Biker priest told to hit the road
Martin Beckford and Nick Britten in the London Telegraph
| 12 Nov 2008
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Rev Teresa Davies: erred and strayed. Picture, London Telegraph.
Her fellow clergy may have turned the other cheek when they saw their new female vicar wore leather jackets and rode a motorbike.
But when the Rev Teresa Davies admitted after a Christmas lunch that she and her husband had an open relationship and enjoyed wife-swapping holidays in the south of France, her colleagues' Christian ideals of tolerance and forgiveness were tested to the limit.
Her parish also took objection when the 37-year-old mother-of-two also held three church services while drunk, smelling of alcohol and swaying from side to side, with the result that the choir "fell apart under her direction".
At a tribunal yesterday, Oxford-educated Mrs Davies was found to have "acted in a manner that is unbecoming or inappropriate to the office and work of a clerk in holy orders" and was barred from ministry for 12 years.
A spokesman for the Diocese of Peterborough said: "It is always a matter of regret when any clergy fail to set an example of Christian behaviour in word and deed. We are very sorry that Teresa Davies has failed to set such an example."
Mrs Davies, who studied theology at St Stephen's House, part of the Oxford University, was ordained as a Church of England priest in 2002 and first worked as a curate at a church in Worcester.
She was appointed Team Vicar in Daventry, Northants, in 2006 and was given special responsibility for children's work, becoming a governor at a local primary school.
But at a Christmas lunch that year she told two fellow priests that she and her husband Mick, an IT consultant, had been on trips without their children in an area of the south of France "noted for the casual exchange of sexual partners".
Mrs Davies later claimed she was just trying to be "laddish" and "shocking" but rumours spread in the parish about her open marriage.
After the complaints were made against her, Mrs Davies fled the parish with her husband to a new home in Birmingham where she is now training to become an RE teacher.
She turned up to a disciplinary hearing late, and without any other relevant papers, but admitted the allegations against her very serious and regretted her actions and the fact that she had not sought help for her drinking problem.
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