A Bishop Unveiled God’s Secrets While Keeping His Own
By PAUL VITELLO
March 3, 2008

As is customary during Lent, the sermon at St. John the Divine Cathedral on Sunday touched on the themes of seen and unseen truths, knowing and not knowing what is before one’s very eyes.

It was not intended as a veiled reference to the disclosure this week that Paul Moore Jr., the late, revered Episcopal bishop who became a national figure of liberal Christian activism from the cathedral’s pulpit in the 1970s and ’80s, had lived a secret gay life.

“I’m an old English major, and I can overlay meanings on anything, but in this case it was just the Sunday sermon,” said the Rev. James A. Kowalski, who delivered the words.

In an elegiac article in the March 3 issue of The New Yorker magazine titled “The Bishop’s Daughter,” the poet Honor Moore describes her father, Bishop Moore, who died in 2003 at 83, as alternately passionate and elusive, capable of deep “religious emotion,” yet just beyond her emotional reach. It was only after he died, she said, that she fully realized that he had had gay relationships during his two marriages, the first of which produced his nine children. the rest

Honor Moore: The Bishop’s Daughter
A father, a faith, and a secret.

Revelations Prompt Reevaluation of Bishop’s Legacy