THE BISHOP of New York has written a pastoral letter to his diocese stating that although his predecessor, the Rt Rev Paul Moore, Jr, had been revealed to have dishonoured his ordination vows in his private life, the bishop’s publics actions remained a source of pride for the Episcopal Church.Bishop Moore was a “complex man,” Bishop Mark Sisk wrote. While there could be no “excuse for the enormity of the betrayal of personal trust that he perpetrated in his private life, yet similarly there can be no diminution of the greatness, the nobility even, of the purposes and goals of his public life.”
The bishop’s letter appeared the weekend before the release of the March 3 issue of The New Yorker, which has printed an extract from the forthcoming book “A Bishop’s Daughter” that details the bishop’s secret homosexual life. Honor Moore, the eldest daughter of the bishop’s nine children, wrote that she learned of her father’s 30-year homosexual affairs after his death in 2003.
Considered to be the archetype of the trendy patrician prelate of the 1960s and 70s, Bishop Moore was one of America’s best-known churchmen. A decorated veteran of the Second World War, Bishop Moore was appointed suffragan bishop of Washington in 1964 and Bishop of New York in 1972, retiring in 1989.
A vocal opponent of the Vietnam war, a supporter of civil rights, a “slum” priest who worked with the poor and dispossessed, he was also an early supporter of the gay movement in the Episcopal Church and was the first bishop to consecrate an openly non-celibate lesbian to the ministry.
In his 1979 book, Take a Bishop Like Me, Bishop Moore defended his ordination of gay and lesbian clergy arguing that many priests were homosexuals but only a few had the courage to admit it.
The New Yorker article detailed a 30-year homosexual relationship, Bishop Sisk said was “wrong and could quite conceivably result in the most severe penalties that the church can apply to an ordained person.”
Bishop Sisk alluded to other instances of misconduct by Bishop Moore in his letter noting that the “violation of trust that Ms Moore reports is consistent with behaviour recorded in complaints about Bishop Moore’s exploitative behaviour” received by the diocese.
The former Bishop of New York nonetheless was a “deeply flawed man in desperate need of God’s merciful grace. As are we all,” Bishop Sisk wrote.
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