A Prick Of A Bishop

Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium

From the May 2003 NYTimes obit for the late Bishop of NYC for the Episcopal Church, Paul Moore Jr. :

Paul Moore Jr., the retired Episcopal bishop of New York who for more than a decade was the most formidable liberal Christian voice in the city, died yesterday at home in Greenwich Village. [...] Bishop Moore spoke out against corporate greed, racism, military spending and for more assistance to the nation's poor, pursuing his political and social agenda in both the city and within the national Episcopal denomination. He was an early advocate of women's ordination and, in 1977, was the first Episcopal bishop to ordain a gay woman as an Episcopal priest. [...] During his tenure, Bishop Moore transformed the seat of the diocese, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, at 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, from a moribund backwater church to a place where peacocks roamed, orchestras performed, elephants lumbered, inner city youth found jobs and the homeless slept in supervised shelters. [...] Bishop Moore was married in 1944 to Jenny McKean with whom he had nine children. [...] Standing 6 feet 4 -- something of a human rallying pole -- he became the consummate urban priest.

From The Bishop's Daughter by the eldest child of Bishop Moore and his first wife, Jenny McKean, Honor Moore:

At the time, I was still ignorant of any fissures in my parents’ marriage, and I learned that my mother’s dissatisfaction had a sexual element only after she and my father separated, some years later. It was the early nineteen-seventies, and I was visiting her in Washington. [...] My mother and I often talked about the changes in sexual attitudes from her generation to mine. At the time, for instance, like many of my friends, I was living with a man to whom I was not married. I don’t remember how the conversation began, but suddenly my mother was saying, “I didn’t have an orgasm until I was forty.” I had no reply. “And when I finally did,” she continued, “Paul said, ‘What’s the matter, Jenny?’

From The NYPOST :

February 28, 2008 -- MANY Episcopalians are reeling from the news in this week's New Yorker that the late Bishop Paul Moore - the 6-foot-5 patrician whose political activism drove many parishioners from the church - was a closeted homosexual who had a gay lover for the last 30 years of his life.

From The Bishop's Daughter :

He had a confident voice. Andrew Verver (as I’ll call him) was the only person in my father’s will whose name was unfamiliar when we sat in the lawyer’s office the day before the funeral. [...]

The beginning of the conversation was formal.

“Your father was a close friend of mine.”

“Yes.”

“For almost thirty years.”

“Yes. You said so in your letter—”

[...]Andrew had been a student at Columbia, a Roman Catholic. “I was considering being received into the Episcopal Church,” he said. This was in 1975. “I went to your father for advice. He was very helpful. At first it was a pastoral thing, and after a while we became friends.” [...]

“I’m so happy to be talking to you,” I said.

“I would have called sooner—”

[...]

“Did he tell you about us? About . . . me?”

“You had some problems with each other.”

“Yes,” I said, “we did.”

“We were so close, your father and I. He told me a lot of things.” He didn’t want to get off the telephone either.

“About—”

“About your family. About his life. We missed our plane to Patmos, and we had to spend the night on Samos, another island.[...]

“Did he talk to you about his sexual life?” Two men in Greece, a beautiful night.

“I was his sexual life,” Andrew said.

“You were?” There was a silence and then we both began to laugh.

“For a long time.”

“I am so happy he had someone like you,” I managed to say.

“Of course, there were other men,” he said.

I asked him whether there was any significance to the table that my father had left him in his will.

“Only that it was next to the bed!” he said. “Your father had a sense of humor.” That quiet laugh again.

“Once, we were on the sofa, talking,” he continued, “and Paul took off his bishop’s ring and put it on my hand for a minute. The New York bishop’s ring has windmills on it, and your father smiled and said, ‘I’m your Dutch uncle.’".

From Newsweek's Honor Thy Father:

Paul Moore was a polarizing figure long before his daughter's book. Born into a family of privilege—his grandfather, William Moore, was a founding member of the Bankers Trust Co.—he embraced a radical form of Christianity that focused on social justice, choosing poor parishes and moving his family to the then gritty Jersey City, N.J. ("On the Waterfront" was filmed in the Moores' neighborhood a few years later), where he and his wife, Jenny, opened their house to the community. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day.

The bishop also struggled with his attraction to men and had adulterous affairs with both men and women throughout his marriage. He told his children about his double life when he was 70, after the death of their mother, when his second wife discovered an affair with a man. But he never came out publicly, despite ongoing rumors.

From the Wikopedia entry on Bishop Paul Moore Jr. :

Jenny McKean Moore died of colon cancer in 1973 [she and Bishop Moore had separated before her illness and remained separated until her death]. Eighteen months later Moore married Brenda Hughes Eagle, a childless widow twenty two years his junior. She died of alcoholism in 1999. It was she who discovered his bisexual infidelity, around 1990, and made it known to his children, who kept the secret, as he had asked them to, until Honor Moore's revelations in 2008.

From The NYTimes obit for Bishop Moore's second wife, Brenda Hughes Eagle:

Brenda Hughes Moore, a human-rights advocate and arts consultant and the wife of the Right Rev. Paul Moore Jr., retired bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, died Sunday at New York Presbyterian Hospital. She was 56 and lived in Greenwich Village and Stonington, Conn.

The cause was hepatitis, her husband said.

A native of Richmond, Mrs. Moore graduated from Salem College in North Carolina and studied at the University of Aix-Marseille and the University of Perugia.

She accompanied her first husband, John Franklin Campbell, a Foreign Service officer, to Ethiopia, where she became a special assistant to Emperor Haile Selassie and arranged a national exposition of Ethiopian crafts. [...]

Mr. Campbell died in 1971 at age 31, and the next year she married Vernon Eagle, then the executive director of the New World Foundation, which supported civil rights and community projects.

The year after Mr. Eagle's death in 1974, she married Bishop Moore, who had officiated at her second wedding and had himself recently been widowed.

Re: The Bishop’s Daughter
A letter in response to Honor Moore’s article (March 3, 2008)

With moving elegiac sentiments, my sister Honor Moore has outed my recently deceased father, Bishop Paul Moore, against his clearly and often stated will.[...] We have kept my father’s confidence since 1990, when our stepmother discovered his infidelity. It is this trust that Honor has breached.[...] Nowhere does Honor mention the extent of the anguish suffered by my mother, my stepmother, and my siblings as a result of his betrayals. Instead, she exposes intimate sexual details. Like so many others, we loved him despite his dishonesty, and we recall with deep fondness his courage and affection.

Paul Moore III
Berkeley, Calif.

Comments

[Mitch Bond]

I want to wretch my guts out, but the state of profound irritation has rendered me rather breathless.

This perversion must end!

[Athos]

Your point? Just kidding, darling.

It reminds me of the sad, sordid demise of Episcopalian "Bishop" James Pike of the sixties.

[Robbo the Llama Butcher]

To tell the trooth, I'm not so much concerned with this fellah himself - as his fate seems to me to be pretty well sealed - but rayther for all those souls who relied on him for spiritual, ah, "guidance".

What do you do (and in the spirit of ecumenicism? ecumeicalism? oh, shoot - getting along) in ANY pastoral context when it turns out that your shepherd is a wrong 'un?

[Joules]

That's a lot to think about but it seems like a very fitting post for today, when it looks like CA is going to be more of a gay paradise than it already is.

[Mrs. Peperium]

Robbo, I'm going to tackle your question next week...hopefully.

[Andrew Cusack]

"Bishop Moore spoke out against ... military spending and for more assistance to the nation's poor"

Surely military spending is good for the nation's poor, as it prevents them from being the nation's enslaved?

[Mrs. Peperium]

Ah, you've never been an Episcopalian have you?

Clearly you are not aware of Episcopalian Rule 2,798? The military takes advantage of the poor. Yes, it most certainly does. Not only are the poor too stupid for schools like Harvard, the poor can't afford Harvard, don't you know? So the poor (and stupid) have to go into the military as that is their only option in life. Then the poor get sent to fight wars the Epicopalians do not support. The Episcopalians do not support war because the Episcopalians believe they can talk sense to totalitarians and make them come around to their way of thinking. Meanwhile the Episcopal church is falling into 22 million pieces because of the totalitarian natures (like this bishop's) of those who have been running it.

No. More military spending does not help the poor. Only increased welfare spending can help the poor because welfare it the best the poor can do.

This is how most Episcopalians who are running the joint think. Seriously.