Arnold Hollis of Sandys, Bermuda, died an archdeacon at 92, but it took him 17 years of persistent inquiries to be welcomed as a priest in the nation where he was born. For years he heard that he was not qualified—until after years of study in England and earning multiple degrees, when he heard that he was overqualified.
Bermuda’s daily newspaper, The Royal Gazette, marked his death with 1,20o-word obituary by Jonathan Bell, its chief obituary writer. Bell’s obituary called Hollis “a church’s conscience.”
Hollis spoke frequently about injustice—Bell compared his fire to that of ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church—and he sometimes included his long sojourn toward ordination in Bermuda as an example of that injustice.
He was, Bell reported, “the first Bermudian to be sponsored by the Synod of the Diocese to train for Holy Orders in 1956, during a time when discrimination and racial segregation were firmly entrenched.”
“He had a sense of wonder that God should have called and used him in his service, with a sense of his own unworthiness—yet with an awareness that, whilst he was on this Earth, he had a place and a purpose from God,” said the Rt. Rev. Nicholas Dill, Bishop of Bermuda. “Dr. Hollis was a highly educated and qualified theologian and priest of great experience, which he brought home to Bermuda.”
He first served as a teacher in a primary school. His began pursuing ordination in the 1950s. “Here was this little Black kid, trying to even think that he could be a minister in what was considered a white, elite church, so to speak,” Hollis said.
Friends helped him enter Codrington Theological College of Barbados in 1956. Next he studied in England, and while there he moved from the diaconate to the priesthood.
“At the end of this process, I wrote back to the Bishop in Bermuda inquiring about when to come home—and the response I received was that there was no available place,” Bell quoted him as saying.
“That was not always the truth, but there was indeed no place for me. That went on for 17 years. I was told that I could stay in England or go to the West Indies.
“In my annoyance, I decided to go to the West Indies. I intended to go back to Barbados, until a position in a mission church was offered to me in Guyana.”
“As Dr Hollis waited to come home as a young priest, he accrued a bachelor’s degree in sociology, two masters of divinity and a doctorate in parish ministry and church administration—only to be told when he next applied for a position in Bermuda that he was now too qualified,” Bell wrote.
“Eventually Sir John Swan, the former premier, who was then responsible for immigration, intervened—making it clear that he would not consider any work permit applications for either position,” Bell wrote.
The next year, the Sandys Parish’s vestry accepted Hollis.
In 1969, he married Janice Polk, and the couple moved to the United States to minister in Philadelphia and New Jersey.
Forty years later, their youngest daughter, Joanna, was ordained a deacon of the Episcopal Church. In 2010 she became the first woman ordained to the priesthood in Bermuda.
