Take A Bishop Like Me
Moore, Paul Jr.
Take A Bishop Like Me Paul Moore, Jr. Harper & Row / $8.95 Rachel Mark Can women be priests? Can homosexuals of either sex be priests?" With these questions the Rev. Paul Moore, Jr., Diocesan...
...In the absence of public scandal, the personal morality of an ordinand becomes almost by definition a matter between him or her and a confessor, pastor or bishop...
...Covert homosexuals (of the male gender) have been entering the priesthood for years, as everyone is aware...
...Should "openness" be an obstacle to ordination...
...Biblical injunctions against homosexuality may have obtained in an ancient society, but they are not relevant to modernity...
...Pressed into action in her behalf, Moore turns his attention to this second fact of quirky history: the prejudice against homosexuality...
...No one can agree on the psychological or medical facts of homosexuality...
...Once upon a time, a bishop might well have cried tears of bafflement, or shame, or rage, at Ellen Barrett's ordination ceremony...
...The subject, he says, is surrounded "by the same dangerous mythology that has kept black people in a position of degradation in this country and led to the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany...
...There is, moreover, "general agreement that our sexuality is forged at an incredibly early age Thus a per son' s sexual preference is not in the category of sin...
...Episcopalians may take it as a very ill omen indeed...
...conservators of virtue against the licentiousness of secular society...
...These, are healthy developments, the Bishop feels, for "now it is possible to be more open about one's sexual orientation...
...The answer is a resounding "No...
...Yet against this Scriptural evidence stands the science Theology: "[No] respected theologian [has] described God Himself as male...
...The Episcopal Church's resolution to endow women with the properties of the priesthood is a personal triumph for Moore, and he employs it posthaste...
...Bishops, after all, are "called to be...
...It has been pulled and plucked at...
...Lately, however, the Church has "been shift ing away from an exclusively procreative view of sex to one of sex as a human expression of love...
...The fine fabric that was woven to sanctify human life, whose fashioners called procreation a blessing, has begun to fray...
...In part, the memoir explains the process-a very natural one, given his bent for membership in all the social justice movements of the latter half of this century-by which Paul Moore comes to defy a "sexist" convention that has kept women down, and barred them from the priesthood, for at least two millennia...
...That he should, in addition, be surprised to learn that he has displeased some of those grubby strugglers- "My misjudgment was that Ellen's ordination would make a splash only in my own diocese, one more crazy thing happening in New York"-is appalling...
...If it rends, their Church will have been in no small part responsible...
...But the tears that brimmed in Moore's own eyes during the course of that remarkable event signified no such conservative intent: "[H]ow proud I was, and what a fine moment this was in the life of the church...
...God became flesh, not a male, Moore points out, and flesh is "the bodily existence which belongs to all, male and female...
...But liberation must be gained on all fronts...
...The appearance of Jesus of Nazareth (who was, the bishop freely admits, a man) only the more firmly established a masculine God...
...This has been one of the difficulties," Moore explains...
...The ancient Jews, he writes, "were a patriarchical society and could not imagine the one and only ruler of the universe as anything but male...
...To his modern eye, then, the "ascendancy of the male gender" is no more than an accident of sociology-a reversible one, at that...
...More importantly, however, it describes the bishop's decision to ordain the lesbian Ellen Barrett, his accounting for that act to dissenting brother bishops, his justification to horrified parishioners, and his defense against the "swirl of outrage and prejudice" it provoked...
...If, moreover, he tended to take Scripture literally, he might even have believed that he was witnessing the Devil's work...
...Many of us, in fact, accomplish it with regularity...
...God should be thought of and felt as masculine...
...The crucial question, says the bishop, is whether "one who is not male [can] symbolize Christ for His people and represent the people before God...
...It was He who rode the thunder and shook the earth with volcanoes and earthquakes He who sent them into battle Small wonder, then, that this harsh, powerful, driving Rachel Mark is a researcher at Newsweek...
...Miss Barrett, a seminarian affiliated with a group of outspokenly "gay" Christians, longs for the priestly life...
...Miss Barrett's "orientation" constituting no such scandal, she is deemed to "have the character and competence to fulfill this vocation," and is installed into the priesthood...
...That the Church itself should have countenanced this demoralization is worst of all...
...And on these facts, of course, theological and moral judg ments [have] to be based...
...These days it is no great feat to make a virtue of licentiousness...
...Here again we are reminded that Christians can no longer rely on Scripture for direction in these mat ters...
...His "Yes" comes to him by way of spare analysis...
...Not two years ago, in fact, several women, one of them an avowed lesbian, were ordained in Bishop Moore's very lap, by the laying of his very hands upon their heads...
...His conscience, he tells us, has long pressed him to have at that "cosmic male chauvinism in the Judeo-Christian tradition" that oppresses women...
...But a church's bishop, whose task above all is to guard others against corrupting influences, to shield them from their own pernicious impulses, and to uphold the standards by which they may at least struggle to live good lives--that such a. man should have managed it is chilling...
...Paul Moore, Jr., Diocesan Bishop of the Episcopal Church in New York, opens his little memoir, Take A Bishop Like Me...
...The questions, of course, are rhetorical: If that Church has done nothing else lately, it has taught us that neither sex nor sexual proclivity is any bar to the priestly vocation...
...Indeed, "until the emphasis on maleness in the image of God is redressed, the women of the world cannot be entirely liberated...
...He feels, nevertheless, that the questions must be put, and answered, before the public...
Vol. 12 • June 1979 • No. 6
