Church Officials Decry Son’s Statement : Controversy Centers on Methodist Bishop’s Death

The AIDS death of a retired United Methodist bishop has stirred a controversy because of his son’s statement implying that the bishop may have been infected while assisting victims of the disease.

Seven Los Angeles area church officials issued a statement saying that it was “irresponsible at best” to suggest that casual contact with AIDS patients led to the May 21 death of Bishop Finis A. Crutchfield, 70, in Houston.

“Significant harm will be done . . . by the insinuation that AIDS is transmissible through non-sexual or other intimate contact,” said the statement endorsed by the Rev. Roland Brammeier, Los Angeles district superintendent.

Although the statement said Crutchfield “may have been” homosexual, both Brammeier and the statement’s co-author, the Rev. Ignacio Castuera of Hollywood First United Methodist Church, said in interviews that they did not know for a fact that he was.

‘Very Loud Secret’

But Castuera added that “it was a very loud secret” in the church, especially within the nationwide Methodist homosexual caucus, Affirmation, that the bishop was homosexually active. Castuera said he is a heterosexual member of Affirmation.

The Houston Chronicle recently reported that a United Methodist minister and a Houston gay activist both had said that the bishop had told them of his homosexual behavior. The minister, who did not allow his name to be published, said that he had “candid conversations (with Crutchfield) about his same-sex sexual experiences and about his ministry with gay persons” from mid-1984 through 1985, according to the Chronicle.

The Chronicle also quoted Ray Hill, an advocate for gay concerns, who said he had been a close acquaintance of the bishop since the late 1970s and claimed that he had seen Crutchfield at a gay bar and at gay festivals. “Bishop Crutchfield kept the various elements of his life separate,” Hill told the Chronicle.

Crutchfield, elected to the episcopacy in 1972, served in Louisiana and in Houston before his retirement in 1984. Among other church offices he held was as president of the denomination’s Council of Bishops in 1982-83.

In Hospital 7 Months

Apparently the first bishop of any major Christian denomination to succumb to acquired immune deficiency syndrome, Crutchfield died after about seven months of hospitalization.

On the day of his burial, May 23, his son, the Rev. Charles N. Crutchfield, revealed the cause of death and stated that his father had denied any homosexual activity or intravenous drug use.

In a “private, extremely candid conversation with my father” Charles Crutchfield said, the bishop had denied any homosexual or extramarital sexual contact. “I believe him,” said the son, a pastor in Odessa, Tex.

Saying also that his father was “verifiably not a drug user” and never had a blood transfusion, the son said: “We are left with the conclusion that we simply do not know, and may never know, how he contacted the virus.

“I do know, however, that over the past two years, in the course of his work as a bishop in residence on a local church staff in Houston, Dad was called upon to minister to many people suffering from AIDS. He had helped to plan and conduct funerals, provide transportation to the hospital and clean the apartments of AIDS victims,” the son said.

” . . . He responded to the needs of others without thought of possibly harmful consequences for himself,” the son said.

The Methodist minister quoted by the Chronicle said the bishop “was sufficiently active (in homosexual experiences) that rumors of this contact followed him for much of his ministry. . . . It’s not surprising, therefore, that up to the end, he denied his same-sex experiences to his family and to his doctor.”

The United Methodist Church officially holds that homosexual activity is contrary to biblical teachings. The denomination’s 1984 General Conference also ruled that “a self-avowed practicing homosexual shall not be ordained or appointed” as a minister.

Charles Crutchfield, the bishop’s son, asked in a telephone interview about allegations that the bishop had engaged in homosexual activity, said he and his mother stand by the original family statement.

However, he added, “we believe that people should continue in ministry to AIDS patients. To believe in less would be to abandon the compassion and care for the ill that characterized my father’s life and that characterizes the Christian ministry.”

The statement issued in Los Angeles expressed sympathy for the pain experienced of the family and friends of Bishop Crutchfield. “Understandable also is the desire to protect our denomination from possible embarrassment,” it said.

It would be ironic, the statement continued, if the bishop’s example of ministering to people with AIDS might not now be emulated by others “due to fears stirred by misleading information born out of filial love and denominational protectionism.

“He was a loving husband and a caring father. He may have been a man who was gay as well,” the statement said.

Castuera, a former Los Angeles district superintendent, wrote the statement with Dennis Durby, a lay member of the Hollywood church.

The six ministers endorsing the statement were Brammeier and the Revs. Buzz Stevens, Tucson, district superintendent; William Boggs, pastor of Wilshire United Methodist Church in Los Angeles; Tom Reinhart-Marean, appointed by Bishop Jack M. Tuell as spiritual resources director for AIDS Project Los Angeles, and Sharon Rhodes-Wickett and Patricia Farris, who chair the Methodists’ Southern California Board of Church and Society and the Board of Higher Education, respectively.