NEW YORK — Frederick H. Borsch, who as the Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles crusaded for an inclusive social justice agenda that empowered women, gays and lesbians, blacks and Hispanics, and poor and low-wage workers, died April 11 at his home in Philadelphia. He was 81.
The cause was myelodysplastic syndromes, a form of blood cancer, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles said.
Between positions at Princeton and Yale, Bishop Borsch presided over the sprawling six-county Southern California diocese from 1988 to 2002, and there he elevated female and Hispanic clergy in the church hierarchy.
Despite opposition from the world’s Anglican bishops, he championed the ordination not only of celibate gay men and lesbians but also of those in committed monogamous relationships.
Advertisement
Bishop Borsch didn’t just talk. He walked the picket line outside a Beverly Hills hotel with workers demanding what they called a living wage and helped convince Mayor Richard J. Riordan that minimum pay should be higher.
When a black priest was unjustly detained and handcuffed during a routine stop, Bishop Borsch demanded, and received, a public apology from the Los Angeles Police Department.
His supporters were not surprised when he chose to build the diocesan headquarters, the Cathedral Center of St. Paul, in Echo Park, an ethnically diverse neighborhood in Central Los Angeles. (Nor were they surprised when, characteristically modest, he initially resisted installing the bishop’s ceremonial throne at the cathedral, although he later acknowledged with a grin, “It’s incredibly comfortable.”)
Frederick Houk Borsch was born in suburban Oak Park, Ill., to Reuben Borsch and the former Pearl Houk. His father played baseball with a St. Louis Cardinals farm club before becoming a Rhodes Scholar and a lawyer.
Given Frederick Borsch’s preference for scholarship and teaching (and only fanciful hopes of being recruited to the Dodger bullpen), he earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1957 from Princeton and expected he would become a lawyer like his father or teach college English.
Advertisement
But although as a young acolyte he rejected a suggestion from his parish priest to enter the priesthood, the question lingered. His goal remained to somehow make the world a better place.
“I began to feel more and more the real heart of that was related to faith,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1999, “to giving people hope in life.”
He received a bachelor of sacred theology degree from the General Theological Seminary in New York, a bachelor’s in theology from Oxford, and a doctorate from the University of Birmingham in England.
He leaves his wife, the former Barbara Edgeley Sampson; their sons, Benjamin, Matthew, and Stuart; four grandchildren; and his sister, Jane Borsch Robbins.
Before being elected bishop, he was dean of the chapel and professor of religion at Princeton and dean, president, and a professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif.
After his retirement in Los Angeles, he moved to New Haven, Conn., to be interim dean of the Berkeley Divinity School — the Episcopal seminary at Yale — and associate dean of the Yale Divinity School.
At his death, he was a professor of New Testament studies and the chairman of Anglican studies at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He was the author of 20 books, including two novels.
When riots erupted in Los Angeles, sparked by the acquittal of four police officers accused of beating a black taxi driver, Rodney King, in 1991, Bishop Borsch wrote, “In biblical terms, if the society fails to care for the poor, for the widows, the orphans and the strangers in their midst, that society will come to tragedy.”
Advertisement
He advocated for the 1988 election of Barbara C. Harris as the first woman ordained a bishop in the Anglican Communion.
Bishop Borsch was forever seeking answers. In The Christian Century magazine in 1995, he asked, “Where Was God When the Plane Crashed?” — a meditation on his survival when a DC-10 skidded off a Logan International Airport runway in Boston on a snowy evening in 1982 in an accident that claimed two lives.
“The God who cannot be seen is yet present as the Spirit of all that is,” he wrote, “willing to share in all the consequences of creation — including evil and suffering — and seeking to transform them through love.”