Scarlet Ribbons: A Priest with AIDS - Softcover

Bailey, Rosemary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0986377031 ISBN 13: 9780986377037

Publisher: Jorvik Press, 2017

Synopsis

Honourable, impassioned and tender — Sara Maitland

A quiet triumph of the spirit — Library Journal

A soul-searching testimony — The Observer

Rosemary Bailey gives an unsentimental yet heartbreaking account of her brother’s life, from his strict upbringing by a fundamentalist father, through ordination as an Anglican priest, then gay liberation, to his diagnosis with AIDS and a long debilitating illness that he never allowed to defeat him.

Rosemary captures the sad drama that consumes Simon Bailey, rector of the South Yorkshire village of Dinnington, as he breaks the news of his homosexuality and his illness, first to friends, then to close parishioners, and finally to his family, the church authorities and the media.

While slowly succumbing to AIDS, the Rev. Bailey continues to hold services in the parish church, while his parishioners care for him around the clock through his final months.

The story was the subject of the BBC Everyman documentary, Simon’s Cross.

About this title

About the Author

Rosemary Bailey was born in Yorkshire in 1953, and studied English and Philosophy at Bristol University. She has worked as a journalist for twenty years, writing about sexual politics, culture and travel for many publications including the Sunday Times, Guardian and Vogue. She now lives in London and France with her husband, biographer Barry Miles, and their son.

From Kirkus Reviews

Successfully integrating her voices of loving sister and dispassionate reporter, the author, a journalist, tells the life story of her brother, Simon Bailey, a gay priest in the Church of England who died in 1995 of AIDS. Drawing from his journals and sermons, from interviews with parishioners, other family members, and friends, the author traces the rocky path her brother walked from his youthful awareness of sexual difference, to his conversion out of the austere Baptist Church in which he was raised into the more ``esthetic and sensual'' Church of England, to his ordination, years of ministry to Dinnington parish in Yorkshire, and his final physical decline under the tender watch and care of his devoted parishioners. Much of the drama of the story unfolds in the step-by-step process by which the priest admits friends, close parishioners, family, church hierarchy, and the pressin that orderto the knowledge of his illness, a sequence that moves the author frankly to confess how ``immensely sad'' it is that she, her siblings, and parents were not among the first to be trusted with the news. That unself-justifying candor is part of what makes Bailey the perfect memorialist of her brother. Though she joyfully communicates the high points of reactions to his illnessespecially the unprecedented public support he received, as an AIDS-afflicted Anglican priest, to continue actively in his priestly office, as he wished, up until he diedshe also admits to moral misgivings over the secrecy he kept for so long. Simon's shortened life reminds Bailey of the dying Beth from Little Women; but his capacity to transform private suffering into eloquent and edifying sermons will suggest to many readers of Scarlet Ribbons another, more ambiguous literary portrait from Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter: the long-suffering minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. The ambiguities in Simon's life that the author preserves in her memorial of him will deepen and extend the impression he leaves. (16 b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jorvik Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0986377031
• ISBN 13: 9780986377037
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 224