Gay Anglican Bishop Comes Out on TV
Episcopal News Service. March 16, 1995 [95049F]
(ENS) Bishop Derek Rawcliffe, retired from the diocese of Glasgow and Galloway and honorary assistant bishop in the diocese of Ripon, recently revealed his homosexuality on the BBC2 Newsnight television program. Rawcliffe said that he had been celibate and grew to be "rather hard and judgmental," but that in his 50s, while serving in the Pacific, he fell in love with a young wan and was encouraged by a confessor to "come to terms with myself." On his marriage in 1977, he said that, since he himself seemed able to change, he believed that others could. But after his wife's death in 1987, he realized that he was still gay and always had been, and that he had been "quite unfair to those of my clergy who were gay. I have apologized to some of them since then." He said that if he were a diocesan bishop now he would not regard it as a condition of ordination that a homosexual candidate should not live with a partner. "I would want to reassure priests who were gay that they are accepted by the Church, because I think that the Church has got to come to terms with the situation and not to hedge about as it has done and as it did in the statement on sexuality" (the Anglican House of Bishop's 1991 statement, Issues in Sexuality).