Name Jules Ferrette | Died 1904, Geneva, Switzerland | |
Jules Ferrette (22 April 1828 – 10 October 1904) was a Bishop of Iona and founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church of the West (later known as the British Orthodox Church).
Ferrette was born at Épinal, France, in 1828. His parents were Protestants. According to his own account, when he was a boy of 14 he obtained access to the library of an eminent writer, in which there were a great many works of the Eastern fathers and Anglican divines. From reading these he reached the conclusion that most of the divisions of Christendom were unnecessary and capable of readjustment. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1850 and joined the Dominican Order and was given the religious name Raymond. He studied philosophy and theology at Grenoble and Rome and was ordained a priest on 2 June 1855. He was a Dominican missionary in Mesopotamia and Kurdistan from January to June 1856 but then left the Catholic Church. He worked with the Irish Presbyterian Mission in Damascus from 1858 to 1865, and assisted Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood's Mission to the poor Christians of Mount Lebanon from 1860 to 1862. He was consecrated as Bishop of Iona and its dependencies by Mutran Boutros (later the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch) at Homs (Emesa) on 2 June 1866 acting solus, with a mission to introduce Oriental Orthodoxy to the West. He died in Geneva in 1904.