The notorious Helen Percy, scarlet woman of the kirk, is thinking about her flock when we meet in a hotel on Blairgowrie High Street. But scandalised parishioners are no longer her concern. Instead she is worrying about her black-faced ewes, which are in need of a ram. This is a simple problem compared with the one that has dominated the past nine years of her life.
In 1997 Percy, a former Church of Scotland minister, was accused of having an affair with a married elder. She was initially suspended, then, she claims, forced to resign despite her pleas it was a single encounter that took place without her consent.
It is easy to imagine how infuriating and frustrating her situation was. She felt it was inconceivable that the same punishment would have been meted out to a male minister in the same position.
As a result Percy, 39, embarked on a bitter legal battle against her former employers that finished up with a landmark House of Lords ruling, which effectively gave her leave to sue God. Even at her lowest moments, sedated by antidepressants and vilified by critics, she was determined to vindicate herself.
Last week, hours before the scheduled finale of a legal battle that started at the employment appeal tribunal via the Court of Session, she achieved her aim. The kirk settled her claim for sex discrimination. She estimates the process cost the kirk close to £200,000; it also paid her legal expenses.
Percy’s saga began when, in her late twenties, she left her first ecclesiastical post in Paisley to take up a job as associate minister for six parishes in Angus. Close friends warned that the post was fraught with back-biting and parochial politics, but she adored the area and believed her youth and enthusiasm could breathe life into church activity.
Soon after she arrived she met and befriended Sandy Nicoll, a church elder in the parish of Kilry, Perthshire. “I trusted Sandy,” she says. “I talked to him a lot. He knew I had been abused as a child, but his marriage was in trouble and he was distressed. He knew I felt safe with him.” Percy claims he abused that trust by having sex with her once, when she was in bed suffering from flu. She did not resist.
A vivacious female minister with radical ideas, Percy was already an unsettling presence to her elderly parishioners. Her close friendship with a man 20 years her senior soon provoked scandalised gossip. Nicoll’s mother wrote to the presbytery alleging the pair were having an illicit affair and that Percy was not fit to be a minister.
In 1997 Percy was formally accused of having adulterous sex and was summoned to face the ancient procedure of trial by libel.
This church mechanism was introduced when there were no female ministers and Church of Scotland doctrine defined a sexually active single woman as a sinner for whom “everything possible must be done to win them from wrong ways and redeem them from wrong desires”.
Percy’s smooth and smiling face still crumples in anguish when she recalls the arcane process. “During the trial by libel, my colleagues were the judge and jury. Six of
the jurors were my parishioners. They found out things about my private life that nobody should ever know; things I would not discuss with my closest friends. It was a completely inappropriate way to handle it. The trial by libel act was last updated in 1935. It has not changed much since the 18th century.”
The question of consent was ignored. Rules designed to regulate the conduct of male ministers left no place for it. Percy says: “The presbytery clerk told me, ‘It does not matter whether you gave your consent or not. It is still adultery.’ ” She offered to admit improper conduct, but the kirk refused to let the matter drop.
Percy resigned, citing pressure from the church, and took the matter to an industrial tribunal. She alleged discrimination on the grounds the kirk had “not taken similar action against male ministers who are known to have had or are still having extramarital sexual relations”.
That was where the God excuse came in. The 1921 Church of Scotland Act, which defines the church’s power to govern itself, proclaims that it receives from “the lord Jesus Christ, its divine head, the right and power subject to no civil authority to legislate and to adjudicate finally in all matters of church discipline”. The kirk’s argument was that Percy was employed by God. Secular courts and tribunals had no right to protect her from discipline or dismissal. In 1998 the employment tribunal agreed. She appealed, but in 2001 three judges at the Court of Session confirmed that her complaint was not covered by employment law. It took a House of Lords ruling in December 2005 to grant Percy the right to take the kirk to an industrial tribunal.
On Monday it settled. “I was a bit disappointed,” she admits. “I really wanted my chance to say in court all the things I wanted to say.” There is no confidentiality clause, but she will not disclose the details of her award. She does, though, acknowledge that it is not large. “The financial settlement will not change my life.”
The Church of Scotland is remaining equally tight-lipped. “The matter is now closed,” it says.
The agonising process Percy was forced to endure in order to reach it, though, has profoundly altered her view of the church.
“All I ever wanted was for them to listen to me. If they had permitted me, I would have withdrawn without a penny. The right solution would have been reconciliation. Was it all worth it? If I had known it would take nine years, I would not have started.”
But Percy does not look bitter. Her skin is fresh and unlined and her eyes sparkle when she talks about her new job as a shepherd. “When you pull out a live lamb and tickle its nostrils with grass to wake it up, that is so satisfying. It gives me the same thrill as the first baby I baptised,” she says.
She has not abandoned the ministry, though. Friends still invite her to conduct weddings, funerals and baptisms, but she has thought long and hard about what it means.
“Ministry is not about power. It is not about telling people what to do as the church tried to tell me. Real ministry means getting close to the muck, sin and joy of human life, getting right in there amid what it means to be human.”
Percy knows how it feels to be desperate. Still resident at Blairgowrie, just outside her former parish boundary, she has been tormented by a few locals. “One man shone a torch in my eyes and screamed: ‘I know all about you. You are that filthy vicar.’” Such hostility hurt, but she was able to escape a possible repetition of the pain by working for three years in South Africa as a Quaker peace and social worker in the Northern Cape Province.
“South Africa has the worst rape statistics in the world. Some victims have to travel many miles to report the crime. Police and forensic services are so far apart.
“I set up a support system and refuge for women and children. I am so glad I went. People there have so much worse to deal with than anything I endured. I have seen children eat sand and water to keep their bellies full because there is no food in their house. How could I even think about a stupid legal battle in Scotland while that was going on?” Africa also helped her to overcome residual fears about relationships with the opposite sex. “I had a black boyfriend in South Africa,” she says. “Our relationship was sweet, innocent and short-lived, but it gave me back a lot of self-confidence.”
Her cheeky grin implies she would dearly like the parishioners who questioned her morality to know all about it. But it has been her only love affair since 1997.
For much of the past decade she has been portrayed as a scheming adulteress who cried rape. Her position is complicated by the fact that, though he was interviewed by the police, Nicoll was not charged.
After the allegations emerged, he split up with his wife and is now believed to be living in a cottage in Angus working as a lorry driver.
She says he was not charged because in 1997 rape charges required evidence that the victim physically resisted her assailant. Her definition of rape is broad.
“So many women are raped within marriage. I don’t think there is a woman in Scotland who has never been subjected to a sexual act when she really wanted to get the kids to bed and was just lying there wishing she was somewhere else.”
It is easy to question Percy’s story. The settlement in her case does not prove her innocent of the adultery allegation. She admits she was a very young woman in 1997 and did not handle events perfectly. Her sense of injustice still rankles despite the legal settlement.
“I have been exposed to a system that is prepared to sacrifice the individual to protect the institution,” she says. “There are many people in the Church of Scotland who are gracious and compassionate, but there is a problem in the higher echelons.”
Since returning to Angus from Africa, Percy has lived in a gypsy caravan alongside her closest companion — a collie called Roy. Together they tend her small flock of sheep and look after larger flocks for local farmers. She is profoundly grateful to the friends who have given her food, work and accommodation.
“I stayed because people here know me. They read the papers and said: ‘That is not the Helen we know.’ At first it was people being kind that made me cry. There was so much kindness it cracked me up.” She is, however, contemplating another move.
“I might go back to Africa. I would love to settle down properly.” As a minister? “Not in the Church of Scotland. The kirk does not recognise my ministry. I don’t think I could work in an institutional role in a church again. I’m a bit of a rebel these days. If I am still a Christian, it is because of Christ’s belief in me. I don’t think I’ll give up my sheep entirely.”
Nor will she abandon her conviction that the church she was once proud to serve should concentrate its efforts on helping those in need rather than policing the private lives of its members.
The net curtains may no longer twitch on every street in Scotland, but Percy’s case illustrates the grip illiberalism still exerts on the grassroots of a church that prefers to present itself as leftist and socially aware.
