Michael Arditti

Carry on curate: scenes of modern clerical life

The Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie regales us with stories of mistaken identity, hymns with erotic undertones and an archbishop’s surprising take on Lenten penance

Fergus Butler-Gallie. [Jeff Cottenden]

In A Field Guide to the English Clergy (2018), the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie offered an amusing and informative survey of some of the more eccentric priests and prelates to have served the Church of England over the years. In Touching Cloth, he focuses on a contemporary eccentric: himself.

On New Year’s Eve he was taken for a drug dealer, and on Holy Saturday for a blind man

The book is an account of a year in his life as a young curate at the Church of Our Lady and St Nicholas in Liverpool.

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