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NEW YORK: Bishop Sisk responds to revelations about predecessor
Honor Moore, in her forthcoming book, "The Bishop's Daughter," describes how her father became involved in a long-term relationship with a man who came to him for advice about being received into the Episcopal Church. The man, to whom she gives the pseudonym Andrew Verver, was a Roman Catholic.
"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," Sisk wrote about Moore in a February 29 pastoral letter. "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."
Moore, the 13th bishop of New York, became bishop coadjutor in 1969 and served the diocese as bishop from 1972 to 1989. Previously, Moore had been the bishop suffragan in the Diocese of Washington. Moore died in May 2003 at the age of 83. He had been suffering from brain and lung cancer. The former Marine who had earned a Silver Star, a Purple Heart and a Navy Cross, was known for his outspoken stands on issues of social justice. He advocated women's ordination early in the Episcopal Church's debate on the issue. In 1977 he became the first Episcopal bishop to ordain a lesbian as a priest.
In Moore's obituary, the New York Times said that he had been "the most formidable liberal Christian voice in the city" for more than a decade.
An excerpt from Honor Moore's book, due out in May, was published in the March 3 edition of the New Yorker magazine. Sisk said the article "brings to light what appears to be her father's decades-long violation of his wedding vows." Moore was married in 1944 to Jenny McKean, with whom he had nine children. She died in 1973. Two years later, Moore married Brenda Hughes, who died in 1999.
"Any person who has extra-marital relations commits an offense," Sisk wrote. "This is true whichever party is married: whether clergy or lay, same-sex or heterosexual. Whatever the circumstances, it is family relationships which are broken. And, indeed a point of Ms. Moore's article would seem to be just that: the relationships between Bishop Moore and Ms. Moore and her mother indeed were evidently severely damaged."
Sisk continued: "The preservation of those relationships is an important aspect of the Christian life and of course of the life of its ordained ministry. Actions such as those which Ms. Moore reports are wrong and could quite conceivably result in the most severe penalties that the church can apply to an ordained person."
Sisk wrote that Moore's offense was made worse by the manner in which it began, calling the circumstances "a fundamental violation of an ordained person's vow to minister to the needs of those entrusted to his or her care; never is this more so than when working with the vulnerable who have come seeking pastoral care.
"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," Sisk said. "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."
Sisk concluded his letter by calling Moore "a vastly more complex man than many of us who admired and respected him ever knew." While "there can be no excuse for the enormity of the betrayal of personal trust that he perpetrated in his private life," Sisk wrote, "similarly there can be no diminution of the greatness, the nobility even, of the purposes and goals of his public life."
"We are left seeing a deeply flawed man in desperate need of God's merciful grace," he wrote. "As are we all."
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