ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9607010092
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: EASTON, MD.
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
The Rev. John Keener Mount, who acknowledged his homosexuality and blessed a same-sex union despite an Episcopal Church moratorium, died this month of congestive heart failure.
Mount, who died at his home in Easton on June 15, shook up the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland in 1992 when he told church leaders that he was a homosexual during a task force report on human sexuality.
``For me, it's over - the struggle, the deceptions. And it was the deception that was the terrible part,'' Mount said at the time.
Last year, in another controversial incident, Mount officiated at a ceremony in Talbot County for two gays who were also HIV-positive. As a result, Mount was stripped of his license to preach or serve communion in any church of the Easton Diocese.
``What he did came out of his own personal life and he worked through it,'' said Charles Longest, Suffragan Bishop of Maryland, who said Mount took his work for the church very seriously.
``He saw what he did as being entirely appropriate,'' he said.
Mount was born in Baltimore, and he earned his master's degree in English in 1932 from Johns Hopkins University. In 1935, he received his divinity degree from Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria.
Ordained that same year, he served at St. Stephen's in Severn, St. Bartholomew's in Ten Hills, St. Barnabas in Sykesville and at Tidewater Parish Church in England. He retired to Easton in 1972.
He was married in 1960, at the age of 50, to the former Alice Thornton Dashiell. She died in 1991 at the age of 84.
- Associated Press
LENGTH: Short : 40 linesby CNB