Bishop Sisk’s February 29th Pastoral Letter Concerning Recent Revelations About Bishop Paul Moore

Posted by Kendall Harmon

(Note: The initial blog post about this story was here).

The March 3, 2008 issue of The New Yorker contains an article by Honor Moore which is drawn from her forthcoming book A Bishop's Daughter (prepublication copies of which are in circulation). While the book is, in the main, autobiographical, Ms Moore goes into considerable detail about the private life of her father, Paul Moore, Jr., the 13th Bishop of New York.

Her description of him comes as a shock to many of us. The man that so many of us knew and admired was a man of enormous personal courage, a passionate, articulate, and tireless champion of the poor, the disenfranchised and the most desperately helpless in society. He was all that, but as Ms Moore tells us there was another side to him, a man who led a secret double life. While on the one hand he inspired people to work for, and hope for, a community that could stand against the powers of oppression and exploitation, on the other he was himself an exploiter of the vulnerable.

Ms Moore's article brings to light what appears to be her father's decades long violation of his wedding vows. This was an offense of the most serious nature. Any person who has extra-marital relations commits an offense....

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • * Culture-Watch • Marriage & Family • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

6 Comments
Posted March 1, 2008 at 3:15 pm [Printer Friendly] [Print w/ comments]



1. robroy wrote:

Mark McCall’s and my response over at Stand Firm is to ask what was the result of the referral of the complaints to Bp Browning alluded by Sisk. Swept under the rug?

March 1, 3:42 pm | [comment link]
2. nwlayman wrote:

Any person who has extra-marital relations commits an offense….And His Grace will be leading the effort to stop the shacked-up seminarians at General Seminary?  Of any particular combination?  Which last time I checked, is in NYC?  Oh, what a crock.

March 1, 3:47 pm | [comment link]
3. okifan18 wrote:

The sad part of this is that it is but one example of the double lives lived by many Episcopal Church leaders during this era.

And now we hear about the importance of honesty—where was it?

March 1, 8:10 pm | [comment link]
4. Adam 12 wrote:

If monogamy is so important why is bisexuality embraced by the TEC leadership…it obviously involves infidelity? There are many other ironies regarding +Paul Moore so it seems curious that +Sisk seizes on this one, tragic as it must have been.

March 1, 8:12 pm | [comment link]
5. TomRightmyer wrote:

I think that at the restoration of Charles II some of the dead bodies of those who had signed his father’s death warrant were exhumed and beheaded.  But we don’t do that now. We write books and excerpt them in magazine articles.

March 1, 8:53 pm | [comment link]
6. azusa wrote:

“Sadly the violation of trust that Ms Moore reports is consistent with behavior recorded in complaints about Bishop Moore’s exploitative behavior received by the office of the Bishop of New York. As Canon Law required, the concerns of those complainants (who wished their identities held in confidence) were duly conveyed to the then Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning for disposition.”

And what happened? filed in a shredder? How much did they know and when did they know it? Was the institution protecting One Of Its Own? The homosexualist movement is pervasive in Tec.

March 2, 2:07 am | [comment link]
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