Moore's vision of justice

Moore's vision of justice

By James Carroll, 5/6/2003

A CHILD BORN to wealth and privilege is riding in the back seat of his family limousine. It has never occurred to him that there is any other way to live than with abundant pleasures. But then the limousine draws alongside a line of men dressed in tattered clothes, their faces etched with a desperate longing that snags the gaze of the child. The men are standing in a bread line. It is the Great Depression. The child sees at once that a vast gulf separates his world from that of men who must beg for food. The child's reaction, as reported years later, ''was to hide on the floor of the limousine in shame.'' That child was Paul Moore Jr., who grew up to be the Episcopal bishop of New York and who died last week at age 83. The stirring New York Times obituary by Ari L. Goldman included the anecdote about the shame-stricken child. Reading it made me wish I could reach back through time and whisper in that boy's ear words describing all that he himself would one day do to shrink the gulf that so horrified him.

What makes the story of the wealthy child who felt ashamed significant is that he never forgot what he saw and felt that day. And unlike many of his kind who cloak such awareness in detachment, in him it ignited a lifelong passion for justice -- not only to serve the breadline but to change what makes it necessary.

After a privileged education -- St. Paul's School, Yale -- Paul Moore went to war in the Pacific and returned a hero. Embracing a vocation in religion, he found ways to turn his privilege against itself, ultimately helping to change the way the church understands its role in a divided world. As a young priest in a gritty parish in Jersey City, he quickly saw the link between impoverishment and the economic structures that undergird it. He brought politics into the pulpit and religion into the street. By the mid-1960s he was a young bishop in Washington, an outspoken ally of Martin Luther King Jr., and an early critic of the war in Vietnam. A war hero become an instrument of peace.

I was a Catholic seminarian in Washington at the time, and Bishop Moore's witness had a tremendous effect on people like me. He lacked entirely the hesitance and ambivalence that marked the responses of most religious leaders. His spiritual authority had such clear integrity that it transcended the narrow denominational divisions that had until then kept Protestants and Catholics in separate spheres. In his broad call for a church radically committed to social justice, a first ideal of Christian reunion became real. In the mounting struggle between rich and poor, his alliance with the latter was clear.

This was a man who had left the posture of crouching on the floor of a limousine far behind. The hungry and homeless, racial minorities and gay people, disenfranchised women, working people getting hit by the urban meltdown -- these were his first congregrants. Not given to the use of power to enhance his own stature, he did not shrink from using his birthright access, the clout that came with his position, or his considerable personal charisma as levers for social change. But he exercised such wide influence, finally, because he was, above all, a kind man whose grace and courtesy ennobled everyone he met.

With a shock of recognition that would change my life, I saw this Episcopal prelate as my bishop, too. He embodied the great theological hope of the day -- that the wounds of the Reformation could at last be healed. For many of us, the ecclesiastical boundaries between the Episcopal Church and the Catholic Church would never be absolute again.

Such boundary crossing was a mark of Paul Moore's whole ministry. In New York, where he went as bishop in 1970, he reestablished a partnership with the Rev. James Parks Morton, with whom he'd worked in Jersey City and whom he appointed dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Together, Bishop Moore and Dean Morton proceeded to reinvent the cathedral, turning it from an establishment bastion into an exuberant center of open, committed, and compassionate religion. Hungry people, artists, performers, neighborhood kids, environmentalists, the homeless, poets, city workers, spiritual seekers, philanthropists -- they all found a home in the vast reaches of the largest Gothic structure in the world. The New York cathedral became an engine of the beleaguered city's renewal, a prophetic model to churches everywhere, and an emblem of religion as a force for human solidarity instead of elite triumphalism.

The Episcopal Church, Christianity, and all religion would never be the same after the vision of this one man began to be realized, a vision first glimpsed out the window of a rich child's fancy car.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.