Toronto gay priest and former Anglican archbishop reconcile

Fintan · Mar 15, 2012

Toronto News: Toronto gay priest James Ferry and former Anglican archbishop Terence Finlay reconcile - thestar.com
Toronto Star

The two Toronto clergymen are by now so inextricably linked that they’re bound to appear prominently in each other’s obituaries. They know that.

But Terence Finlay and James Ferry do not want a confrontation 20 years ago — one that scandalized the traditional and appalled the progressive in the Anglican Church — to define them.

As of next Sunday, when they participate in a rare public service of personal reconciliation at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Finlay and Ferry hope the relationship will be known for more redeeming reasons.

For Finlay, now 74, the service is a “personal opportunity for me to express my regret” for Ferry’s suffering. “It was a very, very difficult time for both of us.”

Twenty years ago, Finlay was Anglican Archbishop of the Diocese of Toronto. Ferry was a priest at St. Philip’s Church in Unionville.

Ferry is gay. In 1988, he’d met Ahmad, a refugee from Lebanon. “It was love at first sight,” Ferry has said. “I did not believe in love at first sight. But when it happens, well, it happens.”

The two men became involved in a committed relationship. This became known in the parish. When it became apparent that some in the community were aghast at what resided in their clergyman’s heart, Ferry went to see Archbishop Finlay.

“He panicked,” Ferry has said. “And the rest is history.”

It is history of a painful, bizarre, instructive — and entirely human — sort.

When Ferry informed Finlay of his circumstances, Finlay ordered him to end the relationship. Ferry refused. (The church accepted homosexual clergy, but only if they abstained from giving expression to that fact. In effect, if they lived a lie.)

Finlay then issued a letter to be read at all Anglican parishes, outing Ferry and “inhibiting” him from performing pastoral duties. Effectively, the priest was fired, becoming, he said, “an outcast . . . and a ‘labelled’ outcast.”

Under church procedures, Finlay brought charges against Ferry and, in early 1992, convened a rarely used “bishop’s court” to hear the case.

The court — which had origins in pre-Reformation England — concluded that Ferry’s only wrong was his disobedience to a superior.

As a penalty, Finlay withdrew the priest’s licence.

In a letter sent 20 years ago this month to Anglican parishes, Finlay wrote: “The church is the family of God and in any health family there is a need for both discipline and loving care. As Bishop, I am to maintain the unity and discipline of the church.”

As a priest, and as a man, Ferry lost almost everything — his vocation, his livelihood, his faith that the church loved all its people. For a time, he also lost his relationship.

Ahmad was a shy man, whose culture was not welcoming to homosexuals and whose family did not know of his sexual orientation. The firestorm of the bishop’s court, which with its medieval trappings, attracted international attention, and that was too much for him.

The two men parted for a time, but reconciled a few months after the bishop’s court was over and its attendant furor had passed. They were together until Ahmad’s death from lung cancer in 2007 at the age 43.

“A person is fortunate once in a lifetime to find somebody who’s their soulmate,” Ferry said in a recent interview with the Star.

For both Finlay and Ferry, the pat two decades have brought pain, anguish and humiliation. Ferry paid immediately and publicly. For 20 years, he felt cast out for the crime of “loving another human being deeply and intimately.”

He had to find another way to make a living, and now works as a rights adviser to psychiatric patients at area hospitals.

He had to learn to let go of roiling emotions. “One of the things that one has to do is to learn how to let go of pain,” he says. “Not to fixate on events of the past and let them take over your life.”

Terence Finlay apparently paid in the more private coin of a tormented soul.

Over 20 years, he came to believe that he had caused great pain. He concluded that his obligation to justice outweighed the need for church unity.

After Finlay retired, he spoke out for a so-called “local option,” allowing individual dioceses to decide whether to bless same-sex couples.

Over the years, Finlay’s own views evolved.

In 2006, he officiated at a same-sex marriage in a United Church in Toronto. He was later admonished and disciplined by his successor.

“I’ve moved in different directions,” he told the Star. “And I have been very supportive of the gay and lesbian community, and also the whole question of gay marriage.”

In 2004, Finlay became special envoy in regards to the church’s reconciliation with First Nations survivors of residential schools. That, he observes, may have been a catalyst for his growing wish to make peace with Ferry in a formal way.

The reconciliation service — the Eucharist, prayer, scripture readings, a statement by Finlay and response from Ferry — is “something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” Finlay says.

“I felt this was something I wanted, to reach out to Jim and to do and to express my regrets or that pain and what was experienced then and continued for him, I’m sure, these past years.”

He observes that if the Christian faith is founded on anything, it is founded on reconciliation. The heart of the Lord’s Prayer is the acknowledgement that any claim to one’s own forgiveness is contingent on the forgiving of others.

Finlay and Ferry intend to give formal public expression to those values in a ceremony that bears echoes of aboriginal healing circles, the amends processes of recovery programs, and the truth and reconciliation commissions in South Africa and elsewhere.

As the Anglican Diocese of Toronto says about the Finlay-Ferry service, “when deep pain has been caused, it is important to have an opportunity to share our sorrow for that pain and seek a renewed relationship.”

Ferry says the two have been in touch “from time to time” over the years and that the relationship is “amicable enough.”

Last summer, his licence was reinstated and he was appointed by Archbishop Colin Johnson as an assistant priest at Holy Trinity.

In was, in large measure, vindication — the acknowledgement, he says, that “James, you belong!”

Though he is once again a priest in good standing, he’s not on the church payroll.

“I don’t know how things are going to unfold. I’m 59 now. There’s a 20-year gap in my ministry as licensed clergy.

“But I know that I have a calling.”

What Ferry did over the years was, quite literally, to keep the faith.

In 1992 he said that while the church had abandoned him, he would not abandon the church. Rather, he intended to remain “on the margins, as a voice crying out for justice, love, and full inclusion in the life of the church family.

“I believe it will not be too many years before my hope and faith will be vindicated.”
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Toronto gay priest and former Anglican archbishop reconcile

Fintan Full Member

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