[Dialogue] 9/22/11, Spong: Walter Cameron Righter 1923-2011: A Great Bishop

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Walter Cameron Righter 1923-2011: A Great Bishop 
He was one of the most courageous men I have ever known.  He lived out the stereotypical strength of character that he inherited from his German ancestors.  Even though people experienced him as kind and gentle, on his broad shoulders the Episcopal Church’s struggle to achieve equality for its gay and lesbian members literally pivoted in a dramatic way.  He never flinched.  He outlived and outloved his detractors.  I admired him inordinately.  I trusted him implicitly.  I cared deeply for him personally.  Walter Cameron Righter was a remarkable bishop, one of the great church leaders of the 20th century.  Let me tell you something of his story.
Walter was born in Philadelphia and educated at the University of Pittsburgh; where he received his AB degree in 1948.  He did his theological training at Yale-Berkeley in New Haven, receiving his Master’s degree in 1951.  Following ordination, he served congregations in Pennsylvania until becoming rector of Good Shepherd Church in Nashua, New Hampshire, where he carved out an enviable career of parochial and diocesan service for almost 19 years before being elected Bishop of Iowa in 1972.  In the House of Bishops he was a quiet leader, serving on the committees to revise the Episcopal Prayer Book and the Episcopal Hymnal.  He identified himself with the liberal side of the aisle in that body, but he spoke in the debate on the floor seldom and his various stances never seemed to alienate the conservatives. The Diocese of Iowa was always a moderate to liberal diocese in an otherwise generally conservative Midwest and Walter fitted it well, enjoying a memorable Episcopal career for the next 17 years and retiring a much loved and respected bishop.  Controversy would come to him in “retirement.”
In 1989, Walter accepted my invitation to come to New Jersey to serve with me as the assistant bishop of Newark.  It was an exciting time in this diocese.  Four years earlier we had commissioned a task force, chaired by the Rev. Dr. Nelson Thayer of the faculty of Drew University’s Theological School, to study changing patterns in family life.  The title sounded rather innocuous, but that commission was determined to challenge the entire Christian Church.  We asked this commission to look at three segments of our society that seemed to be outside the Church’s radar screen.  They were:  (1) unmarried couples, that is couples living together prior to marriage or instead of marriage, (2) post-married people, that is people who were widowed or divorced, yet who formed long-term and sexually active partnerships that never issued in marriage, (3) gay and lesbian couples, that is those members of our society whose permanent commitments were at that time in this nation’s history never recognized or acknowledged by either state or church.  Indeed, all of these life-patterns, if noticed by the church at all, were condemned as “wrong.”  The commission did its work over the course of two years and then issued a report that suddenly transformed our diocese into an exciting, but highly controversial place.  They recommended that all relationships that “issue in life and enhanced humanity” be recognized as holy and blessed by the church, thereby setting aside the formality of wedding licenses as a prerequisite of either morality or affirmation.  The Diocese of Newark received that report with thanks and commended it to our 135 congregations for a year of study.  During that year, congregations engaged in a significant manner the issues of sexuality and our gay couples began to be invited to tell their stories to our congregations.  A year later, the Diocese of Newark, enlightened by this year of study, approved the findings and recommendations of this commission, thereby becoming the first unit in any of the mainline Christian bodies in America to suggest that sex outside marriage can be both good and holy, and that gay and lesbian partnerships should be both affirmed and blessed by the Christian Church.  A new day was dawning.  That was the moment when Walter Righter moved into his new role as assistant bishop and began not only to share in but to direct this exciting venture and rising consciousness.
Dramatic changes in traditional institutions do not come without reaction, however, and these changes brought immense reaction, mostly negative.  Abusive telephone calls and hate-filled mail were our daily bread for the next six weeks.  There was also an undercurrent of affirmation that Walter sensed at once helping us to believe that what we had done was right.
“If you mean what I read,” a letter from Dallas said, “will you screen one for ordination in your diocese?”  The writer of this letter was a man who had graduated with distinction from one of our finest seminaries.  He had the unanimous recommendation  of his dean and faculty.  He had passed the required physical and psychological testing.  He had been told, however, that he need not apply for ordination in Dallas since he was an out and partnered gay man.  With Walter’s strong encouragement we accepted his request and agreed to test his vocation.  Eighteen months later, all requirements being passed with flying colors and with the recommendation of our authoritative decision making bodies, he was ordained deacon with absolutely no public notice and we assigned him to develop a ministry to the alienated gay and lesbian population of New Jersey, based in All Saints Church in Hoboken.  This ministry, known as “The Oasis,” was unusual in that it signified that an official part of the Christian Church was now reaching out to the homosexual minority.  It was also successful in that there was a massive positive response that in turn brought it to public notice.  When this man was ordained to the priesthood on December 18, 1989, it became a national “cause celebre” in the Episcopal Church.  Walter Righter stood beside me and participated fully in that ordination.  Protesters lined the sidewalks, the media from all over America was present and, through Reuters, the story went around the world.  The news angle was that a unit of the Christian Church “has officially stated that it is open to the gifts of qualified homosexual people and that no one needs to hide any longer in dishonesty in order to gain admittance to the priesthood of this church.”
Of course, the hostility flowed, but now so did the hope in the hearts of countless people.  While the institutional Church went through its defensive “let’s not rock the boat” exercises, Walter Righter quoted our former Presiding Bishop John Hines, who said, “When you do an audacious thing, you do not then tremble at your own audacity.”  The next openly-gay candidate in our diocese was scheduled for ordination in June of 1990.  Both Walter and I were placed under enormous pressure by national church leaders to postpone that action until after the meeting of the House of Bishops that September.  To my lasting regret, I bowed to that pressure, dashing many of the hopes to which our previous action had given birth.  The Bishops did vote in September “to disassociate” themselves from the Diocese of Newark and from its bishops for breaking “with tradition,” but the vote was 78-74, with two abstentions, which indicated that they had neither the will nor ability to stop such actions. So we set the date to proceed.
At the request of the Presiding Bishop, Walter Righter agreed to be the ordaining bishop to divert the members of the media, who at that time followed almost everything I did.  I would ordain this man to the priesthood after the required time as a deacon.  It worked.  There was little public notice.  We felt the battle had been won.
A year or so later, the “anti-ordination of gay people” forces in our church decided to mount a legal challenge.  Ten “traditionalist bishops” charged Walter Righter with “heresy” for ordaining this man as a deacon and a sufficient number of bishops concurred to force a trial before a panel of nine bishops.  By this time, Walter was fully retired and thus had no secretarial assistance and no legal counsel to defend himself.  Perhaps that was why our critics made him their target, but this diocese, in which he had become a powerful symbol, rose to his defense.  The Chancellor of our diocese agreed to be his attorney.  The resources of our diocese were placed at his disposal.  The trial went on. Walter accepted this abuse with dignity.  He never lost his calm.  During the trial, he was interviewed on ABC Television by Ted Koppel for one hour.  He was so reasonable, so non-vindictive that he won national acclaim and revealed how petty and prejudiced his accusers were.
When the nine bishop judges rendered their decision, the vote was a 7-1 vindication of Walter Righter.  There was one abstention; the Bishop of Los Angeles recused himself because in the middle of the trial, he left the court room to fly home to ordain an openly-gay man to the priesthood in Los Angeles! Such is the inconsistency of church debate.
The verdict was announced on a Saturday.  The next day we turned a Sunday afternoon Confirmation service in St. George’s Church in Maplewood into a massive diocesan celebration.  The church was packed and Walter was cheered with a standing ovation.  He spoke briefly.  There was no triumphant fist raving in his words, just the quiet response of one who had done what he believed was right and who was not surprised when others affirmed his point of view. After this united the liberal circles of our church, Walter Righter was forever regarded as a great hero and was appropriately honored.  In traditional circles Walter became the hated symbol of a world that was changing more rapidly than they had the ability to adjust.
In the last few years, Walter’s health declined and he knew death was imminent.  He was now 88 years old.  I talked to him via telephone about a month before his death.  He was calm, courageous, ready and willing to make this final walk with the same confidence and courage he had shown all of his life.  He lost consciousness a day or so before he died peacefully in his sleep.  “It was,” said his wife Nancy, “a beautiful death.”  To which I can only add perhaps that was so because his life was such a beautiful life.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Walter from Richland Center, Wisconsin, writes:
Question:
Thank you for your comments on the tragic happening in Norway.  It brought to my mind this question:  Was Adolph Hitler simply a madman with egocentric ideas or did WWII and the Holocaust simply exhibit the extreme end to what centuries of anti-Semitism, wars between rival nations and ambitions of tyrannical national leaders could lead to in Christendom?
Answer:
Dear Walter, 

I cannot answer your question in the way you have posed it because I do not see history in such either/or categories. 

Hitler was a madman and an egomaniac.  Someone who can systematically annihilate six million Jews, countless Slavs, mental and physical cripples and homosexuals under the guise of “purifying the human race” is clearly not in touch with the reality that possesses most of us.  At the same time, however, personal hatred placed so often and so regularly into the blood stream of human history will almost always finally erupt in killing violence.  We have seen it happen in Christianity in such activities as the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust, to say nothing of religious persecution and religious wars. There are other factors like greed and the intense nationalism, which suggests that a single nation has both God and righteousness on its side. 

While religion has within it the seeds of self transcendence, it also wrestles with the intense and deep survival needs that human beings share with all living things. We human beings are, so far as we know, the only self-conscious creatures in the universe and as such might have the power to move beyond survival as the highest value of our lives. 

When Jesus was quoted as having said: “I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly,” he was asserting that there is something beyond the struggle to become, namely the freedom to be.  I do not think that human life is “fallen.”  I do not think “original sin” is a reality.  What I believe instead is that we human beings have not yet achieved the fullness of our potential humanity and to help us do that is, I am convinced, the essence of what the Christian faith is all about. 

Thank you for writing. 

~John Shelby Spong





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