Why Ed Murray Cant Quit the Catholic Church
The mayor has made his faith a central part of his public persona. But the Church has not always been an easy institution for the gay, liberal politician to be a part of.
DANIEL PERSON
Wed Mar 1st, 2017 1:30am
At the end of his State of the City address at Idris Mosque in Northgate last week, when it came time to thank his friends, staff, and husband, Mayor Ed Murray looked toward an elderly man in the front row, wearing a Roman collar.
“I also want to acknowledge someone I met as a kid who introduced me to the concept of social justice and the need to reach out to others, particularly those who are most in need, and that’s Father Mike Ryan,” Murray said. “Father, thank you for being here.”
The remarks were not on the prepared transcript sent out by the mayor’s staff to the media prior to the event. They were, though, entirely in line with a recurrent theme in public remarks made by Murray and those close to him—his Catholic faith and its influence in his day-to-day efforts as the leader of the city. Last year, in a special address on homelessness, the mayor invoked Dorothy Day, radical homeless service provider and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, in his appeal to the people of Seattle to do more for the homeless. He wears a bracelet on his right wrist that he received while in a hermitage in California, he recently told Crosscut. It is an homage to the Rosary his grandfather carried in Ireland. His husband, Michael Shiosaki, told The Seattle Times in 2014 that Murray’s intense work schedule as mayor comes from “his Catholic roots of serving others, and caring for the poor and aged.”
The fact that Murray is Catholic is not, in itself, remarkable. His two predecessors, Mike McGinn and Greg Nickels, also identified as such, with Nickels growing up in the Seattle neighborhood nicknamed “Catholic Hill” for its heavy concentration of Catholic families. However, neither McGinn nor Nickels made their Catholic faith central to their public identity, as Murray has done in leading a city that surveys consistently show is one of the most secular in the United States. Thirty-seven percent of residents here identify as religiously “unaffiliated,” according to a 2015 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, tying it with San Francisco and Portland for the least religious city in the country. While the Catholic Church continues to have a large institutional footprint on Capitol Hill—the “Catholic Hill” area Nickels grew up in—its influence quickly diminishes once one leaves the confines of Seattle University, the Providence hospitals, and St. James Cathedral: Citywide, only 13 percent of Seattleites identify as Catholic, according to the PRRI survey.
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/why-ed-murray-cant-quit-the-catholic-church/