In further twist to his fascinating story, it seems that Bishop-elect Kevin Thew Forrester in his early life played a prominent role in another Roman Catholic controversy, that over the dismissal of Catholic theologian Charles Curran from his teaching post at the Catholic University of America back in the 1980s after he challenged everything from Humanae Vitae to Papal infallibility.

Bishop-elect Forrester, at that time a Catholic and a graduate student of Curran, was a member of the student group Friends of American Catholic Theology or Fact, that organised protests and petitions in support of the theologian, one of the best-known Catholic priests of that era and now a professor at the Southern Methodist University in the US.

It was this episode that helped propel Forrester into The Episcopal Church.

. . . After the Curran episode Forrester returned to Michigan to write his dissertation. In 1991 he was welcomed into The Episcopal Church at St Clare's in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is a church which then and now has a Jewish temple along with the Episcopalians sharing the one sanctuary in what is known as the Genesis Project.

His student group, Fact, was born of a desire to reconcile the principles of US-style democracy with Catholic ecclesiology. Forrester says: 'We had a number of different people come in and lecture us. My experience was that the Catholic church was not the church home for me. I realised, particularly when I came to St Clare, that The Episcopal Church provided the breadth, freedom, intellectual depth and the rich liturgy that was me.'