At The Gate?

This whole #VicarGate business is extremely disturbing. 

So she has to support herself by secular employment? Even a lot of the Church of England's clergy do that these days, and if you count academia and schoolteaching then they always did.

Eastern Orthodox priests are expected to work the land like everyone else. Few of the Free Churches have ever been in position to pay very much, if anything. And so on.

Ignore the Wikipedia entry on what I am about to write. It is all over the place, and I do not have the time to begin to correct it.

The white clerical "dog collar" is in fact properly called the Roman collar, and it was originally just the collar of the Diocese of Rome. It was never worn in this country, even by Catholics, until it was introduced by Italian missionaries in the nineteenth century, so it is certainly not the property of the dear old C of E.

Nor, even, is the small and detachable version for slipping into shirt collars. That was invented in the Church of Scotland. Lynn Hayter has as much right to it as anyone else.