foreign born, with most from Mexico and Vietnam. In this century, India and Nigeria are expected to be a prime source of American priests.

The Milwaukee archdiocese actively recruits foreign missionaries. A recruit from a foreign country, says Mason,” will send their salary home, and that supports two or three priests there or puts three more seminarians through school.”

Mason is negotiating with the archbishop of the Congo, hoping he’ll “lend” him two priests for five years. But first, he says, they’ll need to spend six months in an “accent reduction” and “acculturation” program.

Mason faces an ever-worsening shortage of priests. This year, when he compared the number of parishes in need of a pastor to the number of priests available, he was 15 short.

Under Weakland, the archdiocese began closing or merging parish schools and then parishes in the 1980s, first responding to declining congregations and, over time, to the shortage of priests.

A school closing at the Polish parish of St. Paul’s on the city’s Southeast Side in 2004 was “like a death,” says Daryl Olszewski, then the parish’s lay administrator. The congregation was mostly made up of retirees who had attended that school or sent their children there. “It was almost like losing a member of the family,” Olszewski says. In the end, six area parishes merged their grade schools into St. Thomas Aquinas Academy.

Over time, archdiocesan leaders have learned to let parishioners go through “the stages of grief,” says Welte. In 1999, St. Barbara merged with Holy Spirit, forming San Rafael, Archangel. Each church’s pastor said “a Mass of thanksgiving for all of the people who had found solace there, for those who were married and raised their families there, got sick and died,” says Welte. Then, with the church bells tolling, the parishioners walked to a park midway between the two parishes and then walked in unity to the new combined parish.

During the 1990s, 23 parishes were reconfigured as 13. Some have dragged their feet; others have gone willingly. In Fond du Lac, five parishes came together to form a 16,000-member mega parish with four pastors, but in Sheboygan, six parishes have been talking about mergers since 2000. “You can only move as fast as the slowest one, and one parish isn’t ready,” says Fr. Connell, pastor of two of the churches.

“You always lose people in mergers,” says Fr. Bob Betz, who recently oversaw the marriage of four South Milwaukee parishes – newer, 1960s-era St. Silvester’s; Irish St. Mary’s; German St. John’s; and Polish St. Adelbert’s – into Divine Mercy.

Unlike Weakland, Dolan has refused to order any mergers or closings.

“I’m not going to do it,” he says. “I want it to come from the people. They have to discover what it means to be Catholic, and that means looking beyond their church building.”

So Mason finds parishes willing to share a priest and helps others hire a lay administrator. Mason himself did what many priests have done – he took a second job. In addition to his full-time archdiocesan job, he’s now pastor of St. Richard’s in Racine, a parish produced from the merger of five parishes in 1998.

With 217 parishes and 161 active priests to serve them, Mason already had to leave a parish like St. James in Mukwonago without a pastor. Next year, 30 priests aged 68 to 75 will be eligible for retirement. Six or seven will probably retire, Mason estimates, and he’ll have to fill their spots.

In 10 years, the archdiocese will really hit a wall, as baby boomers begin retiring en masse. Less than half of the 161 active Milwaukee archdiocesan priests are under age 55. (Ten archdiocesan priests were removed from ministry because of the abuse crisis.)

Historically, having its own seminary gave Milwaukee a ready supply of home-educated priests. But now, given the few graduates and high costs, the seminary may be an unaffordable luxury for a diocese this size. “Especially when we’re in a precarious situation spending a heck of a lot on damages in the clergy abuse scandal,” says Dolan. So Dolan dismissed his academic faculty and arranged for his seminarians to study at Sacred Heart seminary in Hales Corners, which is run by the Sacred Heart of Jesus religious order.

The increasingly desperate situation raises the touchy issue of women, either as ordained priests or as wives of married priests.

“There are so many things the church has said are not discussable. That’s how they got into this problem [the clergy abuse crisis], says Racine Dominican Sister Michelle Olley, a nun for 50 years and a veteran school administrator.

As a representative of the National Coalition of American Nuns, Olley was asked to meet with U.S. bishops when they were considering writing a pastoral letter on women more than 20 years ago. “They asked very thoughtful questions, like ‘What do women want?’ and ‘What does feminism mean?’”

But the letter never got written. The bishops worried about the repercussions and Rome’s disapproval. “Women still want to be a part of the church, not apart from it,” but many feel the leadership is out of touch with their concerns, says Olley.

“Some of the most persuasive, cogent leaders in this archdiocese are women,” Dolan says. “Women run our schools, our homes.” But the ordination of women, he adds, would be like adding a fourth person to the Blessed Trinity. “There are certain matters of Catholic doctrine that are closed…and the ordination of women is one of them”

For more than a century, the Catholic Church functioned like a marriage broker, says historian Steve Avella. Couples met at church dances, married in the church and raised more Catholics. Parishes thrived.

“I think we had the numbers so we weren’t as conscious about meeting the needs of people as we should be,” says Fr. Betz.

But since 1989, the number of marriages in the archdiocese has dropped 42 percent. At St. Paul’s back in the 1960s, “nearly everyone on the block belonged to the parish, but now, half the neighbors are young families who don’t go to church at all,” says former lay administrator Daryl Olszewski.

Those who did ask him about getting married in the church wanted “something quick and easy,” he says. But those with a prior marriage needed an annulment, while marriage of a Catholic and non-Catholic meant “there couldn’t be a Mass, and a lot of families didn’t like that,” he notes.

Then there’s the problem of couples already living together prior to marriage. “Some priests take a hard line and say you have to live apart for so many months,” says Fr. Kenneth Mich, pastor of Good Shepherd Parish in Menomonee Falls. Other priests might favor a bit more leniency, he adds, “but there’s less tolerance for ambiguity today. The pressure to have things black and white is coming from above.”

The small number of couples that did marry at St. Paul’s during Olszewski’s time there “disappeared within a few weeks after the wedding and we’d never see them again,” he says. New parents did bring their babies to the church to be baptized, but after three months of classes and the baptism, they’d disappear, too. Half the first communion class would be missing from Mass before a year had passed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with our glue, but this is a very big problem for the church,” says Olszewski.

At an archdiocesan pastoral council meeting discussing the shortage of priests, a woman interrupted and noted another shortage. “She said there’s a big problem we bishops hadn’t been attuned to, and that’s the sacrament of marriage,” Dolan recalls. Dolan had previously listed priestly vocations as one of his six top goals, but he’s now changed that to read “encourage vocations – both religious and married.”

In an age when evangelical mega-churches like Elmbrook in Brookfield are attracting ex-Catholics, the archdiocese may need to improve its salesmanship. Religious consumerism is the new trend, with people shopping for their church.

Once a month, after Mass, Haines’ West Bend parish serves coffee and doughnuts to new members. “People come up to me and say [they] visited three or four churches and [they] really like your liturgy, the choir or the school.”

At St. Francis seminary, dean of formation Fr. Don Hying says he teaches future priests to personalize preaching as the evangelicals do, to insert a prayer or word of hope aimed at members of the parish. “You look out at your congregation and you know he’s drinking again, she lost her job, their son committed suicide 10 years ago.”

Ironically, just as Catholics are becoming more demanding consumers, pastors are increasingly over worked and tired. “We’ve got to get the priests out from under the administrative duties of managing a parish and out with the people,” says Sheboygan’s Fr. Connell. “You always have to adapt to the times.”

One adaptation to the times can be found at St. Anthony on the Lake Parish in Pewaukee. Its 12-year-old pioneering program in religious education that includes the whole family has a 99 percent retention rate and has attracted parishioners from 24 widely dispersed ZIP codes. The program has grabbed the attention of East Coast parishes interested in copying it, and won a national award.

“If you build it, they will come,” says the wizard behind this program, lay pastoral associate Kathie Amidei. Amidei, who has three grown kids, says her ministry is about “empowering families.” She credits a former archdiocesan official, Maureen Gallagher, now Waukesha Catholic Schools director, with launching the first program of its type in 1995.

Amidei approached the issue this way: “I thought, what did I get out of my big Italian family gatherings growing up? We’d pass on culture. And I thought, that’s what the church needs to do!”

The number-one complaint families have today is that they are stressed for time. But Amidei says that after one session, “people feel fed, so it’s not just an extra thing on their schedules. It’s relevant to the life they go back to.”

In a typical session, families arrive for 9 a.m. Sunday Mass followed by a period of fellowship (coffee and doughnuts). Then parents and kids (age 3 through high school) break into separate classes. Afterward, they gather for a shared activity, all focused around the same scripture or Catholic doctrine. By 11:45, they’re on their way home.

“We know now that faith is passed parent to child,” says Amidei, explaining why religious education didn’t work when parents just dropped the kids off for instruction. “When you bring parents and children together, the children love being there, the fathers are involved, the parents are learning on an adult level.”

Twenty-five other area parishes have started similar programs, with rave reviews from pastors. Couples who weren’t married in the church, Fr. Betz says, “are coming back with their kids. They find that something is still missing in their lives. We’re helping to fill that void.”

But will such programs be enough to turn things around for such a huge archdiocese, with so many parishes and so much conflict over what is the true path for its flock? Can Milwaukee once again become a leader in the church nationally? No one really knows, but there are flashes of optimism to be found across the 10 counties of Dolan’s archdiocese, much of it centering around Dolan himself.

“He’s the right guy at the right time,” says Fr. Mark Payne, who’s served as a pastor in the metro area for four years. “We are in an archdiocese with a lot of hurt, and he can connect with people. He’s a healing presence.”