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STANDING OUT THERE ON THE ISSUES
By Jervis Anderson
Some years ago, I had occasion to attend a conference called by a group of concerned local citizens to discuss the plight of Haitian refugees in New York. The conference, held on the East Side of Manhattan, had started when I arrived; a film on the subject was being shown, and, in the darkened room, I found a seat in the last row, next to a man in clerical garb. When the film ended and the lights came up, the clergyman leaned over and introduced himself—"My name is Paul Moore"—and volunteered to brief me on what had gone on before I arrived. I was surprised by so cordial, informal, and helpful a welcome from a man of his position, for I quickly recognized his name as that of the Episcopal Bishop of New York—the Right Reverend Paul Moore, Jr., as he is formally addressed. I was also surprised that he—the highest-ranking Episcopalian in the Diocese of New York—was attending such a meeting; that he seemed so absorbed by the problem it was called to discuss; and that someone of his conspicuous civic stature was sitting so contentedly at the back of the room while far lesser lights were arranged prominently up front. I noticed, when he got up to say a word on behalf of the refugees, that he was also of uncommon physical stature. At six feet four inches, with graying hair and a craggily patrician middle-aged face, he was easily both the tallest and the most distinguished-looking figure in the room.
He—I gathered much later, when I made his acquaintance again—would have wondered at my surprise. After all, he was just being himself. But I hadn't met a bishop before; and, from the example of the only bishop I'd ever observed, I hadn't thought it possible for someone of Moore's rank to behave so unassumingly. I had grown up on the island of Jamaica when it was still a colony of the British. And in those days the Anglican Bishop of Jamaica was a Cambridge-educated gentleman—William G. Hardie—who kept a cool distance from what he might have called the common life of a predominantly black society. When common folks caught glimpses of the Bishop of Jamaica, it was usually in the island's only daily newspaper, the Gleaner—pictures of him chatting with dignitaries of his own standing, or presiding at important civic or religious ceremonies, or at garden parties on gracious suburban lawns, sipping tea with nicely dressed ladies wearing broad-brimmed hats. A meeting on the plight of poor refugees—or the poor of any sort—wasn't something that was likely to find a place on Bishop Hardie's calendar. And if a canon, say, had alerted him to the seriousness of that omission he might have simply designated a mere vicar to attend in his stead. Perhaps only if the Holy Spirit had intervened—to whisper stern orders in the Bishop's ear—would he have gone to such a meeting himself. He would have arrived in his chauffeur-driven Buick (that big automobile was the favored carriage of British officials); he would have been received with the bows and deference due to a person of his office; he would have gone in and blessed the gathering with an opening prayer; and he would have asked to be excused before the urgent proletarian issues were aired. In Manhattan, then, I wasn't at all prepared for an encounter like the one I had with Bishop Moore—a prince of the Church of England in America who turned out for a meeting on the plight of poor black aliens and did so with such a friendly and unpretentious demeanor.
"Scratch an Episcopalian, and you're liable to find most anything," Flannery O'Connor once remarked. Miss O'Connor could hardly have been speaking in praise of Episcopalians. An orthodox, dogmatic, and sharp-tongued Catholic, she must surely have been poking fun at the various forms of Episcopal theology and liturgy—ranging from High Church (largely Catholic in theology and ritual), through Broad Church (moderate in theology and with an eclectic Catholic and non-Catholic ritual), to Low Church (distinctly Protestant and evangelical in theology and style of worship). From her position as a Catholic purist, Miss O'Connor seemed to be asking, What is an Episcopalian? The question is answerable, of course, but the answer is too complex, in both historical and theological terms, to be attempted here. In any event, there's a sense—a social sense—in which Miss O'Connor's "You're liable to find most anything" could be cited in defense or commendation of whatever Episcopalians are. It could be used to rebut some of the persistent stereotypes about members of that denomination: that they are an exclusively white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in-group; that they are rich, genteel, and conservative; that they care chiefly about their own; that their church lacks the broad ethnic makeup and the social sympathies that are to be found among, say, the Roman Catholics. Those stereotypes may have been true at one point—a long time ago. But scratch the Episcopal Church today and you'll be surprised at what you find in the way of ethnic diversity of membership, political and cultural attitudes, and range of social sympathies. And there isn't an Episcopalian in America who better symbolizes that diversity than the Bishop of New York.
That may sound odd, for Paul Moore, Jr., springs from the wealthy and conservative wing of the Episcopal family, yet it is true. If he had been scratched—the privileged son and grandson of Episcopal millionaires—while growing up in Convent Station, near Morristown, New Jersey, where he was born in 1919, few would have found anything to suggest that his future lay in the priesthood, of his Church or any other. And hardly anyone would have predicted for him the kind of career he has had as a clergyman. That career has immersed him so deeply in public issues and humane struggles that Moore's critics and admirers—in and out of his Church—have spoken of him in such terms as radical, naïve, idealistic, uncompromising; fool, ass, parlor pink; decent, straightforward; trendy, ultraliberal; honest, compassionate, courageous; a soldier of God. Today, a retired Episcopal bishop expresses "surprised recognition of the fact that the Episcopal Church is still vital enough, and unpredictable enough, to produce a Paul Moore, Jr., as Bishop of New York."
Something about the nature and style of Moore's priesthood (he likes to consider himself a parish priest) recalls the story of the Reverend Dr. Walter Bowie, as maverick a Wasp aristocrat as any who has preached in Manhattan. In 1923, Bowie, just past forty and still a rising star of the clergy, arrived from Richmond, Virginia, to assume the rectorship of Grace Episcopal Church, on Broadway at Tenth Street. At the start, the union of such a church and such a rector seemed perfect. Grace, then a temple of rich and conservative old families, was an élite parish of the New York Diocese. Dr. Bowie was a Harvard man; he had been rector of the illustrious St. Paul's Church in Richmond, where Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis once worshipped; and, the son of an impeccably aristocratic Virginia family, he came from a section of the country where, in the early sixteen-hundreds, the first roots of Anglicanism in America had been sent down.
But, as Grace Church and Dr. Bowie soon discovered, their union was incompatible in one very important matter—that of social outlook. After listening to some of Bowie's early sermons—more liberal and socially impious than any ever before delivered under the roof of that edifice—the Grace parishioners came to the unhappy conclusion that they had invited the wrong man to occupy their pulpit. Apparently, in examining Bowie's credentials for office the Grace vestrymen had looked into everything but his opinions—assuming, perhaps, that no one so well qualified by lineage could ever hold views offensive to people of his own kind. Otherwise, they would surely have learned that Bowie was a flaming social idealist; that he had advocated woman suffrage and denounced the treatment of blacks as shameful; that he was neither a comforter of the rich nor a defender of the profit system. With such attitudes and convictions, Bowie had indeed offended his upper-class parishioners in Richmond. Still, they had put up with his dissidence, for they admired him as a brilliant orator who was an intellectual product of their own vine and fig tree.
At Grace Church, Bowie soon became aware of the coolness with which his new parishioners received his liberal homilies. He was clearly striking no sparks among them. Yet neither Bowie nor Grace Church took any steps to dissolve their union; in fact, the relationship continued for nearly two decades. It isn't clear why Dr. Bowie stayed on. Perhaps, being a gentleman, he felt he would have been violating a code of his social class by offering his resignation to a vestry of gentlemen. If that was so, then the sentiment was mutual. The vestrymen at Grace, rather than fire Dr. Bowie, decided to live with the mistake they had made in hiring him—on the ground, no doubt, that, whatever his excesses or shortcomings, he was, after all, a member of their own class. They and their fellow-parishioners decided that they would simply humor the sermons of "poor Dr. Bowie," that on Sundays they would pretend not to hear a liberal word he spoke. That took some doing, of course, since Bowie was noted not just for the brilliance but also for the sheer loudness of his oratory.
At any rate, the conspiracy of deafness that confronted Dr. Bowie on Sundays resulted in serious consequences for his health: he developed a nervous ailment that diminished his great vocal powers. Its cause was a mystery to almost everyone except the religionists at Grace. Recalling one of their rector's early pronouncements, in which he raised certain questions about the Virgin Birth, they interpreted his weakened voice as a fitting punishment from God. However, when Bowie sought a more reliable opinion—that of the medical profession—his ailment was diagnosed as having stemmed from shock. One commentator later explained, "He had lived in Richmond most of his life…and had been an extraordinarily popular member of the community. The sudden, sharp transition to frosty Broadway had been too much for his naturally sensitive nature. He was unnerved by the suspicion that most of the people in front of him firmly believed that God was a banker, an Episcopalian, and a Republican."
Despite ideological resemblances, Bishop Moore's experience as a priest differs in some notable respects from Dr. Bowie's. At the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, on the upper West Side of Manhattan, which is the seat of his bishopric, Moore has been far more liberal in word and deed than Bowie ever was—even if he is not on record as doubting the Virgin Birth. He has not, however, met the near-solid resistance that Bowie met at Grace Church. Moore does have his critics—at the Cathedral and within the New York Diocese—but they have had no noticeable effect on his nerves or his voice. Part of the reason may be that he isn't the histrionic, old-timey orator that Bowie was. He speaks as directly in his sermons as he does in ordinary conversation. "He's totally himself," says a clergyman on the Cathedral staff. "When he's dramatic, he's unconsciously dramatic—only because he's moved, not because he wants to sell the troops. He tends to preach just the way he tends to talk. There's no change in emphasis, no change in accent. The things that burn him up when he's preaching are the things that burn him up in personal conversation. He has no cheap tricks at all."
Though he's charming, gracious, and sensitive, Moore is by no means soft. A determined and resilient fighter, he has waged more social and religious battles—far rougher ones, too—than any that Dr. Bowie knew. Nor is he impressed by the chilliness of wealthy East Coast Episcopalians. He's one of them—was born, raised, and educated among them. He may have abandoned a number of their inherited attitudes and affectations, but he's still able, when it pleases him, or pleases them, to move easily in their company. He can't be intimidated by any East Coast congregation that might believe God is a banker, an Episcopalian, and a Republican. Members of his family have been involved with banking for generations, and he has studied some of them closely enough to know that God doesn't necessarily appear in the form of wealth. Moore has been an Episcopalian all his life, and he knows the sins and failings of the breed. And if he had ever shared the conviction that God is a Republican he surely wouldn't have turned himself into a liberal Democrat.
Non-Episcopalians still tend to view the Church as a gathering mainly of America's Protestant élite—"the Tory party at prayer," as it has been called. If the view isn't as valid today as it once was, neither is it entirely groundless. Old-family Episcopalians have traditionally regarded themselves as the nation's economic, political, and cultural elect. When William T. Manning, a former Bishop of New York, was asked whether salvation could be found outside the Episcopal Church, he replied, "Perhaps so, but no gentleman would care to avail himself of it." The old patriciate founded such élite prep schools as Groton, Kent, Choate, and St. Paul's, and it was at those and other academies of the ruling class that they educated their children. Their influence at the higher levels of the national government has been disproportionate to their numbers in the population. They have been prominent in the annals of the Presidency, the Senate, and the State Department. They once produced more important industrialists, bankers, and corporate executives than arose from almost any other American group. Episcopalians like the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the Hearsts, and the Harrimans—to name just a few—amassed some of the largest fortunes in the nation's history (though not as large as that of the first John D. Rockefeller, who was a Baptist). Even today, it has been estimated that Episcopal executives and entrepreneurs control roughly a third of the corporate wealth of America. Episcopalians, Kit and Frederica Konolige write in their book "The Power of Their Glory," are "outstandingly powerful because they have bred a small, supersuccessful, and superwealthy élite that has become, historically and today, America's aristocracy."
But such aristocrats, though their financial and cultural influence is still considerable, are a minority in the modern Episcopal Church. The Church membership is now largely middle-class, with a sizable representation of the rural and urban poor; and though the membership in rural and suburban areas is largely white, there is a broad ethnic range in the cities. In New York, for instance, Antonio Ramirez is a not atypical Episcopalian: of Cuban descent, he was raised in a poor section of Manhattan, was educated at Columbia University, holds Democratic Socialist beliefs, works as a journalist in the trade-union movement, and is a former Catholic. His view of the Episcopal Church is that of a socially conscious middle-class urban intellectual, and he has written, "It is for me a church with room for people who fervently believe some things about God, people, beauty, truth, sin, salvation—and, yes, even social justice—that have nothing to do with the Wall Street worshippers." His Episcopal acquaintances, he says, include people who celebrate the Eucharist in Spanish; people who join public demonstrations "in the service of human equality;" people who—"moved by a call beyond my understanding"—have entered convents or so-called mendicant communities to lead lives of prayer and what they refer to as perfect poverty; and people who distribute gun-control literature in the Catskills, where guns and hunters, according to Ramirez, "reign supreme." He adds, "Somehow, I have yet to meet a Wall Street banker, a corporate executive, or a rich lawyer on the rise in politics."
They do exist, of course. Some worship at places like Trinity Church, on Wall Street, or St. Thomas's and the Church of the Heavenly Rest, on Fifth Avenue, congregations that are far richer and more patrician than any that Ramirez frequents. It might even surprise a number of those Wall Street and Fifth Avenue Episcopalians to learn of the social and ethnic diversity within New York's Episcopal family. There are Episcopalians in Chinatown. Black Harlem Episcopalians—members of St. Philip's, St. Martin's, and the Church of the Intercession—make up three of the staunchest parishes in the city. The Church of St. Edward the Martyr, in East Harlem, is mainly Hispanic. St. Clement's, on West Forty-sixth Street, ministers to actors, and serves, part time, as an Off Broadway theatre. St. Peter's, in Chelsea, ministers to a neighborhood with what has been called a patchwork of town houses, tenements, factories, and housing projects. The Episcopal clergy include priests without pulpits, who drive taxicabs, serve in restaurants, or supervise apartment buildings in order to support themselves. A few Episcopal priests are bankers, legislators, or librarians. There are priests who can find no work at all, and there are priests who barely survive on what their parishes pay them. Thousands of the Episcopal laity get by on less than ten thousand dollars a year. As a result, a number of them are led into common forms of temptation. Some time ago, the trusted and respected officer of a century-old parish in upstate New York absconded with a large amount of the church's treasury, leaving his parish to the mercy of God. "We're not a wealthy church, but we're not wiped out, either," the rector said, when the larceny was discovered. "I don't know how much is gone," said a parishioner, "but the Lord will provide for us."
The Episcopal Church, or its liberal wing, is now more deeply involved in social action than it was in the days when it was America's Tory party at prayer, even if this development is less than pleasing to the old order of conservatives and traditionalists. "Only rarely throughout American history," writes Paul Seabury (a descendant of Samuel Seabury, who was the church's first presiding bishop), "were Episcopalians or their institutionalized church to be found at the forefront of great movements and causes, religious or political." Nor, clearly, is the Church now the racist institution it was in the early years of the nineteenth century, when Trinity Church required black members to worship separately. The blacks eventually formed their own congregation, St. Philip's, which moved to Harlem in 1911. And since those days many concerned members of the white priesthood have worked to push the doors and windows of the Episcopal house open even wider, confronting it with the democracy of social experience and the widespread need from which it had previously averted its eyes. Of the recent fingerprints to be found on those doors and windows, none are clearer than those of the present Bishop of New York.
Describing his urban ministry as the "prophetic" sort—"standing out there on the issues"—Paul Moore follows in the tradition, still a minority one, of a progressive Episcopal priesthood. When, in 1972, he succeeded Horace W. B. Donegan as Bishop of New York, he had been a liberal and human-rights activist for twenty-three years—the entire period of his ministry—and has continued to be. Whether or not Moore's conservative critics are aware of that long record in public activism, they have sometimes used the term "trendy" to describe the readiness with which he links his ministry and his Church to movements for social change and cultural tolerance. The charge was made some years ago, for instance, by Paul Seabury, in a Harper's article titled "Trendier Than Thou." Addressing a Church Club gathering in 1979, not long after the article appeared, Moore replied, "You can say 'trendier than thou,' but you can also say 'a church that has been alert to the time and place in which it found itself,' to the trend, if you will, of…what [people] are feeling, and how to relate the gospel of Christ to them. If that be trendy, praise the Lord."
No one truly familiar with Moore's history or with his character and temperament would dream of calling him trendy. Surely not his brother William. "Right from the start, Paul always said, 'Look, I'm going to be a militant priest,' meaning he was going to be an activist," William Moore recalls. "There was never any doubt in my mind that he was what he was. And he has stayed with that throughout. I think this is how he felt he could best display the courage of his convictions. He didn't want to be a sort of nine-to-five priest. I think he felt that, with his background and education, to be a passive priest would really be a waste of his time, because he already had security and independence. I always felt that he had real conviction, a real calling to do the kind of work he's been doing. I never detected any wavering from that. So it doesn't surprise me a damn bit that he was in Mississippi and in the peace movement."
Nor would Moore be considered trendy by a man like the Reverend Powel Mills Dawley, who in the late nineteen-forties taught him church history at the General Theological Seminary, in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. Dawley has written of his former student, "I am not surprised by the humane and socially conscious priest and bishop Paul has turned out to be. The qualities that motivated these concerns were clearly obvious from the moment he entered the seminary. Age and years of experience since 1949 have only more clearly defined their character and sharpened their impact. Integrity, courage, and sensitivity to the social and pastoral needs of the people among whom he ministered have been his greatest gifts. I suppose that the future histories of the Church will credit Paul with the upswing of the ministry to the people of the inner city. He was not the first Episcopal priest to find his vocation fulfilled in the so-called slums, but he was the first to widen the understanding of the Christian mission from narrow concepts of overseas work or work in rural areas into an organized and structured ministry to the poor, the minorities, and other neglected people of the inner city. Furthermore, he took his family to live next to his church in Jersey City"—a depressed inner-city neighborhood where Moore chose to work soon after his graduation from the seminary—"keeping the door of the rectory open to all comers in need. From 1949 to 1957, he identified himself so successfully with such a ministry that he became an inspiration and an example to dozens of young students who followed in his steps."
It was unusual for a young Episcopalian of Moore's means and background to identify himself so closely and successfully with a ministry to the poor—to take so strong and steadfast a stand on a range of social issues. After all, he says today, his family "had a great deal of money." For much of his boyhood, he had no knowledge of hardship, and was, he says, "protected even from seeing poverty." It wasn't until the Great Depression that he got his first look at poverty—one day when, in his family's expensive limousine, he found himself being driven past the breadlines of Hoboken. The view from the plush interior of the automobile so embarrassed him that he, as he recalls, "hid on the floor of the car." His family's wealth was an embarrassment that shadowed him for years to come. "I used to really try to conceal the fact that I had money," he says. "Of course, it wasn't mine; it was my family's. On the occasion of my ordination, in Jersey City, my grandmother arrived in a Rolls-Royce, driven by a chauffeur. 'My, that's a wonderful car your grandmother has,' one of the people in the parish said. I stopped him before he could go any further. 'Oh, I think she rented it,' I said. 'That's interesting,' he replied, 'because her chauffeur said he has been with her for thirty years.' So my cover was blown, and I thought no one would ever believe me again. But I can laugh about all that stuff today. I'm no longer embarrassed. I no longer feel self-conscious about the subject of money."
Moore came from money on both sides of his family. His mother, Fanny Hanna—a niece of Mark Hanna, the Ohio Republican politician and industrialist—had a good deal of money herself; and her marriage to Paul Moore, Sr., linked her to a family fortune that was greater than her own. It had been built by her father-in-law, William H. Moore, who—in the words of his grandson the Bishop—was "a sort of mini robber baron, same as J. P. Morgan and that kind." William H. Moore (after whom the Bishop's older brother is named) was born in upstate New York. His parents were of colonial descent. His father, Nathaniel, was a small-town banker, and his mother, Rachel Beckwith, was descended from three generations of Yale men. As young men, William and his brother James moved to Chicago, where, in the eighteen-eighties, they became successful business promoters and speculators, specializing in steel and railroads. The Dictionary of American Biography states:
**{: .break one} ** They were among the first to recognize the possibilities of industrial mergers in America, and—next to Morgan—perhaps the most important in developing them.…[William] went on his way with a complete indifference to public sentiment, and stood out in the first decade of the new century as the foremost and most daring promoter in American business, just as Morgan was the foremost financier. He had behind him the backing of a dozen banks and trust companies, and was the leader of a group that controlled fifteen thousand miles of railroad. **
In 1889, William Moore shared with a Y.M.C.A. audience his philosophy concerning the accumulation and uses of wealth. "It would be difficult to find a man who does not wish to possess capital," he said. "Those of you who have it in possession, whether in small or large amounts, can appreciate having a most excellent servant that works for you early and late, pleasant and stormy days alike; is vigorous and active while you sleep, and works when you play; allows you to take recreation and enjoyment, and you do so; and when you meet with misfortune, stands ready to be sacrificed to your benefit to the last farthing. Such a servant oftentimes is capital." As the years passed, his "most excellent servant" grew and grew. He moved from Chicago to Manhattan around the turn of the century, and after he died, in 1923, his son Paul, Sr., succeeded him as a director of a number of family enterprises, including the American Can Company and the National Biscuit Company. Paul, Sr., later became a director of Bankers Trust, and, with his brother, Edward, founded Republic Aviation Corporation.
Though William H. Moore was born neither in poverty nor in obscurity, he could, because of the fortune he acquired on his own, be called a self-made man. So could his grandson the Bishop of New York, whose prominence springs not from inherited wealth and position but from his own labors in a vineyard that is quite different from the one earlier chosen by his family. But the influence of tradition can be secret and indirect. No one can be sure that Paul Moore, Jr., would have found it just as easy to choose the independent and unremunerative career of a priest if his grandfather's money hadn't freed him from financial need. The salary of the Bishop of New York, one of the most important civic offices in the United States, is about fifty thousand dollars a year . Yet he could give it all back to the Church; for he is one of the wealthiest bishops in America. Though he is no longer bothered by this contradiction in his status, he is not unaware of it. He has given a good deal of his money away. But, he says, while he reveres the example of St. Francis of Assisi—who also came from wealth—he's not ready to strip himself of all his inherited raiment and hand it over to the poor. Besides, he's not unneedful of his inherited income; he has nine children—all of them born before his elevation to the bishop's chair—and on the modest stipend of a parish priest he would scarcely have been able to raise and educate them in the way he wished. In any event, his inherited wealth hasn't weakened or compromised the religious and social convictions by which he lives and works.
Moore's moral and religious conscience is his own, but much of his social style and disposition reflects the influence of his mother. She was involved, he recalls, "in an enormous number of charitable and artistic enterprises." She loved the ballet. She loved Yale and supported its Art Gallery. She planted trees at hospitals in New Jersey and joined visiting nurses on their calls. She felt guilty about having a lot of money and living in a big house. She was unstinting in her expenditures for worthy purposes and causes, and yet "she would also save thread," Moore says. "She plunged into every social challenge that came her way, and I've inherited something of that, for good or ill. I tend to get involved in everything. I'm attracted to almost any enterprise that has some life in it."
The Reverend Edward West, an erudite seventy-six-year-old canon of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, concurs with that, and goes on to say more. "Paul is very much the son of his mother," West says. "He has tremendous aesthetic taste, and is very strong-minded about it. He's hypersensitive about the use of English. Anything that is not in good English upsets him considerably. His widely reported democracy is probably a misnomer. It isn't that at all. He loves people just as people. A person's background is absolutely meaningless to him. That doesn't mean, however, that he has a common taste. He doesn't have that. He cares terribly about what things are like. He is, in the strict sense of the word, a radical. But that only means that he's terribly conservative—which is what radical means, running by the rules. So he's terribly conservative in things that matter. He has absolutely no give about them at all. And the things that make him take stands—things that are frequently unpopular with his own friends, or people with whom he was raised—reflect his conformity to the rules of his ethical influences. That's what makes him take stands. It's not because he likes being off base; he doesn't. He doesn't like being disliked at all. His point is like Martin Luther's point at the Diet of Worms—'Here I stand, I can do no other.' He hasn't the slightest idea of ever doing a thing for the sake of popularity. He hasn't the slightest touch of the demagogue. So, in his own religious sense he's extremely conservative. He's a totally convinced Christian, and a highly orthodox one."
Some of this was already noticeable while Moore was at St. Paul's School, in Concord, New Hampshire, which he attended from 1932 to 1937. According to Bernard McVeigh, a classmate at St. Paul's, who is now a Trappist monk, at Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey, in Lafayette, Oregon, Paul was "younger-looking and frailer than most of his confreres physically, and not very athletically inclined." Consequently, he was picked on by the athletic types, who knew that his brother William had been "a revered jock at school." Though younger and slenderer than the bullies, Moore stood up resolutely to them, and, in doing so, showed "the strong determination—and perhaps a dash of stubbornness—in the face of notable odds that have characterized his later life," McVeigh points out. Moore had "a strong sense of loyalty to childhood friends who, when with him at St. Paul's, moved in different, less 'in' circles than he did and who were not his intellectual peers," and this loyalty was "intense; in fact, fierce." He "hadn't a cynical bone in his body." He was blessed with "a delicious sense of the ridiculous, which not only prevented him from taking himself and situations too seriously but also graced him with a marvellous humorous touch." He was "an interesting combination of fearlessness and laid-backness." Underlying that, however, was a "deep" and "intimate commitment to Christ and to His Church"—a commitment that "entailed much personal suffering," though he kept this hidden from all but his closest friends. He was also fun-loving, and, indeed, capable of "outlandish behavior." But even before his "conversion experience" (which McVeigh shared, and which led them both to their careers) Moore had "strong religious sensibilities, a natural reverence—a sense of the 'numinous,' if you like."
"Conversion experience" is an extremely reticent description of an overpowering religious epiphany—like that of Saul of Tarsus struck blind on his way to persecute early Christians in Damascus. Many people today—those who are unfamiliar with the cool and undemonstrative language of the upper classes—speak of "getting religion," "finding God," or "being born again." Moore himself almost always uses the term "conversion experience" to describe the religious emotion—"an emotion of God's presence"—that overcame him when he made his first confession at St. Paul's. Slipping, as he sometimes does, into slang, Moore recalls being "spaced out" for several days after that experience. His "prayer life" took on a reality he hadn't felt before. He now wanted to do what he felt would represent obedience to God's will—and becoming a minister, he says, "was as far as I could go in all-out commitment." Making the commitment was the easier part. The hard part was deciding what sort of minister he should become. He wasn't particularly drawn to the conventional models—preaching boring Sunday sermons and "having tea with nice old ladies." It was while reflecting upon those dreary options that he discovered the ideological roots of the Anglo-Catholic tradition and the kind of engaged social ministry that it produced.
He had begun reading and hearing about the Oxford Movement of the eighteen-thirties and eighteen-forties, led by such Anglican revisionists and tractarians as Hurrel Froude, John Keble, Edward Pusey, and John Henry Newman, and he had come to see how those religious intellectuals caused the Anglican Church, or a section of it, to rediscover and reëmbrace aspects of its Catholic origin. As Froude had put it, Anglicans wanted to be "Catholics without the Popery," or "Church of England men without the Protestantism." The controversy split the Church of England into its two principal, coexisting, factions—Evangelical Anglicans, who predated the Oxford Movement, and Anglo-Catholics. And it was among the latter that there sprang up an urban priesthood that was more socially active and committed than any the Anglican Church had previously known.
A number of such priests, some of them educated at Oxford, declined the traditional privilege of ministering in comfortable and highly respected Anglican parishes and chose instead to live and work among the urban poor, particularly in the dockland area of East London. These slum priests, as they were called—men like Father Charles Lowder and Father Lincoln Wainright—helped to recover for Anglicanism the Catholic tradition of social service and action. They lived lives of poverty, devoting themselves wholly to the spiritual and material needs of the parishes they served. And at a time when the aristocracy of Anglicanism was still arguing over the place of Catholic ritual in Protestant worship the dockland churches of East London, which were readily incorporating Catholic ritual, were filled to overflowing on Sundays. The Anglicans of the slums would probably have accepted and adjusted to any ritual proposed to them by their Anglo-Catholic priests—men who were serving them with a selflessness that was without precedent in their religious and social experience. Here, from a biographical study by the English writer Evelyn Underhill is a description of Father Wainright:
**{: .break one} ** In 1873, a dapper young clergyman, very correctly dressed, with well-brushed hat and black kid gloves, arrived at the clergy house of St. Peter's, London Docks. Fifty-six years later, on a bed as poor and comfortless as any ascetic could desire, a little old man lay dead in his bare and carpetless room; and in the words of one of his children, "Dockland was washed with tears," because this tiny but indomitable figure, shabby, untiring, spendthrift of love, would not serve them on earth any more. …He served them for over half a century, without holidays and always in a poverty of life very near their own; for he had the saint's peculiar inability to keep anything for himself. The blankets from his bed had a way of disappearing; several times he gave away the shirt he was wearing.…Like St. Francis, he hardly noticed what he ate or wore. Coarse and ill-cooked food meant nothing to him. He had no midday meal; and supper was frequently postponed till nearly midnight, because he had no time for it before. **
That was the sort of ministry that inspired Paul Moore, Jr. That was the standard of service he wished to emulate. "It turned me on," he has said, "made me want to get involved in that kind of work." But he was still at St. Paul's, was not yet eighteen, and four years of college, at Yale, still lay ahead of him.
Going to Yale was a Moore family tradition. One of Paul Moore's ancestors, George Beckwith, had graduated from Yale in 1766. His mother was fond of the school. His father and his uncles were Yale men. And his brother William had gone there just ahead of him. Strangely, for someone who had recently undergone a conversion experience, Paul Moore read neither religion nor religious history at Yale. He majored in English literature and took supplementary courses in the classics. Hardly anyone in New Haven could have guessed that he aspired to a career in the priesthood. If his curriculum showed no signs of it, neither did his conduct. Beyond attending Mass with some regularity, he didn't behave like a "Christer"—the term that was then used to describe any young man who took himself too seriously. He still wasn't much of an athlete, and never would be. In his brother's words, "he started to grow rapidly, and his coördination didn't come along as fast as his growth." He was good only at rowing, and he rowed stroke on the Yale freshman crew. Even that, he later said, was "total torture, except for the glorious moments when the boat would fly and eight big men skimmed the river like a butterfly, and we felt the thrill of the shell." When it came to other extracurricular activities, however, he was wilder than one might have expected a budding priest to be. He himself has set down some recollections of these, in a memoir of his time at Yale:
**{: .break one} ** None of us liked the taste of alcohol. But someone introduced sweet Cuba libres, a nauseous concoction of rum and Coca-Cola.…We poured the Bacardi into…cardboard containers and gulped it all down. After two drinks the room was too small to hold us, and six, eight or ten of us would take off for a romp through the campus, shouting up at windows, breaking bottles, wrestling, singing, stopping by other rooms as the party gathered momentum.… Naturally, we grew better and better at drinking. Soon people learned to pass out, get sick, graduate to rye and ginger ale and even get into real trouble.… Still, I must say I enjoyed drinking. The exuberant, hilarious evenings begun in freshman year continued.…Stopped by the police for stealing a parking sign, a Harvard friend who was driving us home from the biannual picnic of a drinking society known as the Haunt Club, drew himself up to his full swaying dignity and said, "You can't arrest us, you peasant, we have been drinking champagne!" …My nickname for a brief period was "Paralysis" because of the unfortunate physiological reaction in my legs after the intake of a certain amount of alcohol: they stopped working, and my normal sized colleagues would have to lug all six feet four inches of me home as my long extensions dragged along the sidewalk. **
Amid such worldly excesses, only Moore knew how deeply attracted he was to a future life in the priesthood. Indeed, as he notes in his memoir, he was grateful that his early years "as a serious Christian took place in a secular atmosphere and included a full enjoyment of life," for those years strengthened his "deepest conviction about the Church, that it should be set in the midst of the world and not a quiet place set apart."
Just before graduating, in 1941, Moore went home for a weekend and told his parents of his ambition—to enter the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan, and read for the ministry. His mother took the news calmly. She may even have been secretly pleased. However, the senior Paul Moore was anything but gladdened. His older boy, William, had followed in his business footsteps, and he had held similar hopes for the younger. This is how the Bishop now recalls the unpleasant confrontation with his father: ''When I told him, with fear and trembling, that I wanted to go into the ministry, he said, 'Oh, I myself had some silly ideas when I was a kid. I thought I might want to be a teacher, ha, ha, ha.' He said, 'Well, if you want to do that later on, why don't you learn how to make some money first, so that you can take care of yourself? Then you can go into the ministry and make it a nice hobby.' And then he said, 'I never really want to talk to you about this again.' I was very fond of my father. He was a man of considerable integrity. But I also had my disagreements with him. He didn't understand what it meant to be a minister. He was a businessman, and he didn't understand that I wanted a life that was more unified than I saw his to be—which had business as one thing and family as another. He didn't understand that I wanted to have a life that was a total vocation. My father's view of a minister was that of a nice little man down at the church, who was there when you needed to get married—a nice little man even though he may have been six feet tall. To him, a nice little man was someone like a chauffeur, or a young lawyer who does scratch work for you—a service-industry sort of a person. And yet he must have been ambivalent. For he also had a great respect for the Reverend Samuel Drury, who was the rector of St. Paul's School. And one of his closest friends at Yale became a Presbyterian minister. Anyway, I didn't discuss the subject with him again until I entered the General Seminary."
That was much later than Moore had planned. The war intervened. Shortly before leaving Yale, he joined the Marine Corps—as did a number of his classmates—and in time sailed to fight the Japanese in the Solomon Islands. Enlisting in such a violent enterprise posed a difficult decision for a young man of his moral feeling and religious aspirations. Torn by "the questionable morality of war," he turned for advice to Father Clark Kennedy, a priest in New Haven, who, as a chaplain in the First World War, had witnessed horrible scenes of battle. "Paul," Kennedy said to him, "war is a most terrible sin. I believe, however, that to allow Hitler to conquer the world is even worse. I remember, when I was in action, seeing the most glorious examples of Christian sacrifice." With that blessing, Moore went off to become one of the heroes of Guadalcanal.
Like many old soldiers, Moore dislikes recalling the traumas of combat except when he finds himself among men who suffered those traumas themselves. In 1963, some twenty years after he fought on Guadalcanal, Moore addressed a gathering of Marines at the National Cathedral, in Washington. "It is a difficult thing, a very complex assignment, preaching an honest sermon on an occasion which celebrates not only years of courage, loyalty, and glory but also years of efficient killing and destruction," he said. "I will not go into the memories, which are full of the horror of war—we know these, and each man keeps them always with him till he dies.…What about killing? What about the deliberate hardening of mind and spirit—running and screaming on the bayonet course, being taught to hate?…These things seemed necessary in order to be a Marine. And the strange thing is that they often went hand in hand with a level of sacrifice and courage I have never seen in civilian life. I say that these things seemed necessary. The hardening process: Could tender American boys have endured without it? When they heard screams in the darkness, when their best buddy was blown to pieces, when even in sleep the nightmare guns were trained at you from the foot of your hospital bed? Does this hardening lessen the guilt of casual killing, the state of mind to which death has ceased to have any real meaning?"
He was, of course, one of those tender American boys, and for him, a priest-to-be, the hardening experience must have been more painful than it was for most. He had barely arrived in the Pacific when he heard that some of his closest friends had been killed. His letters home conveyed the humor and hardships of soldiers at the front, comrades under fire.
*{: .break one} ** DEAR MOTHER AND DAD: I am forgetting my grammar rapidly, although there is one East Boston lad whose English is even more disreputable than he himself, and whom it is amusing to correct. The main reason is to shut him up…because he talks too much, and if you make him speak grammatically he can't talk at all. **
*** ** DEAR MOTHER AND DAD: Don't ever let anyone tell you these boys didn't do their bit, even if they all go home now and live off the government the rest of their lives.…I've seen a lot since I left you, seen too much and lived too much. I know that a man is a being of the greatest worth.…The worth of life, the worth of peace, is now so real and so significant. But over it all is the deep courage of these men and a charity between them, between the toughest and the weakest, that at times reaches dimensions of, well, sainthood. **
In an unpublished manuscript, Moore later set down these recollections:
**{: .break one} ** It was hard to tell when war started. Perhaps it started when we first realized it was no different than other life, or perhaps it started when we saw the first dead.…A little Japanese boy was lying on the side of the trail with a beardless face and small feet. At that time, we were still unhardened, and it struck deep that we had killed.… And so at dawn we set off, passing two of our own dead on the way—"killed by your own bullets." There they were in queer positions, their faces, their young faces, thank God, covered. Until that minute, we did not know. Now all that was left to find out was the strain that only months could bring, and the smell of a used battlefield.… Much thought about food at home; we have been hungry for a week. On the third day, I was sitting in the midst of my platoon…when a sniper ran across the field below. We opened fire. It seemed like shooting clay pigeons but there were photographs of his children on him. He smelt violently for two days. My hands aren't bloodless.… Occasionally, the boredom was relieved by an intense struggle to stay awake.…What is there to do to keep your eyes open? Not too much movement should be made, for any sound is dangerous. Shake your head, slap your face, sit up on something hard. Tie your shoe, untie it, tie it again.… It is also a demanding business to make an effort time and again against death. To have to run out fully exposed to enemy fire five minutes after a harrowing escape that has left you shaken. The eyes of men are turned to their commanding officer in a helpless pleading. They know there is no use in pleading. They will go. They have to go. They say nothing—except with their eyes. **
In May, 1943, Moore was awarded the Navy Cross, "for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action." The citation further stated, "During the offensive of the Marines, on November 3, 1942…Lieutenant Moore was commanding a platoon. By his leadership and aggressive charges, the enemy was forced to retreat to the edge of the ocean. Although the enemy was laying a heavy barrage, the Marines forced them back. Throughout the attack Lieutenant Moore led his men intelligently from the line until he was seriously wounded and later found on his back, but continued to give orders until he became unconscious." In June of 1943, he was awarded the Silver Star. That citation said that under heavy machine-gun fire Moore swam across a river and rescued two of his wounded men, "without regard for the dangers to his own life." A month after receiving the Silver Star, he was dispatched to a hospital in New Zealand, and later was sent home on medical furlough. According to one account, "a bullet passed through Lt. Moore's chest, so close to his heart that he would have been killed instantly if the organ had been expanding at the exact second he was hit." No wonder that in his unpublished manuscript Moore also wrote:
**{: .break one} ** A man who has been to war will never be the same, for he has lost the virginity of living around the edges of life, and in the long gray waste of combat has had crushed his belief in smaller things.… It is enough for a man to live cleanly and quietly in peace with a few friends. **
He returned from the war—having also won the Purple Heart—"deeply shaken" but "even more certain" of his religious faith.
While Moore was home on sick leave in 1943—and was being acclaimed in the New York metropolitan press as a war hero—he renewed an acquaintance with a twenty-one-year-old student at Barnard named Jenny McKean. She came from a well-to-do Boston family; was a graduate of the Madeira School, in Virginia; and had attended Vassar before transferring to Barnard. She later said of their first weeks together, "I continued classes in the daytime, and at night we danced, went to parties. Paul drank too much, and there were times when he told me how dishonest this heroism business seemed, how he really didn't like getting a medal for shooting somebody in the gut." (He could have been thinking of what he had once heard the Reverend Drury say: "God won't look you over for your medals but for your scars.") Jenny, who was of medium height and build, found the twenty-three-year-old Paul "terribly tall," and also "very funny, and exceptionally loving." He "took seriously all the events of his life, but himself rather lightly." She was "afraid of life when I was twenty-one," having painted for herself "an exaggerated picture of a lonely childhood," but "Paul understood." At all events, "we fell in love, laughing ridiculously, and found that knowing each other upset the adolescent logic that whatever happens happens to you alone. Everything we talked about seemed afterwards to be part of both our lives." They were married in 1944, and their first child was conceived before Moore was recalled by the Marines to duty overseas.
When the war ended and Moore returned to his wife and child—a daughter named Honor—it was time to begin fulfilling the vocation that he had first considered at St. Paul's School, and in 1946 he entered the General Theological Seminary to begin his training. With its ethnically mixed inner-city population, the Chelsea section of Manhattan, where the seminary is situated, was a suitable area in which to live and study, in view of the activist urban ministry that he was soon to pursue. He and his family moved down from the East Seventies (with its well-stocked food stores and monogrammed baby carriages) to live in an apartment in Chelsea. Nearby, St. Peter's Church, a run-down parish, long abandoned by its earlier, prosperous membership, gave Moore an opportunity to engage in community work with poor people while studying at the seminary.
"The city fascinated me then and always will," Moore wrote later, in explaining some of the strong feelings that drew him to the life of a seminarian. "I had read years before of the slum parishes in London at the turn of the century; and now, in our Church, there were very few who really cared about the people way down underneath. The Episcopal Church in the city sometimes seemed like a dressed-up old lady picking her way along a muddy road. Some of us at the seminary did not like this image, and instead wanted to see our Church dirty her hands, become part of every tenement, every saloon, every gutter. Without touching, how can she redeem?" In view of that conviction, Moore couldn't have picked a better wife than Jenny McKean. She shared his beliefs totally, and until her death, in 1973, from cancer, was not only a marital partner but also an active partisan in almost every facet of his urban ministry. "A majority of the seminarians arrived fresh from college, not war," she wrote in "The People on Second Street," a book that records her participation in one of the most important phases of Moore's work. "They seemed satisfied with the Church the way it was, and somewhat unaware of the world. With few exceptions, theological arguments were rooted in the preoccupations of other centuries. We charged into seminary life brimming with enthusiasm for change. There was to be no compromise, and we were sure that with a little luck we could change the world."
Moore's friends at the seminary included two young men who shared his passion for a ministry among the urban poor. One was Robert Pegram, and the other was Kilmer Myers, who later became the Bishop of California. Even before Moore's graduation from the seminary, in 1949, Myers had written to dioceses around the United States to see, Moore says, "whether we could get an old broken-down parish to come in and try to do our thing." Bishops wrote back in praise of their idealism and their valiant intentions, but only one replied with an offer. That was Benjamin Washburn, the Bishop of Newark, who said he would be glad to put them in charge of Grace Church, in Jersey City. On a hot summer's day, while the children were staying with their grandmother, Moore, his wife, Pegram and Myers, and a dog named Chelsea left Manhattan for Jersey City, on the other side of the Hudson River, and took up residence in the three-story church rectory. Their first Sunday service was a dismaying omen of the difficult road ahead. As Jenny reported, the service was a dismal one, with a congregation of twenty in a church built to seat six hundred.
Over the next eight years, they built up the membership of the parish, identified the church with the social struggles within and around Jersey City, fought for better housing conditions, collected petitions against police brutality, visited jails and hospitals, led delegations to City Hall, and made their rectory a sanctuary for the homeless and the needy. From various parts of the United States, young seminarians made their way to Jersey City to observe the work that the Moores and their colleagues were doing.
"My experience in Jersey City," Moore recalled not long ago, "validated what I had read in those early books about the London slum priests. I don't see how anybody can read the Gospel and not feel that Jesus is deeply concerned about the poor—to put it simply, that He loves the poor. If we are trying to represent Him, then that is the first priority. The Jersey City experience made me see that you couldn't go next door to visit a little kid who came to your Sunday-school class, find him living in one room with eight brothers and sisters—to say nothing of rats—and just pat him on the head and say, 'Jesus loves you.' You had to do something about the conditions you saw. And when you started doing something about the rats, then you got to the landlord; you tried to organize a rent strike, as we did. A family got kicked out, and lived with you for several months, until they found another home. Why was it so hard for them to find another home? Because the public housing project discriminated against blacks, and let only a few of them in. What did you do about the public housing project? You went to City Hall. There you got a lot of promises but no action. What did you do next? You went to Washington. And sooner or later you got involved in wider politics—all starting with that little boy. That is literally the way it happened to me. And shortly after I went to Jersey City I became a Democrat—having been a Republican through my childhood, and not having thought through social issues at all when I was at Yale."
Moore was speaking in his office, on the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and, becoming more contemplative, he continued, "Of course, people have asked me how someone of my background could have become so involved in the kind of ministry I chose to do. I can understand why it must have looked inconsistent to them. They were thinking of the fact that I had some money. And during my time in Jersey City that was still something of a conflict with me. For instance, here you were, a priest in a place like that, with people coming to your door and saying they didn't have enough to eat. You had money in the bank. And if you didn't then your father did. You could probably give them a check for five thousand dollars. But, obviously, that was a no-no. That would have ruined everything. If you were going to give money away—which I did—you had to do so in other ways, anonymously. But if you were a follower of Christ—St. Francis of Assisi was one of my role models, and Dorothy Day was one of my heroines—and yet had all this money it presented a very deep spiritual and moral problem. I wasn't a saint, and I had many family obligations. So where should I make my stand? I worked out a rationale whereby I saw myself as a sort of trustee of the income I had from my inheritance, and would live at whatever level I thought was appropriate—fairly modestly, compared with the way I could live. And whatever money I could give away over the years I did. So that's the rationale I came to, and I don't feel self-conscious about money anymore. I try to respond to the command of the Bible. I'm strongly drawn to people who are at the bottom of the heap, and I want to help them do something about it. I've never been able to get off that kick, and it has led to all the struggles I've been involved with."
Moore's ministry in Jersey City ended in 1957, when he was appointed dean of Christ Church Cathedral, in Indianapolis. He welcomed the appointment, as an opportunity to see whether he could do in Indianapolis some of what he had been doing in Jersey City. Both places had similar inner-city problems; but Christ Church Cathedral was a larger and wealthier parish than the Jersey City church, causing Moore to feel that he would be able to attack the problems in Indianapolis from a position of greater strength. He wasn't sure, however, whether it would all work—whether the Cathedral would be comfortable with his socially activist ministry, whether he would be able to "lead the parish into becoming responsible to the inner city." Before going to Indianapolis, Moore knew almost nothing about the city, except that it was the venue of an annual motor-racing extravaganza. He had no idea that the Cathedral was a stronghold of Hoosier and Episcopal conservativism.
The program he was invited there to administer was designed to involve the Church in the total life of the city, and it had the full support of Moore's superior—John P. Craine, the Bishop of Indianapolis. But Craine spoke only for himself and a minority of his parishioners. As far as the rest were concerned, social action was no part of the Church's business—the Church's only duty was to minister to the spiritual needs of its members. The more liberal he had been in Jersey City, the better Moore had been liked. But Indianapolis, he discovered, wasn't Jersey City. While a minority of the parishioners in Indianapolis applauded his liberal activism, the conservative majority felt betrayed by it. Some withdrew their financial support, some left the Church altogether, and others muffled their criticism of Moore's program only because they were confident that it wouldn't last. Such members, he said, "hampered the financing of any effort in the social outreach of the Church."
Part of their resistance sprang from Moore's support of the civil-rights movement. He recalls, "At a climactic meeting I had with the vestry, one member got up and said, 'I am told on good authority that you are an undercover agent for the N.A.A.C.P., that you are here to subvert Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis.' That was a typical response to the work I was doing. I knew I had to take it easy and be careful. But sooner or later the chips were down—especially when I tried to integrate the parish and to give it a feel for the rough-and-tumble of urban problems. For instance, there wasn't any way I could avoid preaching a sermon on what had happened in Little Rock. And when I said what I had to say there was an enormous reaction. In the midst of all this ruckus, Mr. Eli Lilly himself stepped into my office one day. This pharmaceutical magnate was the senior warden of the Cathedral. 'Good morning, Mr. Dean,' he said. I said, 'Oh, good morning, Mr. Eli.' He said, 'Excuse me, I know you're busy, but can I have a few minutes of your precious time?' He owns the whole town, and he's talking to me so politely. I said, 'That's fine, Mr. Eli.' He said, 'I just want to tell you two things. What has occurred in Little Rock will never occur at Christ Church Cathedral. If you want to paint the church blue with pink polka dots, fine—I'll stand by you.' "
Yet Moore wasn't at all unhappy in Indianapolis. His wife and children liked the city. He himself had made some good friends there; he enjoyed the challenge, even the difficulties, of his work; and he might have stayed on indefinitely, or until his services were no longer required. But in September of 1963 news came that the Diocese of Washington, D.C., had elected him its suffragan bishop. The position, Moore later said, was "too good to turn down." This wasn't because he was flattered by the prestige of a bishop's chair. It was because Washington had become the focus of the political and racial activism that swept the nation during the early sixties and the job he was offered was that of being a lightning rod for the diocese—being its activist ambassador to the various arenas of struggle in and beyond the capital.
Moore became more deeply involved in the black issues and movements of Washington than almost any suffragan bishop had before him. With the Reverend Walter Fauntroy and other civil-rights spokesmen, he helped to organize the Coalition of Conscience, which acted as a moral pressure group for the black protest movement. In March of 1965, when it appeared that Dr. Martin Luther King's march from Selma to Montgomery would be jeopardized by the hostile resistance of the Ku Klux Klan and other militant Southern segregationists, Moore and Fauntroy organized a series of demonstrations in front of the White House, demanding that President Johnson send federal troops to protect the marchers. "We got to see the President," Moore recalls. "For a long time, he talked about everything but what he called us in to discuss. He went on and on about how he and his wife had met and about what life used to be like on a Texas farm. He even got Bill Moyers to fetch him a Bible so that he could quote to us from Isaiah. It was quite a performance, with lots of four-letter words thrown in. We were supposed to see him for ten minutes; he kept us for nearly two hours. But the meeting helped, for the President later gave some protection to the march from Selma."
With Marion Barry, then a civil-rights activist, Moore also co-chaired the Free D.C. Committee, which was formed to mobilize ordinary citizens in the movement for home rule in Washington. That movement—supported by a broad political and racial coalition—was partly successful, of course; and it is appropriate that Barry should have become the second mayor in the modern history of the nation's capital. (Walter Washington was the first.) But the activities of the Free D.C. Committee, which included the boycotting of businesses that financed the election of anti-home-rule candidates, brought Moore into serious conflict once again with the conservatives of the Church. Senior parish wardens called a meeting at the National Cathedral to censure the Suffragan Bishop for embarrassing the business community of Washington, some of whose members were Episcopalians of lofty standing. No sooner had Moore survived the crisis, however, than he resumed his activist campaigns on behalf of home rule.
From time to time, he joined delegations of clergymen on pilgrimages into the Deep South, where they addressed civil-rights rallies, held religious services in bombed-out homes and churches, aided the voter-registration drive of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and, every so often, ran for their lives. "What was the Episcopal Church doing there?" Moore later asked—since he realized that the courageous Southern struggle would have gone on without the help of conscientious Northern churchmen. He answered himself, "We were there just to be there; just to say, 'This is the Church, these purposes are of God.' " For, whether they knew it or not, he added, the young blacks and whites who were risking their lives for freedom—especially on so bloody a ground as Mississippi—were obeying the will of the Holy Spirit.
Whether he knew it or not, a number of those brave Mississippi freedom fighters found him, then and later, to be an attractive and exemplary moral witness. Today, more than twenty-odd years later, those valiant armies of young men and women have all dispersed. Some have died. Some have fallen into inaction and obscurity. Some—like Marion Barry—have risen to positions of influence on the national scene. And others have converted the passions of the sixties into various forms of humane and intellectual activity. An example of the last is Michael Thelwell, a former worker for the Student Non-violent Coördinating Committee in Mississippi, who now writes and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst. Not long ago, he shared these recollections in a letter:
**{: .break one} ** In the fall of 1964, I was asked to manage the Washington office of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and to coördinate efforts to challenge the seating of three members of the Mississippi congressional delegation because of the disenfranchisement of that state's black population. This congressional challenge followed hard on the heels of the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City which nominated Lyndon Johnson and which offered the infamous "two seats at large" compromise to the Freedom Democratic Party delegation. The delegation's decision not to accept the token offer of the Democratic Party had led to much recrimination and bad feeling—between the young people of S.N.C.C., the Mississippi volunteers, and the Mississippi blacks who had sacrificed so much and taken such risks to make the challenge and the Democratic Party leadership, especially the liberal wing that had been sponsors and supporters of the challenge, and who, we felt, had negotiated away the political rights and aspirations of the brave group of Mississippians. In such a situation, the climate in Washington was distinctly uncomfortable. At the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights [where the M.F.D.P. challenge was discussed], the political professionals—representatives of the N.A.A.C.P. and the organized labor movement—were extremely hostile, denouncing the student organizers as adventurist, naïve, apolitical, and subversive. We considered them cynical and unprincipled. Going, as I had to do, to the Leadership Conference as the representative of the M.F.D.P. was not pleasant; and I can well remember being astonished at the level of personal acrimony and pettiness that the liberal pols displayed. In this atmosphere of indescribable bitterness, mistrust, and divisiveness, there were two voices that stood out by virtue of their fairness, gravity, and disinterested reasonableness. One was that of the late Robert Spike, director of the National Council of Churches' Commission on Religion and Race, and the other was that of Bishop Paul Moore, who, at the time, was suffragan bishop of Washington.…At first, we did not know who he was. I do remember that very tall, spare-bodied, older gentleman with the craggy, handsome features, who was many degrees beyond merely distinguished. In a roomful of screaming egos, his manner was quiet and unassuming. But his presence was one of authority and seriousness, what the Romans called gravitas, so that a few well-chosen sentences from him would shame the most vituperative politician into, if not decency, then, at least, civility and some measure of fairness. The first time I heard him speak at such a meeting, I was struck by the moral authority of his words, bearing, and presence, and by the obvious respect almost reluctantly but somehow inevitably accorded him by men whom I had come to see as creatures of expedient power and narrow self-interest. "Who on earth was that man?" I remember asking, afterward. "That," said a young lady I worked with, her eyes shining with something close to awe, "was Bishop Paul Moore. Isn't he gorgeous?" Not the adjective I would have chosen, but I understood perfectly. I was to see the Bishop many times after that, and each time I was more and more impressed by the natural moral authority and the deep personal force of his presence. I am sure he does not know the extent to which the young radicals and idealists over in the M.F.D.P. office respected and admired him—hero-worshipped him really. I came to understand that his power and authority were not institutional, were not derived from his position as Bishop; but that, in some uncanny and unusual congruence of man and position, the most establishment of religious institutions had managed to find a man of such personal, moral, and spiritual power as to enhance and uplift the position he held. He was, in our disillusioned and embittered eyes, what a bishop ought to be, a soldier of righteousness. **
In 1972, when Horace Donegan retired, Moore was installed as the thirteenth Episcopal Bishop of New York. In December of 1969, after serving as suffragan bishop of Washington, he had been elected bishop coadjutor of New York, an office carrying the right of succession to Donegan's throne. Two decades after leaving New York City to pursue the kind of radical urban ministry that seldom leads to Episcopal power, he had returned to assume the leadership of a major diocese of the American Church—in fact, to take up one of the most prominent positions in the worldwide Anglican communion. He was thrilled to be back. New York was his "favorite place in the world." And he saw his new job as "a God-sent opportunity" to continue his urban priesthood at the highest levels, and (he was then in his early fifties) to "finish my career in the Church with a tough and important assignment." He wasn't the first socially conscious bishop to preside over the New York Diocese. In the early nineteen-hundreds, Henry Codman Potter had been a strong liberal conscience in the affairs of Manhattan. But Moore was the first Bishop of New York to have been quite so radical in his ministry—the first to have been recruited from the barricades of public activism.
Shortly after his election as bishop coadjutor, Moore went to Saigon as part of an anti-war delegation. There, on July 11, 1970, near the United States Embassy, he had the undignified privilege of being teargassed by the South Vietnamese—a new and frightening experience even for someone who had fought in the perilous battles of the Second World War. Here, however, was a former American war hero, now turned preacher, denouncing his nation's most serious military engagement in decades. His old Marine buddies from Guadalcanal could scarcely believe it. Lewis Walt, his former battalion commander, wrote to ask how a good soldier like him could possibly have been converted to anti-war agitation. Was religious conscience such a liability to the nation's military will? "CAN A CHRISTIAN DEFEND THIS REPUBLIC?" That was how Intellectual Digest headlined an interview it had with Moore in December of 1972.
**{: .break one} ** Q: What about the argument that this is a moral war, because it is immoral to let one small nation be overrun by a communist, atheistic neighbor? Is there a moral case in what we think we're trying to do? Moore: What they say we're trying to do—to protect a freedom-loving weak country from an aggressive enemy—might come under the rubric of a "just war." I personally have gotten past that. I don't really think there is such a thing as a just war. But I'm not absolutist on that because my moral theology is such that I don't think you can be absolute about anything. Morality is always the lesser of two evils. That's why I'm not a pacifist in the fullest sense of the word. Given the present world, it would be hard for me to imagine the possibility of a just war, but I don't rule it out, because I just can't.… Q: On the question of a just war, do you ever go back and think about World War II in those terms? Moore: I suppose I am, with a very small "e," something of an existentialist. It depends on who you are, at what point in your life, under what circumstances you make decisions. As a youngster of 21, I thought we were defending the world against fascism. Indeed, maybe we were. But I feel that I couldn't now become a combat Marine. I just couldn't, in my being, lift up a gun and shoot somebody in war. When I think back to the three months on Guadalcanal, what went on, I just—no way—could not do it again, just could not do it.… Q: If a young man doesn't want to go to war today and chooses to become a C.O., who should carry the gun he would have shouldered? Moore: That's a profound question. The young man who takes C.O. status is not telling another young man to take up his gun. He has a choice, too. Maybe if everyone decided he would not go to war, if everyone refused to go, it would change the world. The mightiest power in the world would refuse to wage war! And perhaps the Russians would not come over here because they would no longer need to be afraid that we would threaten and attack them. I know this is a fantasy, but the spiritual dynamic of non-violence has been miraculous in its power in the past. Who knows? **
Moore was asked recently how it was that a minister with so radical a background had come to be elected Bishop of New York. "Because of the Anglo-Catholic tradition I came out of," he replied, "I always had at the very guts of my belief that we are all children of God—that you couldn't go to church and worship at the Mass, the Eucharist, and ignore Christ's presence in the poor. That has always been at the heart of my worship, not just my sense of duty. And I think that people who knew me—and quite a few people from the New York Diocese knew me, the ones who pushed my candidacy for bishop—really believed the same thing. Some may or may not have felt that my methods were correct, and some may have been more conservative. But there was a group of people here—our large black constituency, much of our liberal white constituency, conservatives who had a social conscience—who weren't offended by my social radicalism; they felt it was founded in my faith, and wasn't just some pinko kind of stuff. That was one factor. Another factor was that a number of people in the conservative leadership of the diocese, the bankers and so on, knew me. I think they said, 'Well, he can't be all bad if he went to St. Paul's and Yale, if his brother is the chairman of Bankers Trust, and if his granduncle is Mark Hanna; he must be all right somewhere.' Then, there were those who belonged to the Anglo-Catholic tradition; they knew I had been brought up in that tradition, that I could swing an incense pot with the best of them. Also, I was known to be a sort of open-minded person, who wouldn't jam any kind of High Church views down the throats of a Low Church parish. There were the sixties kind of liberals, who were concerned about peace and civil rights, and they knew that I identified with them. And I had a reputation as someone who cared about the clergy, as pastor. I'm not saying that all those things were perfectly true, but I'm told that's the image I had."
The Bishop's New York Diocese is what he calls "an enormous, loosely federated conglomerate." It covers Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, and spreads through the upstate counties of Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Dutchess, Orange, Sullivan, and Ulster-about two hundred parishes. (Brooklyn and Queens belong not to the Diocese of New York but to that of Long Island.) Reflecting the broad diversity of life in the city and the state, the parishes of the New York Diocese range from the very rich to the very poor, from the very conservative to the very liberal. There's Trinity Church, which is probably the richest Episcopal parish in America—richer, even, than the New York Diocese itself. There's St. Paul's Chapel, an affiliate of Trinity, where George Washington once worshipped. There are the black and Hispanic parishes in Harlem, the South Bronx, and lower Westchester. There are the Chinese and interracial congregations downtown. There are the poor parishes of some of the rural counties. There's fashionable St. Thomas's, on Fifth Avenue, and there's the prestigious St. Bartholomew's, on Park Avenue next door to the Waldorf-Astoria.
Running the loosely federated conglomerate from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Moore has great influence but less direct authority than one might think. The other parishes view him more as a friendly referee than as a feared enforcer of laws. "Our canon law is such that if I want to remove a rector from a parish because he's too old, or has got stale, or isn't doing a very good job, I can't remove him," Moore explains. "He has tenure. The only way he can be removed is if the vestry comes to me and formally asks for his removal and I accede to the request. Even then, he can ask for a trial, if he doesn't think I have good grounds for removing him. However, I've seldom gone along with efforts to remove a priest. When it gets to a point where a priest is having that much of a problem with his parish vestry, I usually sit down with both of them, singly or together, and try to find out if there isn't a way they can get along. If there isn't a way, then I may suggest that the difficult members of the vestry resign—assuming there's indeed no good grounds for removing the priest—or I may say to the priest, 'Hey, look, Charlie, you know you've had it. You'd be an idiot to want to stay on when two-thirds of the congregation can't stand you.' Then I'd help him find another job. And that's always tough, because it's hard to get a job as a priest."
Part of Moore's job requires him to be a pastor to all his clergy—visiting them in their different parishes, receiving them at his office in Manhattan, listening to their personal and professional problems, and offering spiritual and practical guidance. He's vested with the power of ordaining priests, but he can ordain no one who hasn't been approved by the standing committee of his diocese. As the chief liturgical officer of the diocese, he may celebrate the Eucharist or may preach in any of the parishes, and as the principal administrative officer of the diocese he helps to direct all the Church's mission work in that part of New York over which he exercises jurisdiction. He has a considerable say—though he doesn't always get his way—in how diocesan funds are budgeted. He's responsible for the running of his own church, the Cathedral—which he does through his dean, the Very Reverend James Parks Morton—and he's the president of its board of trustees. And, as the sovereign of a major cathedral—the head of the Episcopal family in much of New York—he probably finds it awkward that a single parish like Trinity Church is richer than the entire diocese over which he presides. "Trinity's budget is so much bigger than that of the diocese," he says, "that I think it's like asking the father of a family 'What's your income?' and then asking him 'What's your kid's income?' Embarrassing. But Trinity has been extremely generous in its support of the diocese."
Of his other functions as bishop, Moore says, "I also feel a responsibility to represent the Church in the city and the region. I'm involved in the Coalition for the Homeless here in New York City. This week, we'll have a press conference on AIDS, which has caused so much suffering among the gay population. The Church must speak to that—not only the evangelicals, who say it's God's vengeance. We want to address that idea. I have become more and more involved with the AIDS issue because of the tragedy and increasing seriousness of the epidemic. It is now one of my major concerns. I have also been a strong supporter of the new law in New York City banning discrimination against homosexuals. We have a great many homosexual persons in our diocese. They are our people, and I want them to have their civil rights protected. Then there's the question of Nicaragua. We have no business arming the Contras. The solution lies in diplomacy and economic aid rather than military intervention. Whenever there's a major social issue, I feel some responsibility as a bishop to either have a press conference or preach a sermon about it or show my own—sometimes the Church's—point of view. If it's just my own, I often say that this is my point of view as Bishop—speaking to the Church and not for the Church. I also express my views concerning the directions of the national Church when I gather with my colleagues in the House of Bishops."
The Cathedral Close of St. John the Divine—thirteen acres of trees, gardens, lawns, and Gothic-style structures—must be the greenest and serenest spot on the upper West Side. It looks especially so in early spring, when the poplars and oaks and maples are in fresh leaf, their lower branches spreading shade over walkways, hedges, and resurrected lawns. With its cool, pastoral look—and its buildings dedicated to worship and to study as well as to administration and clerical residence—it is an oasis within four busy and strident city blocks: Morningside Drive to the east, Amsterdam Avenue to the west, 113th Street to the north, and Cathedral Parkway to the south. Sitting near the top of the incline known as Morningside Heights, the Cathedral Close is also a neighbor of Columbia University, Union Theological Seminary, Riverside Church, St. Luke's Hospital, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Manhattan School of Music. They all belong to what was called the Acropolis of New York in the late nineteenth century, before the area was invaded by the present cacophony of commerce and urban housing. To the east, the Close looks out over a section of Harlem—not as distinguished a neighbor as Columbia, to the west, perhaps, but as permanent a one as the Cathedral will ever have—and the Close is where the Bishop of New York lives and works.
When Moore is in town, his office, on the ground floor of Synod House, is among the busier ones on the Cathedral grounds. Waiting in its lobby on a spring day for an appointment with the Bishop, a lay visitor sits among a number of priests who have come for audiences with their spiritual leader. There isn't much levity among them as they wait to see the Bishop; each seems preoccupied with a problem of some gravity. But the audiences are transforming, for each priest comes out smiling, looking relieved, stepping lithely. The Bishop's reputation as a friendly and reassuring counsellor is apparently well founded. (When Moore took office in 1972, a priest was heard to say, "Bishop Donegan was our king. Paul will be our captain." One now sees a little of what that means.)
When the visitor is finally invited by Nell Gibson, Moore's executive assistant, to enter his office, the Bishop gets up from behind his desk, comes forward to shake hands in the middle of the room, and has his guest sit with him at a table across from the desk. The room is a pleasant combination of den and office, which, to one side, looks out through small-paned windows upon new spring foliage. It is tastefully decorated: faded rug, spare antique furniture, books, photographs, a few paintings and engravings on the walls. Its atmosphere is as informal as the style of its occupant. The Bishop is, of course, a commanding-looking figure, but, then, he has no control over that feature of his looks. His lean frame is attired in a gray business suit, worn over a white clerical collar and the purple rabat of a bishop; a bronze cross dangles from a long chain around his neck; on one finger is an impressive episcopal ring; his gaze is direct and penetrating but in no way intimidating; and his voice is deep, resonant, and self-assured but without a trace of conceit or smugness. At the table where they sit, the visitor is invited to share the Bishop's lunch of tuna-fish sandwiches, ordered from somewhere on Amsterdam Avenue. And there seems to be a supply of wine in a corner of the room, for the Bishop gets up from his sandwich, steps away for a few seconds, and comes back with what turns out to be a mellow Bordeaux.
During the lunch, Mrs. Moore comes in. She has been out walking Watson, the younger of their two cairn terriers (Plowright, the other, has been in the office, keeping the Bishop company), and she has dropped by for a brief midday chat with her husband, or perhaps just to see him, before returning to their residence, a short distance from Synod House. An attractive woman in her early forties, she has shoulder-length brown hair, is wearing a silk blouse and a tweed skirt, and speaks in a warm and cultivated voice. She was born Brenda Hughes, in Virginia, and she became the Bishop's second wife two years after Jenny, the mother of his nine children, died. "Paul, dear," she says as she comes in, "it's so warm in here. Don't you think you ought to open a window just a bit?"
"I hadn't noticed it, darling," the Bishop says, and he jumps up to open a window just a bit. Before sitting down again, he introduces his wife to the visitor. She smiles winningly, makes some charming remarks, says goodbye, and walks out, with Watson happily in tow.
The Bishop now tells this story: "Jenny died just after I became Bishop of New York. She and some of the children had been living in Washington, and I was alone in New York—a cheerless life. So my first years as Bishop, especially after Jenny died, were shattering ones, full of sorrow—for her, for the children, and for myself. When she died, I had to bring the children to New York, a place they didn't particularly like, and where they had hardly any friends. So, starting out as Bishop of New York with my personal life falling apart, and having, despite that, to carry on like a brave bishop, was very hard. It was then that I met Brenda. Actually, I had met her before Jenny died. She and her husband, Vernon, were friends of ours. I had presided at their wedding here at the Cathedral. Then, on their first anniversary, they found out that Vernon was dying of cancer, at about the same time that Jenny was dying. So we were all in communication. I ministered to Vernon in his last days and took his funeral. And then, after Jenny died, I called on Brenda a few times, as a priest calling on a widow in bereavement. Pastoral calls evolved into another kind of relationship, and in 1975 we were married here, in the Cathedral garden, by the Reverend Edward West. Since then, Brenda has been the heart of my personal life, and my strongest friend and ally in all the difficult situations I confront as a priest and as a bishop."
When lunch and conversation are over, the Bishop calls Plowright, puts a leash on him, and leads the way out of his office. Outdoors, in the bracing spring air, he looks up at the clear sky, and takes a deep breath. His eyes sweep across the profusion of greenery, and he declares the young springtime to be wonderful. Identifying for his visitor the various buildings they pass along the way, he eventually arrives at Cathedral House, the residence of the bishop and his family. It is a splendid three-story French-style château—so splendid that, soon after it was erected, people were heard to say that it was much too nice a place for a bishop. Legend has it that the building of the château was a gift from J. P. Morgan, who worshipped at St. George's Church, on Stuyvesant Square. Legend further has it that when Morgan was asked why he had built so fine a residence for a mere bishop he replied, "The Bishop of New York should live like everybody else." The legend is disputed, however, by the Reverend Elliott Lindsley, an upstate priest who is the historiographer of the New York Diocese. "The facts are otherwise," Lindsley told an inquirer. "Morgan had very little to do with the house. He was dead when it was completed. It wasn't paid for until about 1920—and then from diocesan funds, chiefly from the sale of the old episcopal residence in Gramercy Park. Please do not resuscitate legends I'm at pains to kill forever."
In any case, Moore doesn't live as sumptuously as some of the early bishops did—or as Morgan may or may not have believed they had a right to. In fact, for a man who could probably afford a mansion of his own, he lives very simply. He and his wife occupy only the third floor of the fifty-odd-room château. The lower floors have been converted mostly into cathedral offices and meeting rooms. On the second floor, there is a great dining room, where some former bishops gave lavish dinner parties—a room with a gallery, from which musicians entertained while the bishops and their guests enjoyed fine wines and platters. There's a smaller dining room in the Moores' apartment, which they use for their dinner parties, but when they're by themselves they mostly eat in the kitchen. It's a cozy, arboreal kitchen—with soft chairs and potted plants, and a wine rack nearby. "Brenda is the green thumb of the family," the Bishop explains, "and the kitchen is where she and I spend our mornings, over coffee and the Times. It is also where we spend many of our evenings, over dinner." The Moores' living room is small and intimate, with warm-looking rugs, laden bookshelves, modern paintings, and eclectic furniture. Perhaps the most interesting of the rooms is the Bishop's study. Its furnishings include antique chairs and tables and a large antique desk. There are book-lined walls, and there are pictures and memorabilia of the Moore family, going back several generations. Under some soft rugs, the floorboards creak. Before the visitor leaves, Moore tells him not to forget the Cathedral, which dominates the Close.
The Cathedral is, of course, the Bishop's seat, the Bishop's church. It is the largest cathedral in the world, its walls—a hundred and twenty-four feet high and more than six hundred feet long—enclosing sixteen million cubic feet of space. About a half-million visitors come to look at the Cathedral every year, and wander through its cavernous and magnificent interiors. What they see these days is much more than what visitors saw fifty years ago and something less than what visitors will see fifty years from now—for the Cathedral (also called St. John the Unfinished) is surely New York's oldest work in progress. In 1924, Alfred D. F. Hamlin, a professor of architecture at Columbia, said of it, "Nothing comparable to this superb design has ever been executed or conceived in America, and the cathedrals of Europe may fairly be challenged to surpass or even to equal it." Whenever it is finished, that is what future visitors will see.
Today, over ninety years after the foundation stone was laid (in 1892), a good deal of the Cathedral's design—towers, pinnacles, and other exterior details—has still not been executed. Almost no one is brave enough to estimate how many millions of dollars have already been spent on the building and how many millions more will be needed to complete it. In 1931, one writer described "the money-eating" St. John the Divine as "that hungry edifice which swallows a million dollars as a hippo engulfs a peanut." It has been erected as seasons and epochs have allowed: as money was available, the work of building proceeded; as money ran out, it stopped; and as more money was raised it started up again. The crypt was opened for worship in 1899, but it wasn't until 1941 that the full length of the Cathedral—in various states of incompletion—was ready for use. In 1924, while Franklin D. Roosevelt was directing one of several fund-raising campaigns on which the progress of the work has depended, he hazarded, "Someday soon—we hope in our lifetime—the Cathedral will be an accomplished fact." That hope, obviously, was not fulfilled in Roosevelt's time; it probably won't be fulfilled in the lifetime of the present adult generation; and if St. John the Divine deserves its comparison with some of the great cathedrals of Europe, which took centuries to build, the hope may not be fulfilled for a number of generations to come.
When Horace Donegan became Bishop of New York, in 1950, no work had been done on the Cathedral since 1941. None was done during the fifties and early sixties. And in the late sixties, a few years before he retired, Donegan decreed that no further work should be done. There was something improper, he felt, about pouring millions of dollars into the completion of a stone monument when—in the city and in that very neighborhood—there were so many urgent social and human needs. Within a few years of succeeding Donegan, Moore decreed otherwise. He certainly wasn't indifferent to social needs, but his sense of the Cathedral—his interpretation of its spirit and its significance—was quite different from Donegan's. Especially during the fiscal crises of the mid-seventies, when New York seemed on the verge of falling apart, Moore wanted the Cathedral to be seen as a symbol of struggle, continuity, and hope. And there was no better way of symbolizing those ideals than by continuing to build the Cathedral. The decision to build, Moore said in 1978, a few months before work was resumed, was "a concrete sign of hope for our city and our neighborhood, a dramatic affirmation that we are here to stay."
In revoking Donegan's policy, Moore acted on the advice and counsel of the Very Reverend James P. Morton. They had been comrades in past struggles. They had known each other since the days of Moore's ministry in Jersey City; they held similar views on what an urban ministry should entail; and Morton, in particular, had a special feeling about the role of cathedrals in the life of cities. Hence, one of Moore's first acts as bishop was to appoint Morton the Cathedral's dean, its chief executive—whose programs would reflect not only Morton's own enthusiasms but also the goals of the new bishop. While assessing the future prospects of the Cathedral, Morton found that, because of Bishop Donegan's moratorium on further building, wealthy Episcopalians were leaving the Cathedral out of their wills. The trend was depriving the institution of much-needed revenue, and that trend could be reversed only by reversing Donegan's policy.
Though black opposition was feared, Harlem community leaders did not protest the planned expenditure of some twenty million dollars for the completion of two three-hundred-foot towers, and for a number of other improvements; in fact, they applauded the plan. They were pleased to have been consulted about it beforehand, and were pleased as well that most of the workmen would be minority-group apprentices. Under the supervision initially of James Bambridge, a master builder from England, the apprentices were to be trained in the ancient arts of cutting, carving, and assembling the nearly twenty-five thousand stones to be used in completing the towers. That stage of the work continues today, and whenever it is completed the Cathedral will still be St. John the Unfinished.
Though the Cathedral has a congregation of its own, it has always—from its inception—been considered a church for all the people of New York. The preamble to its constitution describes the proposed Cathedral as "a house of prayer…for the use of all people who may resort thereto, especially of the Christian folk dwelling within that portion of the country covered by the spiritual jurisdiction of the Bishop of New York." And, in a sense, the Cathedral was built not by Episcopalians alone but by all the people of New York. When the foundation stone was laid, the Bishop of New York was Henry C. Potter, and in a fund-raising campaign he made wise and successful use of the slogan "A house of prayer for all peopIe." Money poured in from Episcopalians, and from Catholics, Jews, and Protestants of all denominations, and even from New Yorkers who would have been lying if they confessed to any religious faith at all.
That slogan, which was kept in harness as a description of the Cathedral's ecumenical appeal, got a later bishop, William T. Manning, into considerable difficulty. At one point in his tenure, Manning, who became bishop in 1921, called on John D. Rockefeller, Jr., for a donation toward the building of the Cathedral—since, of course, the church was hospitable to people of all religious affiliations. Rockefeller responded generously, with a check for five hundred thousand dollars. But along with his check there was a note to Manning suggesting that since so many non-Episcopalians were being asked for donations perhaps they might also be considered for seats on the Cathedral's board of trustees. Manning, even with the half million safely in his hands, was trapped. Though it made practical sense, Rockefeller's idea was simply out of the question; no Episcopalian would stand for such a thing. A writer of the period, Alva Johnston, records Manning's handling of the matter:
**{: .break one} ** Bishop Manning escapes from the trap, but leaves several yards of satin and lawn behind him. He gives two reasons that it is inexpedient to meet Mr. Rockefeller's request: first, it is too early; second, it is too late. "The time has not yet arrived," says the Bishop, for such a course; such a course would "disturb statutes of immemorial standing," says the Bishop. The hope suggested in the Bishop's first reason that "the time" might yet arrive is rather forlorn in view of the fact that those statutes are growing more and more immemorial all the time. The "immemorial statutes" were only fifty years old, an early infancy for a statute. But John D. Rockefeller, Jr., is satisfied; he has his fun. Bishop Manning is satisfied; he has his half-million. **
But here is how, in 1927, one Episcopal clergyman described the "house of prayer for all people":
**{: .break one} ** By far the majority of those who attend are strangers, coming from all parts of the country, and indeed of the world, and representing every faith in Christendom, and many who are without definite religious convictions.… The rich and the poor meet there without distinction; strangers who come do not feel that they are trespassing; men who have not been inside a church for years and who would not enter any church other than a cathedral, sit beside habitual churchgoers and take part in the service; young people, whose beliefs are unsettled and who are for the time being more or less out of touch with organized religion, make an exception in the case of the Cathedral;…working people come because the Cathedral is democratic and free; artists and musicians come, and other lovers of beauty, to join in a service in which glorious music fulfills its highest function by being transmuted into praise. **
Following this tradition, Moore and Morton, early in their regime, made the Cathedral—beyond its religious and sacramental functions—a center for the diversity of cultural life in New York. The spirit in which Moore and his dean would be running the Cathedral was foreshadowed in the style of his installation as bishop. The installation was marked, to be sure, by high religious seriousness—hymns, prayers, impressive medieval ceremonies, and colorful processions—but it also featured folk and gospel singers, a steel band and a classical brass ensemble, a performance by the cast of the Off Broadway musical "Godspell," and a daylong picnic on the Cathedral lawns, to which all were invited.
A year or so later, this report appeared in the Times: "Worshippers wound through the cavernous Cathedral…on a recent Sunday, shaking tambourines, singing plainsong and watching medieval mystery plays. In the basement, members of a mystical Islamic sect thumped their drums. Black feminists met in the Synod House.…Members of a Tai Chi workshop did oriental meditation exercises. These diverse activities reflect the changes that in recent months have given new life to one of New York's best-known landmark institutions." Since then, the Cathedral has been host to art shows, peace demonstrations, dance programs, secular concerts, and ethnic cultural festivals. On various occasions, it has been graced by the attendance or the jazz sounds of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Williams, Dave Brubeck, Charlie Mingus, Mary Lou Williams, Louie Bellson, Earl Hines, Billy Taylor, and Hank Jones, among many others. It has honored Tennessee Williams, Leonard Bernstein, Elie Wiesel, and Olivier Messiaen for their contributions to literature and music. In 1977, Stewart Mott, heir to a General Motors fortune, chose Synod House for the celebration of his thirty-ninth birthday. Mott invited hundreds of friends and acquaintances to don medieval-style attire and join him for a medieval feast. Time was there: "The menu included gyngere (gingered carp) and blancmange (spiced chicken in almond cream), all to be eaten only with fingers; potables were mead and hippocras (spiced wine). As the banquet's lord of the manor, the host was outfitted in ermine-trimmed cape and ducal crown. The price tag for the gothic gaieties: $25,000."
Sunday sermons at the Cathedral aren't always Biblical in theme and aren't always preached by clergymen. The congregation has listened to discourses on "New Dimensions in Healing," by Norman Cousins; "Stone as Symbol," by the novelist Madeleine L'Engle; "New York Landmarks," by the critic, novelist, and cultural historian Brendan Gill; "What Makes a Monument," by the architecture critic Paul Goldberger; "Sacred Geometry," by the English art teacher Keith Critchlow; "Cathedrals and Human Needs," by the Harlem community leader James Dowdy; and "The Meaning of Stone," by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.
During a peace rally in the early seventies, the Bishop, making a late entrance, walked slowly up the Cathedral's center aisle, accompanied by his learned and venerable canon the Reverend Edward West. When he was halfway up the aisle, Moore's nostrils registered an unfamiliar aroma—unfamiliar to him, at least. And, turning to Canon West, he remarked on the new and interesting incense the Cathedral seemed to have acquired recently. West—a bald, bearded, and monkish-looking man—was surprised by the Bishop's remark. His nostrils told him immediately that there was nothing sacramental about the smoke he and the Bishop were smelling. Should he break the news? He decided, after some hesitation, that he should. Clearing his throat, he glanced at his Bishop and whispered: "No, Paul. That isn't incense you're smelling. That's grass!' He was confident that the Bishop had at least heard of "grass." Moore's response to the information that marijuana was being smoked under the high and holy vaulting of his Cathedral is not on record. But it must surely have pained him to recognize the price his church was paying for being "a house of prayer for all people."
A furor erupted one recent Easter, when a statue of a woman on a cross was unveiled at the Cathedral. Were there no limits to what was admissible in a house of prayer for all people? What, anyway, was the statue, called "Christa," meant to portray? Was it meant to present Jesus as a woman or was it meant to symbolize woman as a sufferer in social and religious life? The meaning was all in the eye and the convictions of a beholder. Dean Morton, who came under fire for sanctioning such an exhibit, beheld "Christa" in his own way. "It's stupid to think it shows Jesus as a woman," Morton said to the Post, "because we all know Jesus was a man." He added, in an interview with the Times, "Theologically, it is very important for this kind of thing to be done. For one thing, it puts flesh on St. Paul's words that all Christians are to bear the cross of Christ." Professor Phyllis Trible, of the Union Theological Seminary, concurred with Morton's views. The statue, she said, should be seen as an allusion to "Christ's mystical body that transcends sex," without "denying the male Jesus of history." Continuing, she argued, "We never have problems when we talk about males being Christ figures. We only get stirred up when the figure becomes a woman." But the Right Reverend J. Stuart Wetmore and the Right Reverend Walter Dennis—who, as suffragan bishops, are episcopal assistants of Paul Moore—were not mollified. In the absence of Moore, who was on a sabbatical, Wetmore wrote Morton to say that it didn't surprise him that "someone, somewhere would do such a sculpture, either out of cynicism, smart-aleckness, or a distorted devotion." Dennis accused Morton of "desecrating our symbols." He went on to say that while he supported "the women's cause both inside and outside the church" he considered "Christa" to be "theologically and historically indefensible."
A few weeks after the "Christa" uproar, however, Morton heard almost nothing but applause when, in another characteristic act of his administration, a Poets' Corner was established and dedicated at the Cathedral. The Corner—similar in concept to the illustrious one in Westminster Abbey—commemorates America's great poets and prose writers of the past. The first to be elected were Emily Dickinson, Washington Irving, and Walt Whitman. Walter Cronkite was master of ceremonies. Edgar Bowers read from Dickinson; Gregory Peck read from Irving; Robert Penn Warren read from Whitman; and there were musical selections by Michael Tree (the violist of the Guarneri Quartet), Rosalyn Tureck (the organist, on this occasion), Barbara Nissman (the pianist), and Paul Winter (the saxophonist). According to Daniel Haberman, the Cathedral's poet-in-residence, the corner "will become the permanent memorial for those who strove for excellence and achieved what has become our extraordinary literary heritage." Since then, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe have been assigned places in the corner.
All in all, not since the days of the controversial James A. Pike—who was dean of the Cathedral from 1952 to 1958—had St. John the Divine vibrated with so much of New York's secular styles and energies. Pike's regime, his biographers William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne write, was "breathtaking." His preaching attracted "huge throngs," and his administration "restored the cathedral to the venerable vocation…as intercessor for the total life of the city."
Bishop Moore and Dean Morton have also been widely praised for the democratic uses to which they have put the Cathedral—for having brought it into close touch with the general life and concerns of New York City. But they have been fiercely criticized as well—especially by elements within their own denomination. "Not everyone in the Cathedral is enthusiastic about all the changes," the Times reported some years ago. " 'I think there's a great danger in trying to do everything at once,' said one member of the cathedral staff.…'You end up doing nothing really well. Everyone here is worn out.' Another critic suggested that the activities were geared for publicity, 'without figuring the long-term merits of the program. It's an exploitive thing.' '' Paul Seabury, in his 1978 Harper's article, said, "One New York churchman has asked that, at some future time, the cathedral, defiled, be formally reconsecrated. But by then, one might have thought, was it a cathedral anymore, or a recreation hall for the counterculture?"
More recently, a former member of the Cathedral's congregation said to this writer: "Much of what is done at the Cathedral is done with an eye to media and personal publicity. The Cathedral is used for making more of a secular splash than a religious splash. My quarrel isn't so much with Morton's secular program. What I object to is that he will go through the period of Lent, for example, and have all of his preachers at the main services be ecologists and novelists. They're all people with public reputations but not religious reputations. For Lent, Morton might announce six lectures on the passion of the earth, as related to the passion of Christ. Then he'll have a bunch of ecologists come in and talk about land use and water use and smokestacks and dioxin. Then he'll bring in Norman Cousins to talk about medicine, and so on. I think Morton is an impresario—a show-biz guy, not a religious leader. It's no surprise to me that he comes from the family of Morton's Salt. I think all he's doing really is a Reader's Digest kind of thing. He brings in a little bit here and a little bit there, but there's no theology in it. I don't see how you can build a ministry on that, and I don't see what that has to do with the unique function of the Church. I think Morton is desacralizing the liturgical life of the Cathedral—turning the preaching function over to laymen, some with no relationship whatever to the Church. I'm sure he has Bishop Moore's support in what he's doing, but I don't know what he's accomplishing. He may be getting a few people into the building to hear these talks, but are they, as a result, developing an interest in the theology of the Episcopal Church? People used to get up out of their beds on Sundays and flock to the Cathedral when James Pike was Dean. Pike was a person who lived on the edges of controversy and public issues. But he did what he did within the context of his ministry as a clergyman."
The disillusioned critic, who has transferred his church membership to the Diocese of Long Island, continued: "Morton talks a lot about running the Cathedral in the way that medieval people ran cathedrals. But we don't have a medieval culture today. There was no difference between sacred and secular in medieval culture. For that matter, in the Middle Ages people were also burned at the stake. Or they would expel people who were heretics. There were all kinds of things in the Middle Ages that we don't do nowadays. So, for him to claim that he's running a medieval cathedral is just a bunch of bull. It's just like his training these kids to be medieval stonemasons and stonecutters. I suppose when that job runs out they're going to build the next medieval cathedral over in Connecticut. It's all nonsense. He's teaching them a skill that has no relevance to the contemporary world whatsoever, and he's getting an enormous amount of press out of it. Morton can play all the games he wants to, but he's not living in the Middle Ages; St. John the Divine is not a medieval cathedral; and New York City is not a medieval town."
When such criticisms were reported to Dean Morton—in his office, on the Cathedral grounds—he replied, "Both the Bishop and I are very involved in the city, as the context of our ministry. We see the church as a presence and as a dimension of life in the city. We don't say, 'Well, here's the church, on the one side, and here's the city, on the other.' We see the church as a vein running through the life of the city. I think a lot of church life tends to be very parochial—staying within its own walls, doing things for its own people. But the people who come to the Cathedral are very much a mirror of New York. They come from all different places. I would say that thirty per cent of the people who are here all the time are Jewish. That's a fact. They are involved in the kinds of stands and understandings that this place speaks about. And a lot of people come here who catch on to religion for the first time. And they come here because they find that this is different from what they find in other churches, synagogues, temples—you name it. That's really been the thrust of my administration and that of the Bishop—making the Cathedral meet the agendas of human need. One of the first things I got going when I came here, in 1972, was the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board—UHAB. It's a technical-assistance program—dealing with the phenomenon of abandoned buildings, dealing with poor people in areas that have become more and more like Berlin after the war, dealing with tenants who can't move, who are stuck. UHAB trains tenants to take over their neglected buildings, to renovate them, and to manage them. All that rehabilitation work is being done by people in the neighborhoods. So in completing the building of the Cathedral itself we haven't gone out to get bids from huge construction companies. We've said that we are going to continue building the Cathedral in a kind of UHAB way. Our builders and stonecutters are like the singers in the choir, part of the Cathedral family. They have included American blacks, Caucasians, Hispanics, Haitians, American Indians, and at least one Ethiopian. It's wild, but it looks like New York."
Moving on to a criticism that he particularly resents, Morton continued, "Of those who say the Cathedral makes more of a secular splash than a religious splash, one has to ask this question: Is the social splash or display not also religious? In the Middle Ages, a cathedral was usually in the marketplace of a town—the fairs were there, the theatre was born there. Cathedrals certainly weren't having Mass twenty-four hours a day. There was a lot of social activity in the town, and it took place inside the cathedral—for the cathedral was the pride of the town. It's only later that you have a separation of church and state, sacred and secular. Some people now say that only the pure word of God should be preached in a cathedral—that all this other stuff should be out. Well, you see, that's just a mentality. For instance, the Paul Winter Consort is going to be having a concert in our Cathedral, and there will probably be two or three thousand people there. I find Winter's music to be very religious. It's very involved with endangered species, and it will have the cries of whales and wolves and sea lions and whatnot. Now, is that religious or not? For me, that's profoundly religious. Because the issues being lifted up by that music express our responsibility as God's stewards of his creation. We are blowing the world up and killing all these animals off, and using them for ourselves. Are we celebrating the beauty and the glory of God in his creation? My recollection is that people who come to some of these concerts have said that they've had the most religious experience of their lives. And they've started coming around on Sunday mornings. Traditionally, most people have not wanted to come out to church, because they've said there's nothing in the church that's going to grab them. To get the busy and tired people out of their beds to go to church on Sunday mornings is, to me, a miracle. When I came to the Cathedral, there wasn't anybody here on Christmas and Easter. On my first Christmas, everyone was jubilant, because there were six hundred people here. Well, of course, it takes over two thousand people to fill the Cathedral; but those six hundred hadn't been at the high altar for several years. Now the place is packed at Christmas and Easter, which isn't the way it used to be."
Morton concluded, "Naturally, a dean's administration should be very reflective of what the bishop wants his cathedral to be. I've known Bishop Moore quite some time, and I'm familiar with his objectives. I went into the priesthood, really, because of his influence. When I was an undergraduate, I met him, and he was just then starting out in Jersey City. That very much impressed me, and I left architecture and went into the priesthood. My wife and I began our ministry with him and his wife in Jersey City. So that our own kind of work has very much been involved in inner-city, poverty, and peace issues. There have been some differences, in terms of style and in terms of particular foci. I would say that I'm from a more intellectual tradition than he is. I would not consider him particularly intellectual. That's more my style. Also, in certain areas I'm very involved with people—in alternative energy and ecological issues, the paradigm shifts that the civilization is going through. That kind of stuff is very interesting to me. And so Ernst Schumacher and Lewis Thomas and René Dubos and Ivan Illich are all people I've known and worked with. The Bishop, on the other hand, has been much more involved with people who are directly in action. I've been, myself, always in action; but I've been interested in its intellectual antecedents and the larger construct within which that action takes place. Also, I come out of an arts background. I was trained first as an architect. My wife's father was the director of the Metropolitan Museum. My father was a theatre director. And my wife is a painter. That kind of world has been reflected in my work here at the Cathedral."
While visiting Venice in the summer of 1974, Moore recalls in his book "Take a Bishop Like Me," he received an urgent telegram from the United States: "Call Bob DeWitt immediately." "My Lord, what has that impulsive guy done now?" he asked himself. Robert De Witt, a former Bishop of Pennsylvania, was a close personal friend of Moore's and, like him, one of the strong and determined liberal voices in the Episcopal House of Bishops. "Paul," DeWitt said when Moore reached him on the phone, "I just wanted you to know what we are planning to do on Monday. Dan Corrigan, Ed Welles, and I are going to ordain eleven women to the priesthood. Three of them are from your diocese." DeWitt added, "We have been meeting with some of the women and I think the only way is to just do it." Moore was astonished—in fact, as he says in his book, he was "mad as hell." Had his colleagues lost their minds? They were about to violate an ancient law and custom of the Church, and they didn't seem to care. Actually, Moore himself was a part of the "plot." In response to a rising feminist movement within the Church, he, DeWitt, and a few other liberal bishops had decided that the time had indeed come to press for the ordination of women into the priesthood, for a change in the apostolic tradition that held that only men could be ordained as priests. But he thought he and his colleagues had agreed that the breakthrough should be made legally, that they should agitate within the highest councils of the Church. Now that his colleagues were acting on their own, it wasn't only ancient tradition they were about to dishonor but administrative rules as well. Contrary to what those rules required, none of the eleven women had been approved for ordination by their own bishops and standing committees; nor had DeWitt, Corrigan, and Welles received permission from the Bishop of Pennsylvania to conduct ordinations in his diocese. So the ordinations would be illegal and irregular on every conceivable ground. In Moore's view, the whole thing was "a mess."
Moore wasn't at all surprised when, the month after his return from Venice, John Allin, Presiding Bishop of the national Church, summoned the House of Bishops—over a hundred strong—to an emergency meeting in Chicago. Conservatives were scandalized by what the three prelates had done in Philadelphia. Moderates were, at the very least, concerned. And the pro-women liberals were nervous—not just the ones who had broken the law but also the ones who, like Moore, were, in a sense, moral accomplices. According to Moore, "Those who favored women's ordination were upset that they were now on the defensive. We were working hard for proper legislation at the 1976 General Convention; we were working against two thousand years of tradition, and against explosive feelings. Now we were in a position where we had to either defend a basically illegal action or turn against three bishops and eleven women who were leaders of this movement. Those who were against women's ordination now had a 'scandalous,' uncanonical action to make them even more embittered. And no one knew how the new Presiding Bishop would chair a meeting." To make matters worse, Allin, the former Bishop of Mississippi, was himself a conservative. However, the liberals got off much more lightly than they had feared. At the meeting in Chicago, the bishops agreed to submit the issue to a committee for further study. The results would be presented at the Church's next Triennial Convention, in Minneapolis.
In September of 1976, after prolonged debate, that convention—the Church's highest legislative body—voted in favor of a historic resolution: that the canons for the ordination of bishops, priests, and deacons "shall be equally applicable to men and women." The liberals thus won what at an earlier point in the history of their Church had seemed an impossible victory. Bishops crossed the aisles of the convention hall, shook hands, and embraced. Not all of them, of course. A number of the defeated opponents talked of leaving the national Church and forming an Anglican institution of their own. Others had no intention of ordaining women or sanctioning such rites in their dioceses, regardless of what the convention said. The convention had simply authorized the ordination of women by those bishops who were so disposed; such ordinations were not mandatory. But in subsequent months scores of women presented themselves for ordination, especially in dioceses whose bishops were willing to perform the ceremony. No bishop was more willing than the Bishop of New York. And no other, surely, was ready to go as far as Moore did when, in January of 1977, he ordained to the priesthood a woman, Ellen Barrett, who had declared herself to be a lesbian. Once again, the Episcopal Church was in turbulence, and this time it was Moore who stood alone at the center of the storm.
A year earlier, Moore had ordained Ellen Barrett a deacon. He did so after long and careful thought. When she had presented herself as a candidate, he had found her to be qualified on all grounds except that of her declared sexual life. He had told her so, saying that the standing committee of his diocese—without whose approval he was powerless to act—would never approve a self-declared lesbian for ordination; nor, in all honesty, did he think the time had yet come for so bold a step. Moore had, nonetheless, gone ahead and discussed the possibility with his standing committee; and, not at all to his surprise, the majority of its members had recoiled in shock. He didn't drop the matter, however. Continuing to feel an uneasiness over the fact that a woman qualified in all other respects for the position she desired should be barred by considerations of her sexual preference, he kept on bringing up the subject before the standing committee. After debating the issue on a number of occasions, the committee relented and approved her for ordination as a deacon.
But having become a deacon Barrett now wanted to become a priest. And by 1977, when the Church had removed its barriers to female priests, Moore saw no reason—aside from the predictable objections to her sexual preference—that she shouldn't be ordained into the ministry. He decided he would ordain her. When news of his intention leaked out, some time before the ceremony took place, papers around the country carried the "scandalous" story of what the Bishop of New York was planning to do. If Moore had been an easily intimidated liberal, he would have backed off then and there, for reactions to the newspaper reports were immediate and abusive. Among the letters he received was one from a clergyman in Albany saying, "This hurts the whole church. To be personal, I shall be sharing the priesthood with a lesbian. Is this fair?" A bishop in Colorado reminded Moore that "the ordination of practicing homosexuals" did not represent "the mind of the Church," was "plainly contrary to the teaching of scripture," and was "totally irresponsible." A psychologist wrote in to say, "For a Bishop of the Episcopal Church to take part in this sordid…story can only add to the increasing despair of an already fractured Church. May God forgive you, Bishop Moore." Though Moore understood the underlying resentment, he still considered such protests to be hypocritical. Everyone knew, after all, that from time immemorial the Church had been ordaining homosexuals into the priesthood—as long as such homosexuals kept their mouths shut about their private lives.
Moore felt, as a result, that the objection to Ellen Barrett was based chiefly on the fact that she had made an open confession of her sexual preference. Had she remained silent about that aspect of her personal life—as not only a number of male priests had done but, perhaps, a number of the new female priests as well—hardly anyone would be contesting her right as a woman to be ordained into the priesthood. She was being penalized, then, Moore argued, not so much for her sexual orientation as for her honest admission of it. And should honesty be a bar to priesthood? Was the person who had kept his or her sexual life a secret an abler priest than the one who had frankly acknowledged it? Moore had been wrestling with that question ever since Ellen Barrett came to him asking to be ordained a deacon. And he was surer now than ever that he couldn't in good conscience deny her the opportunity of higher religious service simply because she had spoken honestly about herself. He wasn't endorsing homosexuality; he was intolerant of the kind of intolerance and hypocrisy that prevented other people from realizing their ambitions or the best in themselves. Bishops like to say that whenever they are faced with a difficult decision they pray for guidance. Moore prayed for guidance. And on the evening of January 10, 1977, at the Church of the Holy Apostles, in Manhattan, he placed his hands on Ellen Barrett's head and ordained her a priest of her Church. "I truly felt," he wrote later, "that this was right, according to what our Lord would have me do."
But, as is often the case, the Lord's will was not in accord with that of His earthly followers. The protests that Moore had received when news of his intention was leaked to the press were a trickle compared with the flood of denunciation that now poured in on him—from bishops, priests, and lay Episcopalians. A priest of the diocese told Moore at a public meeting that he could no longer consider the Bishop his spiritual leader. Vestries in New York passed resolutions condemning his action, and others voted to cut off their financial contributions to the diocese. "You are a stupid ass," one of his angry correspondents wrote, "and your stupidity is only exceeded by the way you vilified our beautiful church." Another wrote, "We are left with several valid conclusions. A. The Bishop of New York is a degenerate. B. The Bishop of New York is insane. C. The Bishop of New York doesn't care. D. The Bishop of New York is a radical revolutionary. Pick one or all of the above."
At a meeting of the House of Bishops, in Florida, Moore was called sternly to account by his conservative peers. A resolution expressing "strong disapproval" of his conduct had already been proposed when Moore rose to speak in his own defense. "What is the crime?" he asked his colleagues. Had he fallen into heresy, had he departed from his Church's theology? Clearly, no. Had he broken canon law? No. He was guilty only of ordaining a woman who had declared herself to be a lesbian. But had the Church demanded a sexual-preference test, when, in 1976, it revised its canons to permit the ordination of women? No. What, then, was his crime? Hearing no answer, Moore proceeded, "If this action is formally disapproved…I will feel that this House and I differ radically about what the meaning of our apostolic office is. Is it to manage, administer, and keep safe a steadily decreasing number of frightened and confused people; or is it to see the modern world as it is, and bring to that changing, suffering world the liberating, loving message of the Gospel of Christ?" Moore was defended by John Coburn, the Bishop of Massachusetts. "Gentlemen," he said, "don't you think we are going a little far? I was on the Standing Committee of the Diocese of New York when Ellen Barrett was approved for ordination.…If the Bishop of New York stands to be censured, then, as a member of that Standing Committee, so do I. But I simply do not see any reason on which such a motion can be based." When Coburn sat down, the resolution was tabled—in effect, killed. Moore, in his own words, was "off the hook."
Along with the many brickbats Bishop Moore had received soon after the controversial ordination had come many messages of support and encouragement. One was from the Church of the Holy Apostles. It was a copy of a letter that the parish had sent to all parishes in the New York Diocese, and it said, in part:
**{: .break one} ** We continue to respect and admire Bishop Moore. While this ordination…has aroused profound controversy, we believe that this action was taken after prolonged consideration and deliberation, and in accordance with a deeply Christian conscience. We understand the Bishop acted after proper consultation with the governing bodies of the Diocese and in accordance with Canon Law. We know the Bishop to be a good and faithful shepherd of his flock. He has been a strong supporter of our parish as he has of the other struggling inner-city parishes in this Diocese. In conference with him we have always found him to be a good and wise counsellor whose principal aim was the promotion of the mission of the Church.… In conclusion, we reaffirm our loyalty to the Diocese and our support of Bishop Moore in the fulfillment of his Christian duties. **
In a thank-you note to the parish, Moore said that though "amidst the flak" it was sometimes "hard to see the sun," he believed that "we did the right thing and that history will show that so to be."
Seeing Paul Moore, Jr., and William Moore together, a stranger would not easily imagine them to be brothers. There is little or no resemblance between them. Paul looks like a former basketball player. He moves languidly, and his gaze combines firmness and compassion. William is five feet ten inches tall, is chunky and compact of build, and looks like a former football running back—though hockey was the sport in which he excelled at Yale. Today, at seventy-one, he looks a good ten years younger. He's still trim and firmly muscled, and he walks with a brisk and businesslike gait. He speaks in a gentle voice, and his eyes almost always seem to be on the verge of giving in to humor—as though he had a mischievous thought at the back of his mind and weren't quite sure whether he should share it. And he does chuckle a lot, though not so much out of amusement as for punctuation of his sentences. He also looks frugal—and not only because, in his office, he offers a visitor a glass of water, whereas his brother the Bishop had opened a bottle of wine.
A man who has known both brothers since boyhood says, "I feel that there was pressure on Paul at St. Paul's School to emulate big brother Bill, to whom, in my opinion, he has never been close, although perhaps, in the last few years, there has been a change." Only the brothers can be sure.
For William's retirement party in 1975, the Bishop penned a playful bit of verse, titled "The Ballad of Banker Bill." After taking Bill hilariously through boyhood, school days, courtship, marriage, and career, the ballad ends with these lines:
*{: .break one} ** The rest of the story, you know full well, And although he occasionally fussed, He found his glory and worked like hell For his beautiful Bankers Trust. **
*** ** His brother, the bishop, when interviewed About the Chairman of Bankers Trust, Said, "Yes, Bill is nice, but a bit confused. It's God you're supposed to trust." **
Speaking more recently, the Bishop said, "My brother Bill followed pretty much in my father's footsteps. He was a very good athlete, which I wasn't. He was also my older brother, so that was a little burden to carry. He and I are very good friends, though we disagree about almost everything, politically. Over the first Martini, we have fun; over the second, we fight; over the third, we get to be friends again."
Banker Bill says about the Bishop: "I always remember that we were five years apart; and for quite a while a five-year differential between two brothers can be tremendous. He was born when I was five; I was ten when he was just five; I was away at boarding school when he was still at home; I was at college when he was still at boarding school. So, with that sort of difference, we weren't like brothers growing up and sharing a lot of interests. That came along a little later. Still, I didn't find any fault with him as a kid. He didn't annoy me. I probably annoyed him, as an older brother. But I think we had, and still have, a very good relationship. Our relationship has obviously changed over the years. Paul doesn't take himself seriously. If he were in a roomful of people and you walked in, you'd never guess that he's the Bishop of New York.
"Of course, Paul's political philosophy and mine are, in many respects, quite different. He and I get along like two peas in a pod on the human equations—beliefs in social and human progress—but we never agree on the political means by which those should be achieved. I'm not the solid Republican that our dad was—in fact, I'm not as conservative a Republican as some people think—but I'm much more inclined toward Republicanism than toward being a liberal Democrat. Paul and I rarely agreed, even when he was in seminary. We had one beautiful battle once, on a subject I thought he knew nothing about, while he thought I had my head in the sand. Our voices became louder and louder, and we became quite angry with each other. 'Wasn't that ridiculous?' we said to each other when we got through. And so we just don't talk politics. But we do share a great concern for people. I respect Paul profoundly. Paul and the rest of the family never did agree on politics. But we are all proud of him. We are all proud of his courage."
The Bishop's nine children, courageous in their own fashion, have all followed independent paths—choosing neither the road taken by their father nor the one taken by his forebears. Honor, the eldest, is a poet and essayist and a feminist activist. Paul III is a writer and the father of three. Adelia, married to a law professor in Pittsburgh, is a family and marriage counsellor. Rosemary is a writer and actress in New York. George, an artist, has been living in Nicaragua for the last two years. Marian lives in Brooklyn and is a television and concert producer. Daniel is a free-lance film critic. Susanna is a reporter in San Francisco. And Patience, the youngest, is studying acting in New York. "With the genes they have," the Bishop says, "I sometimes wish that at least one of them would go into business. Of course, none have gone into the church, either. But they are all socially conscious, in their different ways. Their positions on issues are very good. I approve of their ideas."
None of the twelve preceding bishops of New York can have had deeper roots in the state than Paul Moore, Jr., or stronger feelings for and about the city. Though Moore was born in New Jersey, he is a New Yorker at heart. The Moore family has lived in New York on and off for centuries. In the early seventeen-hundreds, one of the Bishop's ancestors, Alexander Moore, was a vestryman of Trinity Church. According to an account of the Moore ancestry, "a list of subscribers toward the building of the steeple of Trinity, dated May 1, 1711, shows that Alexander Moore at that time contributed eleven shillings." In 1711, Alexander Moore's donation was not an inconsiderable amount. The Bishop's grandfather William H. Moore was born and raised upstate, and after migrating to Chicago he returned to New York and settled at 4 East 54th Street. While Paul Moore, Jr., was growing up, he spent many hours at that address as well as at the pied-à-terre his parents kept on Fifth Avenue, across from the Central Park Zoo. Manhattan, where his father worked, was the headquarters of the family's business activities. Many of Paul's vacations from Yale were spent in New York, attending parties and absorbing the excitements of the city. It was in Manhattan that he studied for the priesthood. After the bishops' meeting in Florida, where he barely escaped rebuke for his ordination of Ellen Barrett, he was glad to get back to Manhattan, which, he said, was his town.
"Why I like New York is why I like my job," Moore explains. "If you're interested in the life of the urban church, this is the place to be. You're turned on just by the feel of the city—its variety, its vitality, its mixture of glory and poverty. Of course, living here, in the beautiful quarters in the Cathedral grounds, it's easy for me to love New York. I'm not exactly living in Harlem or the South Bronx. And I know damn well that New York isn't that easy a city to live in. It depends so much on who you are, where you are, what your job is. But you could say, if you wanted to be cosmic about it, that New York, more than any other city in the world, has everything in it. That's where I think the church should be active. And I'm lucky enough to be exposed to a lot of the city, through my different parishes, with their ethnic, social, and economic diversity."
Priests who welcomed Moore's election as bishop saw him as "the man for New York." "We were there when he was installed as Bishop of New York," recalls Daniel Corrigan, one of his fellow-bishops. "It felt so right to have a real New Yorker as the Bishop of that place." Elliott Lindsley, the church historiographer, shared that view and still does, citing Moore's family history and his "intense concern" with the urban experience. "Of course," Lindsley goes on to say, "Paul and I don't see eye to eye on cities. I think the city is the work of the Devil. Paul thinks it's the work of God. He thinks that scripture begins in the Garden of Eden and ends in the city. I don't see it that way. I think the Almighty made a mistake. But that's Paul. I was driving him to Washington one night some years ago. His wife was dying, it was too late for the shuttle, so he had to be driven. We are both from New Jersey, and, going down the Jersey Turnpike, we got whiffs of that terrible industrial smell that everybody gets on the Jersey Turnpike. 'Oh, God,' I said, 'what a horrible smell!' 'I love it,' Paul replied, from the depths of his sadness. He loves the smell of anything that's associated with a city. He's got to have a city."
"In your own affairs, you have times of sickness and sorrow and discouragement, and when you get through those times you arrive at a new level," Moore says. "Life is a series of deaths and resurrections. The rhythm of life is incorporated in the symbolism of dying and rising." That is a theme not only of his Easter sermons but also of the inspiriting messages he delivers to individuals in spiritual and emotional crises. And during the Easters of the mid-seventies, when New York, plagued by fiscal problems, seemed on the verge of collapse, he preached that message to the city itself. Addressing his packed Cathedral on Easter of 1976, he rebuked those in the city who were showing signs of despair over its worsening economic plight. His harshest words were for those leaders of business and industry who were even then announcing plans to abandon the city—"sensing, like rats, that the ship is sinking," he said. He exhorted New Yorkers to fight for the city's resurrection, since "courage is as contagious as fear" and "hope as contagious as despair." He called on frightened businessmen to remain in New York, to be part of its "rising," not of its "dying."
A few months earlier, he had preached this eloquent celebration of his wounded city:
**{: .break one} ** As New York begins to founder, all of us will bind ourselves in one body and turn this city around, as the nation united in World War II. I see us forgetting our divisions and being willing to step into the breach left by the social workers who are fired, by the firemen who are no longer able to reach the fires, by the policemen who no longer can man the city blocks.…This is the vision of a New Yorker, to whom the streets of our city—the dirty, smelly streets of our city—are more beautiful than the most beautiful mountain or the most beautiful sea.…Let us unite in love for one another because we are New York, and New York is the nursery of our nation, where millions of families began their lives as Americans. It is the city with the greatest heart and the most creative mind in our country, indeed, in the world. Yes, our city is the beating heart and the thinking mind of the United States of America; and we are not going to let it go down.…If this is a battle between tough, old, wonderful New York and the government of the United States, so be it. I am betting on New York. **
His bet has paid off. New York has been resurrected and has survived. But, despite the city's recovery, Moore remains troubled by conditions within it. "In our poor areas, things are as bad as they ever were," he said recently. "Because of cutbacks by the Reagan Administration, they are worse. The city's administration has also shown a lack of sympathy toward the poor communities, though the administration has acted well in some other respects. Midtown prospers. There's the richness of Fifth Avenue. Walking there, you see prices in the stores and the hundreds of people buying up the stuff. You see Trump Tower, with its apartments worth millions of dollars. And then you get up to a Hundred and Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue, and you are among people some of whom don't have enough to eat. You also think about the burned-out sections of the Bronx, and you're reminded that the gap between the rich and the poor in New York is growing. Sooner or later, we're going to have to come to terms with that. I worry not only because of the pain and desperation of our people—many of whom belong to churches for which I have a direct pastoral responsibility—but also because of what all this might mean someday in the life of our city: social violence. So New York may be in better financial shape today, but we're by no means in good social shape, as a people."
Whatever the occasion may be, Moore's sermons are laden with social themes. Midnight Mass, Christmas Eve, 1980:
**{: .break one} ** From whence does this monstrous evil terror come, that it should recur again and again and again, down through the ages? We can accept the natural disasters—volcanoes, earthquakes, famine. But a resentment, a revulsion wells up within us at the unnecessary violence of man. Our souls are hurt and puzzled that it comes so often in the name of God, like the torn innocence in the eyes of a child, shocked by the blow of an angry parent. From whence does this monstrous evil come? Take the tragedy that occurred nearest to this place during the last few days—the assassination of John Lennon. He was no politician, no leader of a movement. He was a gentle voice dedicated to singing peace, singing freedom, singing love, singing family tenderness. For many years he made us feel good about ourselves; he made us feel that love was good, that being sexy was good, that being alive was good. He then opened himself and took us down the pilgrimage of suffering and fears that he himself passed through.… We always kill the beautiful ones: Billy Budd, Bishop Romero, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X. We always kill the beautiful ones, the gentle ones, the prophets. Maybe it is a crazy man that kills them. And yet somehow we sense that the crazy person is doing an act for us, that somehow deep in the unconscious of our culture is this need to kill, this need to kill the beautiful, the need to despoil the gentle land that God has given to us, the need to burn down the very cities in which we dwell. Why…this violence? This need to burn and kill the beautiful and the good? There are those who say it is because we are afraid of freedom that we kill the prophets of freedom. Others say that we are afraid of love, feel ourselves so unlovable that we kill the prophets of love. But I think it is because we are terrified that the image of God within us will be let loose; that we will be consumed with the passion of love that will not let us go. **
At the Princeton University Chapel, 1982:
**{: .break one} ** When a nation transgresses the built-in laws of justice, compassion, and peace, that civilization sooner or later perishes. This death can occur in many ways. One of the causes of such a death is when a nation states certain beliefs and principles for its life, then denies them. We look at ourselves as a nation of justice, peace, and compassion, but we are denying these principles by taking money—indeed, taking bread—from the poor and putting it into nuclear weapons. When a nation goes against its deepest-held principles, a paralysis of spirit sets in. This paralysis of spirit leads to death from the outside or from within. In the same way that the laws of the physical universe are interdependent and form a seamless robe of delicate physical order, so are the principles of the spiritual creation, which form a seamless robe of delicate theological order. Thus it is we cannot find peace without justice. We cannot seek justice without compassion. **
Easter, 1983:
**{: .break one} ** The hands of the atomic clock approach closer and closer to the midnight hour. I believe that the fear that exists between our nations is even more dangerous than the nuclear bombs themselves. Fear does terrible things to creatures. There are children here this morning who have had guinea pigs or hamsters or rabbits, gentle, furry creatures—and yet when they are cornered, they can bite and tear, because fear makes them into vicious animals. A child will strike out when terrified. Think what one frightened nation can do to another when fear overcomes its judgment in violent acts. And now fear mounts across the world, not only between Russia and ourselves, but amongst all the people who watch these giants ready to fight. Our children even have nightmares of atomic disaster. In this building atmosphere of danger and of fear, isn't it incredible that our President, our leader of the free world, should make pronouncements that escalate that fear into a level it has never been before! Builds the atmosphere of terror, preaching we are a righteous nation taking arms against the source of all evil, turning the atomic war into a holy war! Holy war is the most demonic of human phenomena. Look what the holy wars in small nations have done: Ireland, Iran, South Africa, Lebanon. And think of a holy war waged in space! God help us. God help us. Can we not persuade our President, who I still think somehow is a good man, to be a person of quiet strength and quiet words? Certainly no serious diplomacy can occur on television. The only way we can have peace is to build on trust. You don't trust the leaders of Russia; I don't trust them either now. Nor do I trust our own leaders, nor do many of you. And yet we must begin to build, somehow, somewhere, step by small step, toward the trust that will be necessary for any treaty, any covenant, any promise of peace. I pray fervently this Easter morning for the diminishing of terror and the beginning of trust. Stranger miracles have happened. **
**{: .break one} ** We are talking about Easter here, and now, in the real world, where the forces of resurrection are bursting forth—in the Philippines, in Haiti, even in our city with the passage of the Gay Rights Bill—the forces of justice and peace are beginning to rise again. See those signs of hope! Don't give up; be part of them. Those surprising actions: a housewife in a yellow dress freeing the Philippine Islands from decades of tyranny; the hope that comes at the darkest, darkest hour. Be part of that. Be part of that. **
Moore isn't liked by everyone in his diocese, even if his detractors are far outnumbered by his admirers. "Paul Moore's major problem within the diocese is that he speaks totally out of conscience," Canon Edward West says. "Consequently, some people who ought to support him don't—though what's interesting is that some of the people who are most critical of him are also the most fond of him." Elliott Lindsley adds, "Among some elements within the diocese, Moore is regarded as a feather-ruffler. I think he's so deadly earnest that the average person can't figure him out. In a sense, he's clothed in the same mystique as was Bishop William T. Manning, in the older days. But whereas Manning used the mystique of his office, Paul suffers. And, you know, some of us don't like to be around people who suffer. When Paul speaks about the poor, he can smell them and see them. He isn't dealing with them intellectually. He is visceral. And this is hard to take, unless you yourself are a terribly dedicated and suffering person. Take my parish. They know that I think Bishop Moore is a hundred per cent right in his attitudes. But there are people who just can't fathom the things that Moore stands for. And the things you can't grasp are apt to be the things you dislike. However, I don't think that Paul Moore is really disliked. I think he's much liked. I do think there are some clergy who promote their positions by suggesting that they don't like the Bishop. I know this to be true. But it's inevitable that any strong person will create such a reaction. God help us if we ever have a Bishop whom everybody likes."
It is clear why Moore is widely regarded as a social activist—so much of his career has been spent fighting in one social arena or another . Yet Moore sees himself as primarily a committed clergyman. He sees his social activism as a product of something deeper in him: a determination to abide by the ethics of his faith, a belief that Christian values should be objectified not just in "religious" or personal relationships but also in any public arena where the ideals of justice and fair play are at stake. He says, "I wouldn't want anyone to think that my whole interest in ministry is social action. That instinct is deep, but it springs from my sense of worship. The Eucharist is, in a sense, the most important thing in my whole life. To me, celebrating the Eucharist is to be in touch with reality. It brings meaning to everything I do. I wouldn't be involved in the social side if I weren't also involved in the spiritual side."
A tribute to Moore and the character of his ministry is paid by John E. Hines, a former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church and one of its senior liberals. From North Carolina, where he lives in retirement, Hines states, in a letter:
**{: .break one} ** He is, in my view, a person of…engaging and surprising complexities.…My estimate of him and his episcopate tends to come forth in terms of admiration, prideful amazement, and lasting gratitude. The Episcopal Church, in my time, has been able to produce and nurture such a relatively small number of bishops possessed of Paul Moore's Biblical grounding, probing perceptiveness, broad sense of history, and painfully acute social consciousness.… I may not sound like it but I do know that Paul Moore possesses the proverbial "feet of clay." Most people with a working knowledge of the Episcopal Church would acknowledge the unlikely possibility of locating a bishop with feet of pristine "un-clay-ness." It is precisely the "clay feet" that enhance Moore's credibility as a servant of…Christ and as an earthen vessel in and through whom the Holy Spirit appears to do strange, non-normative, joltingly outrageous things. Some in the Episcopal Church could ignore him for many of these aberrations, if he were Bishop of Katmandu. But—Bishop of New York! When Arthur Koestler took his own life…John Strachey wrote of him: "He was to Europe what Europe is to the world: small, intelligent, aggravating, and indispensable." If I had insight enough and "gumption" enough to beat John Strachey to it, I could have applied those trenchant words, appropriately modified, to Paul Moore. "Small" —but only in that he is but one of a hundred and sixty-five active bishops in the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops. "Intelligent"—super! (And, a blessed fact, without the arrogance of élitism that damages some intellectuals.) "Aggravating"—in the same mode that Jesus was aggravating: a scandal to the morally impeccable; an irritant of hair-shirt intensity to the superficially pious and the ecclesiastically entrenched. "Indispensable"—well, in the economy of the Kingdom of God there simply are no indispensable persons other than the King himself (or the Queen herself). However, if in the economic and social economy of the City of New York (during the past dozen years)—vital arena that the city always is for conflicting ideologies, theological concepts, and political "free-for-alls"—an acute need for indispensable religious leadership had to be satisfied, the lot would surely have had to fall on Bishop Paul Moore, Jr. **
Flannery O'Connor was right. Scratch an Episcopalian, and you're indeed "liable to find most anything." Certainly in the case of Paul Moore, Jr., you encounter a wide range of surprising but principled things. ♦
Published in the print edition of the April 28, 1986, issue.
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