Posted by David Virtue on 2008/3/2
Sexual Revelations about Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore Highlights Contradictions in TEC
Multiple Sexualities at Heart of Episcopal Church's Drive for Pansexual Acceptance
News Analysis
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
3/3/2008
It has long been thought, and expressed, that homosexuality (and lesbianism) is at the heart of the Episcopal Church's changing sexual mores and attitudes demanding acceptance by church leaders.
Revelations, this past week that the late Bishop of New York, Paul Moore, engaged in an extensive homosexual affair while married, raises the specter that it is not homosexuality in the Episcopal Church, but numerous pansexual behaviors - behaviors that are causing rifts in the wider Anglican Communion.
Moore was married with nine children. All the while he carried on a homosexual relationship, for a number of years, with a man by the name of Andrew Verver, whom he met on a trip to the island of Patmos. "I was his sexual life," Verver told Honor Moore, Paul Moore's daughter, in a new book about his life that will shortly hit the bookstands. In a discussion with Honor Moore, Verver said, "Of course, there were other men."
A woman, who knew Moore, wrote VOL to say that even in the 1970's people knew about Moore's sexual proclivities and substance abuse. He was later asked not to function as a cleric by Bishop Richard Grein because he was caught in bed with someone, not his wife. He only reappeared for Sisk's consecration, she wrote. This was further confirmed in an article in the New York Times http://tinyurl.com/2gkm38
It was known by many that Moore committed adultery, but never exposed. An orthodox Episcopal bishop, who was a priest in New York at that time, told VOL that Moore's libidinous sexual activities were well -known but no one dared to challenge him. At one point in his climb up the ladder, Moore made the cover of TIME magazine. Moore, who died in 2003 was known as a limousine liberal. While the patrician bishop said he felt the pain of poor and disenfranchised women, he felt it without affecting his own lavish lifestyle.
Ultimately, he was inhibited by his successor, Bishop Richard Grein, though the charges against Moore were never made public. In New York City, Moore introduced the New Age "sexual revolution" into the church by sanctioning lesbianism among the Episcopal clergy. Moore personally broke the "sexual barrier" by ordaining militant lesbian Ellen Marie Barrett as an Episcopal priest in 1977. Barrett told Time magazine that her lesbian love affairs gave her the "strength to serve God." Since then, numerous openly homogenital and lesbian clergy have been ordained or come out of the closet.
At the time, Moore denied that he knew Barrett was a lesbian in order to escape censure by the HOB at Port St. Lucie in 1977. Ironically Barrett had her lesbian partner with her at her consecration. She was president of a homosexuality organization at General Theological Seminary when she was ordained. "She just lied about it," said a bishop, who was a priest at that time in New York, to VOL.
New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson was married with two daughters, then divorced his wife and sometime later met his partner on a beach in the Caribbean and connected. Dr. Louie Crew was married in 1968 and divorced in 1973. He later met Ernest with whom he has been partnered for more than two decades. "Homosexuality had nothing to do with the divorce. She knew that I was gay long before we dated," Crew told VOL. Former Utah Bishop Otis Charles was married with a family before deciding that he was a homosexual and "married" a man.
Lesbian priest Elizabeth Kaeton was married and has grown children and has lived with a woman partner for three decades. The Rev. Susan Russell, president of the unofficial, though fully recognized Episcopal pansexual organization Integrity, acknowledged she was married and has two sons. She has been living in a same-sex relationship for more than two decades.
Crew and Robinson stand for the idea that it is acceptable to leave one's wife and turn to homosexual conduct and may therefore count themselves as "pure" homosexuals. However, he and members of Integrity accept and support bi-sexuality. They use the term LGBT - lesbian-gay-bi-sexual-transgendered - which puts the lie to the claim of a "committed relationship" or "partnered relationship".
Bisexuality, according to Wikipedia, is a sexual orientation which refers to the romantic and/or sexual attraction of individuals to others of both genders (socially) or sexes (biologically). Most bisexuals are not equally attracted to men and women and may even shift between states of finding either gender or sex exclusively attractive over the course of time.
Episcopal homosexuals really cannot hide under the banner of gay rights and denounce their former sexual preferences as an aberration. They obviously enjoyed both kinds of sexual activity. They procreated with women, wrote a priest to Virtueonline.
Bi-sexuality is the new frontier, now that homosexuality in the church has been "conquered". Once you move from the biblical standard on human sexual behavior, there is no limit. It is no surprise then that IsabeI Carter Hayward, a self-described socialist, feminist, lesbian, "womanist" theologian, and a professor of theology at the Episcopal Divinity School and perhaps the best known member of the church's growing feminist- liberation theology movement should endorse sado-masochism. Heyward's theology extends to calling The Trinity, a homophilial/homoerotic image of relations between male (father / son)." Heyward rejected the divinity of Christ out of hand. She said, "I have been led to Sophia / wisdom, to Christa / community, to Hagar the slave woman, to Jephthah's daughter," all post Christian goddesses now popular among certain feminist theologians.
A priest, who was ordained by Moore to the diaconate, wrote VOL to say that news of Moore's sexual revelations was "devastating."
He wrote: "While I disagreed with his ordaining of lesbians and gays to the priesthood, I thought it was done out of strong liberal conviction rather than an affirmation of his own closeted sexual tastes." Indeed.
In an article by radio host Jeff Rense, http://www.rense.com he noted Moore's horrid background: "Prior to his arrival at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Bishop Paul Moore was a leading patron of the notorious Jim Jones in the years leading up to 1961 in Indianapolis, Ind. His People's Temple was promoted there by Moore and the Methodist now Bishop, James Armstrong. Along with Rabbi Maurice Davis, now of Westchester, N.Y., they gave Jones his original Indianapolis temple site, and sanctioned his acceptance among the Indianapolis clergy as a 'legitimate' religious leader.
"In the late 1970s, several sources reported that Canon Edward West, an aide to Bishop Moore, was a frequent patron of some of New York City's seediest sado-masochistic '"private clubs,'" where he would engage in such ritualistic practices as having young boys urinate on him while he lay naked in a ceremonial bathtub. One such club, reportedly frequented by Canon West, was the Mineshaft, a renovated warehouse in Manhattan's wholesale meat district, and run by organized crime interests linked to John Zaccaro, the husband of Walter Mondale's 1984 vice-presidential running mate, Geraldine Ferraro. Child-sex abuses, such as those alleged to Canon West, are indications of a practicing Satanist."
A retired Anglo-Catholic priest who visited West's apartment said it was painted black and looked satanic, "It was pretty scary to me", said the priest who asked not to be named. "We had an awareness that there was a strong strain of homosexuality among the clergy, but nobody said anything. The times were different."
Bishop Horace W. B. Donegan, the Episcopal Bishop of New York from 1950 until 1972, used to cruise New York's gay bars. West took care of him whenever he got beat up, said a priest to VOL. He died at the age of 91. He was an early church advocate for the rights of blacks, women and the poor. He was a slender courtly man with cool blue eyes. He took a diocese with some of the most patrician families in the country and focused its attention on the needs of the growing ranks of the poor.
A retired Anglo-Catholic priest, who worked in New York City for nearly 20 years (1971 - 1989), before retiring to Rhode Island, told VOL that he had no explanation for Moore's underside. "I knew him reasonably well. We didn't socialize. The first time I had any inkling that something was wrong was when I got back from my sabbatical in 1990. Through the grapevine, I learned that Paul Moore was inhibited." Honor Moore said she became aware of her father's sexual proclivities in 1990.
"When he was inhibited there were complaints but from whom we do not know. Bishop Richard Grein later inhibited Moore from the Diocese."
Grein himself was embroiled in scandal when he dumped his wife Joan and ran off with Ann Richards whom he finagled into a position in Grace Church, New York City, after levering the Rev. Janet Broderick Kraft, sister to the actor Matthew Broderick, from that parish. She sued and won significant monetary damages against the bishop. Some 39 charges were brought against Grein, but then Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold made them disappear in a puff of ecclesiastical smoke. Richards was cited as "the other woman" in Grein's divorce proceedings. He later married her. It was her third marriage and his second. Grein managed to walk away from all the charges through the efforts of an attorney brought in by Griswold. Grein also walked away from a presentment against him.
Revelations this week by Honor Moore about her father got to Mark Sisk, the present incumbent Bishop of New York. In a letter to the clergy and people of the Diocese of New York, Sisk wrote that Honor Moore's description of his behavior came as a shock to him and others. "The man that so many of us knew and admired...led a secret double life." Sisk said that while he inspired people to work and hope...he was himself an exploiter of the vulnerable.
"Ms Moore's article brings to light what appears to be her father's decade's 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. 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. 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 went on to say that Bishop Moore violated his ordination vows in another respect. "The long term extra-marital relationship that his daughter describes was begun, according to her account, with a young man who had come to the Bishop for counseling. That inappropriate relationship is 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. 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."
Revelations of Moore's personal life might, by today's moral standards in The Episcopal Church, appear mild. We now have an openly homoerotic bishop living in sin with a man, and, if Mrs. Jefferts Schori is to be believed, there are other homosexual bishops living in partnered relationships. Their names she will not reveal.
Moore's life is but another millstone around the neck of the morally depraved denomination that is now The Episcopal Church - a church that is losing members at the rate of a 1,000 or more each week. Recent figures show it is the fastest dying mainline denomination in America, down 4.5% over the last year. It will only get worse when more dioceses leave TEC in the next few months.
It is ironic that a mere 2000 members of Integrity USA, which the pansexual organization claims to have, have effectively turned nearly 800,000 Episcopalians inside out over a lethal behavior that is proscribed by Holy Scripture, more than 2,000 years of church history and Old Testament prohibitions.
Revelations of Moore's behavior will duly be noted by Global South leaders, confirming in their minds that the Episcopal Church is irretrievably lost, and a parallel church should replace a bankrupt western Anglican church. It may well push many orthodox Global South primates into believing that a new Anglican Communion may be the only way forward in the 21st Century.
END
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GJ - Nothing was done about WELS District Pope Ed Werner. He molested girls in his own congregation but remained DP for about 20 years, even though the pastors knew about him. When he was arrested, the first story promoted by WELS was this - he slapped a couple of girls for misbehavior in confirmation class. The court documents say otherwise. The grown up girls in the congregation dropped the hammer on Werner when they learned he was working a new crop. Werner went to state prison in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Yes, WELS has the three solas -
- Solitary confinement - Jail ministry on the inside.
- Solitary occurrence - This never happened before.
- Solitary objection - You are the only one who has a problem with this.
DP Janke went charging around his district, getting rid of good pastors while letting clergy adultery go. DP Robert Mueller did the same thing.
Apostate leaders get everything mixed up. The clergy with skeletons in their closets like DPs who protect them. The synod wants no one to identify their fall from faith.
