Hunthausen and Wuerl - what happened?

An interesting brief retrospective by Ed Condon on Cardinal Wuerl's career was occasioned by this week's installation of Wuerl's successor, Wilton Gregory, as archbishop of Washington DC.  We've noted previously here at NewGathering that Wuerl, during his last year as archbishop, was ensnared in both of the scandals that continue to reverberate throughout the American church: the disgrace and fall of Wuerl's predecessor, now-former-Cardinal McCarrick, and the Pennsylvania grand jury report.

Condon, described as a canon lawyer and head of Catholic News Agency's Washington bureau, doesn't seek to minimize or apologize for Wuerl's unadmirable actions that contributed to those scandals, but he also makes the point that Wuerl accomplished some good things that should be given some weight in assessing his overall career:

Wuerl deserves to be remembered for more than the scandals of his final year in office. 

As bishop of Pittsburgh, Wuerl was years ahead of his peers in responding to what would become the sexual abuse crisis. From the moment he arrived as bishop in 1988, Wuerl was meeting personally with victims at a time when many bishops would not even consider doing so. Within a year, Wuerl had established a diocesan committee to evaluate policies for responding to abuse allegations, a committee that grew to become the current Diocesan Review Board, nearly a decade before the Dallas Charter called for every diocese to have such a body. Wuerl also imposed a personal policy of “zero-tolerance” which stands comparison to any other diocesan policy today.   

In considering Wuerl's eventful career as a senior church leader, it may be worth recalling that there was at least one notable earlier chapter: more than 30 years ago, the Holy See appointed him as an auxiliary bishop of Seattle, almost certainly with the intention - and vested with the authority - to rein in the activities of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen.  John Allen recalled that episode last year:

In 1986, a young Wuerl was put in an impossible position in Seattle when he was named an auxiliary bishop with authority over several key areas, in what was obviously a vote of no confidence from Rome about the leadership of progressive Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen. As Hunthausen rallied his friends in the U.S. bishops’ conference and eventually succeeded in having his powers returned, Wuerl was styled as the bad guy, “Rome’s hatchet man,” while insiders would say that he was simply doing his best to try to keep the peace. 

Wuerl did his job in Seattle without complaint, and he withdrew without public fireworks when it was over. In the end the two men became friends, and Wuerl once said he learned a great deal about how to be a bishop from Hunthausen, who died this July at the age of 96.

How progressive was Hunthausen?  Here is how Ken Briggs recalls it in NCR:

In his 1985 indictment of the Seattle archbishop, [Cardinal] Ratzinger [then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome] summed up accusations gathered in his investigation whose point man in the U.S. was Archbishop James Hickey of Washington, D.C. Among the charges: that Hunthausen had allowed divorced Catholics without annulments to take communion; gave lay people unauthorized influence in shaping programs as "a kind of voting process on doctrinal or moral teachings"; permitted intercommunion at weddings and funerals, calling it "clearly abusive"; and supported a homosexual group to meet in the cathedral, which risked ignoring the Magisterium's judgment that same-sex acts were "an intrinsic moral evil, intrinsically distorted and self-indulgent." In addition to welcoming the gay group to the cathedral, he'd stood up for homosexual dignity in the Seatte Gay News in 1977.

He was also chastised for giving the green light to general absolution. 

Not mentioned but clearly decisive in this offensive was the archbishop's staunch protest against nuclear arms in general and the Trident submarine base near Seattle. He had joined anti-Trident demonstrations and refused to pay half of his federal income tax.

Briggs notes that Hunthausen, back then, was "demonstrating values and practices that Pope Francis appears to approve in whole or in part" today.

As an interesting postscript, Gene Johnson in the Washington Post wrote that "Archbishop Hunthausen’s authority was largely restored two years later."

The Hunthausen/Wuerl episode occurred when I was fresh out of college.  I was not following church news as closely as I do now.  In fact, I did not hear of the episode at all until a decade or more after it occurred.  It first came to my attention in a UseNet forum, in which a woman whose first name was Marie, and whose last name I no longer remember, although I do recall that she was a Milwaukeean who had done graduate studies in theology at Marquette and who tragically died a few years later, posted that during his assignment in Seattle, Wuerl had refused to play the role of hit man in which the Roman authorities had cast him.  He had behaved with notable integrity and was at least partly responsible for Hunthausen's restoration.  I remember that that assessment raised hackles among some of the conservative Catholics in that particular forum; Hunthausen, for them, was highly suspect because he deviated in a multitude of ways from their notions of Catholic 'orthodoxy'.

I've searched around in Google a very little bit, looking for a more detailed account of how Wuerl conducted himself during those Seattle years, but haven't really found anything.  I'd like to pose the question to those of you who may have paid more attention than I did during those years: was Wuerl one of the good guys in the Hunthausen episode?