Portas: I cancelled my son’s baptism because priest was not gay-friendly
Mary Portas has told how she refused to have her son baptised after a Catholic priest appeared ‘uncomfortable’ with her marriage to a woman.
the Catholic TV presenter, who is also a retail consultant, said her wife Melanie rickey – also a Catholic – convinced her to get their son Horatio baptised into the faith.
But when she met with a priest at a baptism class and asked him about his feelings towards gay parenting, he got ‘stressed’ and buried his head in his iPhone.
earlier this year it was revealed Miss rickey, 42, gave birth to Horatio, now two, after IVF treatment using sperm donated by Miss Portas’ brother Lawrence. she was previously married to Graham Portas, with whom she has two grownup children, and only came out as a lesbian in her 40s after falling in love with Miss rickey, a magazine fashion features editor.
Miss Portas, 54, told the Hay festival she spoke to the priest on the phone after the class and told him
‘It was really painful’
how ‘painful’ she had found his reaction. He responded with a touching letter and asked her to pray for him.
the priest agreed to baptise Horatio but Miss Portas was so hurt by his reaction she decided she did not want him to do so.
she said: ‘I told him later [on the phone] “I can’t tell you how disappointing that was…I can’t tell you how painful that was for me,” she said. ‘“I’m sorry that I’m putting you through this but somehow, somehow I thought as a man, as a human, you would see that love is simple and you would be able to see past that and understand.”
‘He wrote me the sweetest letter that just said “Pray for me”. It was really extraordinarily touching. It was just one human writing from his heart, from his soul.
‘It was really painful yet at the heart of it was this man who had been brought up in the Catholic faith. It was so rigid in him that he couldn’t open up yet there was this love.’
Miss Portas, who made her name in TV series Mary, Queen of shops, and her role advising david Cameron on the future of the High street, met Miss rickey shortly after her marriage broke down.
the pair had a civil ceremony in 2010 and were among the first same-sex couples to convert that partnership i nto marriage on december 9 last year. today, they share a £5million home in London’s Primrose Hill with Miss Portas’s eldest children, Mylo and Verity.