A Man Called Mark: The Biography of Bishop Mark Dyer - Softcover

Linthicum, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1640650970 ISBN 13: 9781640650978

Verlag: Church Publishing, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Well-known and well-loved bishop of the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion

This official biography tells the compelling story of the Rt. Rev. Mark Dyer: Irish Catholic boy from New Hampshire, U.S. Navy vet, Roman Catholic then Episcopal priest, bishop, and seminary professor―and one of the most influential, beloved leaders of the American Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion. Following a dispute with ecclesiastical authorities, Dyer left the Roman Church for the Anglican Church of Canada. Later received as priest in the Episcopal Church, his gifts as teacher, preacher, and pastor were recognized with election as Bishop of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. There, he established a new model of leadership, delegating administrative duties to concentrate on spiritual direction, pastoral care, and creating mission projects at every church in his diocese. Also renowned as a story-teller, many of his favorite stories appear here, told in his own voice. Called by leadership of the Anglican Communion to a variety of roles, for more than 20 years Bishop Dyer was on the front lines of the most contentious issues facing the church throughout the world, including ordination of women and gay people. He also was co-chair of the ecumenical dialogue between the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox Churches, which produced a landmark agreement after 17 years of meetings.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Tom Linthicum, is a freelance writer who spent nearly 35 years as an award-winning journalist, primarily for The Baltimore Sun. He currently teaches journalism at the University of Maryland. A lifelong Episcopalian, he knew Mark Dyer for 10 years and was selected by the bishop to be his biographer. He and his wife, Dorothy, also a writer, have two grown children and three granddaughters and live in Alexandria, Virginia.

Rowan Williams, the 104th archbishop of Canterbury, spent much of his early career as an academic at Cambridge and Oxford universities. After retiring as archbishop, he became chancellor of the University of South Wales and master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Williams now resides in Cardiff, Wales.

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A Man Called Mark

The Biography Of Bishop Mark Dyer

By Tom Linthicum

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 2018 Tom Linthicum
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-64065-097-8

Contents

Foreword by Rowan Williams, 
Prologue, 
Chapter 1: "You Are Irish Catholic", 
Chapter 2: War and Monasteries, 
Chapter 3: Set Up by God, 
Chapter 4: Breaking Away, 
Chapter 5: Charting a New Course, 
Chapter 6: Matthew, 
Chapter 7: Rector, 
Chapter 8: Bishop, 
Chapter 9: A Yankee in the Archbishop of Canterbury's Court, 
Chapter 10: Of Women Priests and Bishops, 
Chapter 11: The Wars of Windsor, 
Chapter 12: A Monk in the World, 
Chapter 13: Teacher, Mentor, Pastor, 
Chapter 14: Tragedy, 
Chapter 15: New Life, 
Chapter 16: Journey's End, 
Chapter 17: Legacy, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"You Are Irish Catholic"

As I look at my faith and the oppression our family had to go through during the Herbert Hoover days and what the church did, that was very moving to me. — Mark Dyer

Times were tough — very tough indeed — when James Michael Dyer Jr. entered the world on June 7, 1930, in Manchester, New Hampshire.

It was the first year of the Great Depression. The stock market had crashed the previous October, and the country was reeling from the hammer blows of an imploding economy. Unemployment lines stretched endlessly, banks were failing, savings were decimated. Manchester, a mill town founded in 1846 on the banks of the Merrimack River fifty miles north of Boston, was hit especially hard. Its decline had begun in the 1920s as its mills, which once included the largest cotton textile mill complex in the world, began to falter.

The world as Manchester had known it ended on Christmas Eve, 1935, when the last mill closed and filed for bankruptcy. At one time its owner had employed seventeen thousand people and was the chief source of income for half of Manchester's families. Stunned by their city's economic collapse, Manchester's nearly seventy-seven thousand residents did whatever they could to get by.

In the household of the Dyer family, an Irish clan rooted in the Roman Catholic Church, traditional values of family, faith, and work reigned supreme. That included the illegal making and selling of whiskey since Prohibition was the law of the land. Everyone pitched in, even the new baby. It was a story — confirmed by his younger sister, Pat Cashin — that Dyer always took great relish in telling. "My grandfather made it in the cellar," he said, referring to the forbidden brew. "Then he would make the deliveries in the baby carriage, which he had modified with a place for the bottles underneath, and I was the baby in that carriage." And so the carriage bounced along the streets of Manchester, with the youngest Dyer nestled atop the bottles, providing a very legitimate cover for a very illegitimate operation. The first stop was always the residence of the monsignor, who would get a complimentary bottle. There was also a free bottle for the cop on the beat — a good Irishman, of course.

As Dyer grew up during these times of great hardship, he saw firsthand how the Catholic Church ministered to its parishioners not just on Sundays but every day, helping people survive and giving them hope. "The monsignor always knew who was working and who wasn't, which families were struggling the most, and he would send over money or food when it was most needed," Dyer recalled many years later. "It was a social welfare system, it was run by the church, and it worked."

It was a lesson Dyer never forgot. It provided the foundation for his lifelong commitment to social justice and his belief in the church's calling to serve the poor. For Jimmy Dyer, as he was called by his family (Mark was the name he would later take as a young monk), life in Manchester, even in times of deprivation, was a rich tapestry of family, church, and the Irish community.

His father, James M. Dyer, worked as a baker by day and made bread at St. Patrick's Orphanage for Girls at night. "On Friday night he would make what the children would like on Saturday morning, and he would bake cookies," said Pat. "He would make all kinds of cakes for people, and he never asked for any money. He was a good man."

Anna Mahoney Dyer raised Jimmy and Pat, cared for her husband's ailing parents, and took in sewing work to help meet expenses. The four Dyers, along with James Dyer's parents, Anna's mother, and other family members, shared a rambling, three-story house at 352 Cedar Street, in the Irish and Greek quarter of the inner city's east side. "There was no money but there were good times," said Pat. "Grandfather Dyer went to church every morning at 7, and Grandmother was in her rocking chair, saying her rosary. At 6:30, [Jimmy and I] would fire up the oil furnace. Then we would have oatmeal, toast, and orange juice, and leave for school.

"For fun after dinner, sometimes we would sit on the front steps. Other times, we would listen to jazz and do the jitterbug. On weekends, if we were lucky, we would go to the movies and watch cowboy movies on Saturday afternoons but never on Sunday. Sunday was Mass at 9 or 10:30 and then breakfast and a big dinner — roast beef, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and vegetables — at 1."

Every year when the circus came to town, nobody in Manchester was more excited than Jimmy Dyer. He would jump out of bed between 3 and 4 in the morning to watch the elephants lumber from their railroad cars to the circus venue; he was convinced that this was the greatest form of free entertainment known to man.

No matter how tight things were, Agnes Mahoney (Anna's mother) managed to scrape together enough money every year to rent a cottage for a two-week family vacation at Hampton Beach, located on southeast New Hampshire's eighteen-mile sliver of craggy Atlantic coastline. Those memorable trips kindled Dyer's lifelong love affair with the sea.

The family's Irish roots ran deep. Grandparents on both sides were born in Ireland. Years later while he was studying in Belgium, Dyer would visit the family farm in the village of Farranfore, near Killarney in County Kerry, before it became an airport. Anna Dyer treasured her Irish heritage so much that when she died in 1995, the local funeral home flew the Irish flag in her honor.

The Irish-American Club, a tired, one-room affair with a bar, some worn chairs, and a sagging floor, was not far from the home on Cedar Street. Dyer's father would go there regularly on Fridays and Saturdays, and as Jimmy grew older, he would meet his friends there as well.

Although Jimmy developed a taste for beer when he came of age, Anna Dyer was a confirmed teetotaler and a member of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart, founded in Dublin in 1898. Dyer told a friend years later that on one occasion, fearful that an Irish wake in her home was getting out of hand, his mother emptied all of the whiskey bottles into the sink, bringing the gathering to an abrupt halt.

The Catholic Church was also a defining influence in Dyer's life. "Grandmother would say to us, 'You are Irish Catholic,'" Pat recalled, as if the two were woven seamlessly together. During Dyer's early years, they were. His family attended St. Anne's Church, a bastion of Irish Catholicism, where he was baptized on June 21, 1930. The Dyers attended church every Sunday, and young Jimmy became an altar boy and attended...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Church Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1640650970
• ISBN 13: 9781640650978
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland