The New York Times has caught up with former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland, who recently came out as gay in a book to be published next month. He is believed to be the first American Catholic bishop to do so publicly and voluntarily.

“If we say our God is an all-loving god,” Weakland told the Times, “how do you explain that at any given time probably 400 million living on the planet at one time would be gay? Are the religions of the world, as does Catholicism, saying to those hundreds of millions of people, you have to pass your whole life without any physical, genital expression of that love?”

According to the Times, Weakland said he had been aware of his homosexual orientation since he was a teenager and suppressed it until he became archbishop, when he had relationships with several men because of “loneliness that became very strong.”

One of those men, Paul Marcoux, was paid $450,000 to keep silent about the affair, an arrangement that was disclosed in May of 2002, the height (or nadir) of the Catholic sexual abuse scandal. Weakland said he was told by Rome to deny the affair and to keep mum about his sexual orientation.

“I suppose, also, being frank, I wouldn’t have wanted to be labeled in Rome at that point as gay,” Weakland told the Times. “Rome is a little village.”