Moore, Paul, Jr.

(b. 15 November 1919 in Morristown, New Jersey; d. 1 May 2003 in New York City), Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of New York and prominent advocate of liberal causes.

Moore was the son of Paul Moore, a wealthy lawyer and industrialist, and Fanny Weber (Hanna) Moore. Born to privilege in his father’s mansion, Moore grew up attended by butlers, maids, and chauffeurs. His family was staunchly conservative politically, socially, and morally, steeped in the values of noblesse oblige. At age twelve he followed family tradition by enrolling in Saint Paul’s School, an elite Episcopal preparatory school in Concord, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1937. While at Saint Paul’s he became devout, mostly through the influence of Father P. S. Wigram, a Cowley monk.

Moore majored in English at Yale University, receiving his BA in 1941. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps officer training program while a senior at Yale and was commissioned second lieutenant in February 1942. He suffered a nearly fatal chest wound in action at Gaudalcanal on 3 November 1942. His heroism in battle earned him the Navy Cross, Silver Star, and Purple Heart. Later in the war he heard his call to the priesthood.

Moore married Jenny McKean on 26 November 1944 in the Church of the Resurrection, New York City. They had three sons and six daughters. Jenny Moore died of cancer in October 1973. Moore married the film-maker Brenda Hughes Campbell Eagle, twice a widow, on 16 May 1975 in the garden of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. She died in 1999.

After an honorable discharge from the U.S. Marines at the rank of captain in 1945 and a semester taking graduate courses in history at Columbia University, Moore entered the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City in 1946. While in seminary he developed a profound sense of guilt about the privilege of his class and the corresponding social inequities that impoverished millions, especially people in the inner cities of the world. He committed himself to urban ministry. He graduated with an STB and was ordained deacon in the crossing of Saint John the Divine in June 1949. His first assignment was to Grace Church, Jersey City, New Jersey, where he served in a team ministry for eight years. He was ordained a priest on 17 December 1949 by Bishop Benjamin Washburn of the Diocese of Newark. From 1957 to 1964 he was dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Moore was consecrated Suffragan Bishop of Washington, D.C., on 25 January 1964 in Washington National Cathedral. Living in the nation’s capital during the tumultuous Lyndon B. Johnson years, he constantly put himself in the vanguard of civil rights and antiwar movements and protests. Standing six feet, four inches tall, he was an easy rallying point during street demonstrations. He experienced difficulty placating Episcopal lay conservatives who opposed the church’s involvement in social or political struggles, but his activism throughout the Vietnam era enhanced his reputation among the clergy in the more liberal Diocese of New York, which chose him in 1969 to succeed Horace Donegan as bishop. He was installed as bishop coadjutor of New York on 8 May 1970 and as the thirteenth Bishop of New York on 23 September 1972.

On 15 December 1973 during an ordination at Saint John the Divine, five women deacons, Carol Anderson, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Barbara Schlachter, and Julia Sibley, all well qualified for the priesthood and all well known to Moore, interrupted the ceremony, knelt before Moore, and asked to be ordained as priests. When Moore refused, they walked out in prearranged protest. He later claimed that he wanted to ordain them then but that he had no choice because he was bound by church law.

Robert Lionne Dewitt (retired bishop of Pennsylvania), Edward Randolph Welles (retired bishop of West Missouri), and Daniel Corrigan (retired Suffragan Bishop of Colorado), ordained the first eleven Episcopal female priests at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 29 July 1974. This defiant act created a crisis for Moore, who, although socially and politically liberal, remained rather conservative about the liturgy and traditions of the church. After two years of intense and often acrimonious debate, the national church declared these ordinations “valid but irregular” at general convention in 1976. By 1977 ordinations of women had become “regular” and increasingly common. Moore finally followed his friend Dewitt’s lead and became a full supporter of women priests. On 10 January 1977 at the Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City, he ordained Ellen Barrett, a declared lesbian, to the priesthood.

Moore loved the physical building of Saint John the Divine and made it a center of innovative, ecumenical, and multicultural celebrations. He revived the ambitious construction of the cathedral that had been suspended during World War II for lack of materials. The financing of this project failed in the 1980s and the cathedral, although imposing and elegant, remained unfinished in 2006.

Moore retired in 1989 but continued speaking out against social injustice and political unilateralism. The main target of these speeches and sermons was Christian fundamentalism, especially in the person of President George W. Bush, whom he saw as a pseudo-intellectual with an arrogant claim to private, infallible access to Jesus. Moore suffered from brain and lung cancer in his last year. He died at his home in Greenwich Village, New York, and is buried inside the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City.

Moore wrote two autobiographies, Take a Bishop Like Me (1979), which focuses on his role in the controversies surrounding the advent of female and openly homosexual priests in the Episcopal Church, and Presences: A Bishop’s Life in the City (1997), as well as a book about urban missions, The Church Reclaims the City (1964), which includes some autobiographical information. Carter Heyward’s autobiography, A Priest Forever (1976), and Bruce Bawer’s review of Presences, “Spiritual Authority,” New York Times Book Review (4 Jan. 1998): 11, each contains insights into Moore’s character. Moore’s personal papers covering 1937 to 2003 are in the official Archives of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, kept at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. Obituaries are in the New York Times (2 May 2003) and Washington Post (3 May 2003).

Eric v.d. Luft