Paul Moore

Paul Moore (born November 15, 1919 - May 1, 2003 ) was an American bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America in New York .

Professional background

By birth, inherited wealth, friendship networks, and professional success, Bishop Moore was part of the Liberal Establishment , a group that included Kingman Brewster , Cyrus Vance, and many other Yale College graduates .

Moore graduated from St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and then attended Yale University , like his father and eldest brother. In 1941 Moore graduated from there and joined the Marine Corps . He was a highly decorated Marine Corps Captain and took part in the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II. Moore received the Navy Cross , a Silver Star, and a Purple Heart .

Upon his return from World War II, Moore studied at the General Theological Seminary in New York City and was ordained after graduating in theology in 1949 .

Moore was appointed rector of Grace Church , an inner-city parish in the Van Vorst neighborhood of Jersey City , where he served from 1949 to 1957. During this time he began to fight against social grievances and racial discrimination as an activist.

In 1957 Moore was dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis . There, too, he was involved in social issues in the parish. 1964 was consecrated auxiliary bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington by Bishop Arthur Carl Lichtenberger and John Pares Craine and William Forman Creighton . There he became a civil rights activist and an opponent of the Vietnam War . Moore met Martin Luther King and marched with him to Selma and other protest rallies. From 1970 to 1972 Moore was coadjutor under the Anglican Bishop Donegan in New York. From 1972 to 1989 he was the 13th Anglican Bishop of New York .

During his tenure, Moore was active and known as an activist against racism and homelessness. He represented the interests of cities that suffered from a distribution battle with their suburbs in the USA around 1950–1990 for tax revenue, population loss and impoverishment, and compared the corporations that relocated their headquarters to the suburbs for tax reasons with "rats who leave a sinking ship ". Moore was the first Anglican bishop in the United States to ordain an openly lesbian priestess in the Church. In his 1979 book Take a Bishop Like Me , he defended his position on this, arguing that many priests are homosexual , but few have the courage to explain this publicly . His liberal political and social views were associated with a strong traditionalism of liturgy and creed . In his writings and sermons, he referred to himself as a "born again Christian ", referring to conversion experiences that moved him deeply as a boarding school student.

Moore wrote three books: The Church Reclaims the City (1965), Take a Bishop Like Me (1979) and Presences: A Bishop's Life in the City (1997), the memoirs of his life.

family

In 1944 while serving in the Marine Corps, Moore married Jenny McKean , who came from a privileged bohemian family in the North Shore neighborhood of Boston and had attended Madeira School, Vassar College, and Barnard College . Her mother was Margarett Sargent McKean, a well-known painter from the Ashcan School in the tradition of George Luks . Paul and Jenny had nine children together, and at the time of his death Moore had many grandchildren. Jenny McKean Moore published a book about her decade in the Jersey City slums, The People on Second Street , in 1968 , which received benevolent reviews. Their former home, the residential block-like rectory of Grace Church, is now called Bishop Paul Moore Place in honor of Moore . In 1973 Jenny Moore died of colon cancer.

Eighteen months after Jenny's death, Moore married Brenda Hughes Eagle , a childless widow 22 years his junior. She died of alcoholism in 1999 . It was she who discovered her husband's bisexual infidelity around 1990 and passed this knowledge on to the children. Until this information was published by his daughter, Honor Moore, in 2008, the children kept this information private as he had asked.

Honor Moore, the eldest of Moore's nine children and a lesbian herself, revealed her father's bisexuality in an article about him in The New Yorker on March 3, 2008. In it, she also describes a phone call she made six months after her father's death from a man who was the only stranger listed in her father's will. His name is given a pseudonym by her in the New Yorker article. Honor Moore learned from this man that he was her father's long-time partner and that he and her father had made many trips to Patmos in Greece and other places.

Individual evidence

^ The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment, Geoffrey Kabaservice, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2004

↑ Guadalcanal: Guadalcanal Veterans Return ( Memento of the original from October 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2
^ The New Yorker: Personal History: The Bishop's Daughter: Reporting & Essays
^ Paul Vitello, The New Yorker: A Bishop Unveiled God's Secrets While Keeping His Own

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Moore, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America
DATE OF BIRTH	November 15, 1919
DATE OF DEATH	May 1, 2003

[1] The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment, Geoffrey Kabaservice, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2004