Word: clerics
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Clergymen are unfrocked often enough in England that the Times of London, which by a quaint tradition hires deposed clerics as literate proofreaders, is kept sufficiently staffed. But not in 29 years had a cleric been removed from office on the charge brought last week against ex-Vicar William Bryn Thomas, 62: adultery, committed with a Sunday school teacher named Elsie Brandy-and not once but, by Mrs. Brandy's accounting, "at least 75 or 80 times...
Last week Thomas' 30-year career as a cleric came to an end in a formal unfrocking ceremony in London's medieval Southwark Cathedral. While a choir chanted a somber psalm and middle-aged women prayed in silence, scarlet-hooded bishops cast Vicar Thomas out of the Church of England. They read from I Samuel ("And I will raise me up a faithful priest") and Matthew ("Beware of false prophets"). Then the Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, rose to pass final judgment: "By the authority committed to us by Almighty God, the Father, the Son and the Holy...
...last previous cleric to be publicly unfrocked for adultery, the late Rector of Stiffkey, turned circus performer and was devoured by a lion. Thomas, choosing a safer pursuit, has turned journalist. Even as the congregation prayed hopefully for the vicar's "true repentance and amendment of life," Thomas was cheerfully splashing his life story across the front pages of the Sunday newspapers. As he told it, his plight was that female parishioners continually threw themselves at him. Said Thomas: "When I look back upon my years as a minister of the Gospel, I am by no means cast down...
...Lordship, Arthur Michael Ramsey, who will become the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury when Dr. Geoffrey Fisher steps down on May 31, is a massive man of God. Though he is only 56, his large, white-tufted head and ponderous dignity make him look, as a fellow cleric puts it, "at least a thousand years old. When he surges majestically up the aisle of York Cathedral, you feel that all the power and authority of Christendom are concentrated in his stooping presence...
Before dawn one day last week, police and armed civilian partisans of Haiti's President François Duvalier burst in on the country's top remaining Roman Catholic cleric. Haitian-born Bishop Remy Augustin was hustled off to jail so. fast he forgot his dental plates. Fourteen hours later he was expelled from the island. Two days later four more priests were expelled...