N.B. The Daily Mail has taken a stick to the Church in Wales for hiring a disgraced CoE vicar and placing her back in parish ministry. Would a male CoE heterosexual priest who left his wife in these circumstances be welcome in the Church in Wales?
A lesbian vicar has left her parish in disgrace amid claims she had drunken rows with a string of girlfriends.
It is the second time that mother-of-three Rev Michelle Bailey has quit in controversial circumstances.
She previously departed from a Church of England parish after accusing villagers of wrecking her marriage – and then left her husband and children to live with a female lover. But she returned to the pulpit in the Church in Wales – which is part of the Anglican communion but disestablished from the Church of England.
Earlier this year, she was cleared in court of assaulting another girlfriend, but remained suspended while senior clergy investigated a string of complaints about her.
The vicar, 55, was said to have picked up a number of women on online dating sites and invited them round to her home, with drunken rows leading to the police being called at least twice.
Now the Daily Mail has learned that Rev Bailey has retired before the investigation can be completed. She is understood to have gone travelling in a campervan.
Same-sex relationships are forbidden for Church of England clergy, but are permitted in the Church in Wales. A Church of England source said the Church in Wales had ignored warnings not to put Rev Bailey in a parish. The insider claimed: ‘Michelle can be very convincing on a good day – but she really isn’t suited to being a vicar.’
Last night a Welsh church spokesman said: ‘The Rev Michelle Bailey has now retired from all ministry in the Church in Wales.’
Her behaviour first hit the headlines in 2009 when she was the vicar of St Michael and All Angels Church in Stewkley, Buckinghamshire, and still married to husband Michael.
Parishioners found her behaviour erratic. She used a sermon in church to denounce them as gossips, saying: ‘Hurtful angry words have destroyed my marriage’. She blamed ‘poisonous’ rumours about her friendship with cattle breeder Michele Wilde. Village were later shocked when the vicar moved in with Mrs Wilde.
Read it all in the Daily Mail
