The Twenty-first century “Catholic” Anglican

 (With apologies to Dr. Eric Mascall)

I am a Catholic Anglican -- non-papal --  I beseech you,

You’ll only find a trace of heresy in all that I will teach you.

The clergyman across the town has vestments so obtrusive,

My cassock-alb with rainbows is really all inclusive.



My surplice is embroidered with only a suggestion

Of the gin and lace that speaks of orientation.

My liturgy is up-to-date with all pronouns corrected

And clearly is composed to be gender selected.



I teach the children in Sunday School the Dutch Catechism,

Explaining how there is no such thing as heresy or schism.

The truths of Vatican Two I bate not one iota.

But have yet to meet the marriage tribunal quota.



The Bishop has been active in parochial assessing.

She clearly does not distinguish in marital blessing.

The synod having declared equal marriage, then,

Women will no longer have to be married to men.



The music we perform at Mass is clearly gender neutral.

We have assorted voices with counter-tenors neutered.

Two flutes, a fiddle and a harp assist them in the gallery.

The organist left years ago, and so we save his salary.

We’ve started a ‘Sodality of Transsexual Transition’

Consisting of ten people who sing in various positions.

Depending upon how they identify their Sunday morning choices;

We have between four and eight soprano voices.



Mother Earth we extol in fervid peroration;

While the Gia Sisters support our congregation.

And, though I say I’m “Catholic,” I’m really Ang-li-can;

I trust that Henry the Eighth was not such a very bad man.

"Hitler's Pope" myth debunked

New evidence from the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, a historical research institute, has shown that  “Houses of Life” – places where Jews were sheltered during the WW II were supported heavily by the Catholic Church.  

There were more than 500 such houses in Italy, France, Hungary, Belgium and Poland. The overwhelming majority of the Houses of Life were institutions related to the Catholic Church, including convents, monasteries, boarding schools, hospitals, etc.

In Rome alone, some 4,500 people found refuge in churches, convents, monasteries and boarding schools. In Warsaw, All Saints Church sheltered Jews. This was remarkable, because the penalty for Poles for rescuing Jews was the death camp or, more likely, instant execution.

It is appropriate that a foundation named after Raoul Wallenberg should find such an extensive Catholic contribution to saving Jewish lives. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat in Budapest during the war. He and Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio to Hungary, saved 120,000 out of the city’s 150,000 Jews. 

Pope Pius XII’s statements both before and during the war were unmistakably hostile to Nazism.  The Nazis understood his meaning very well. A plan to kidnap Pius in 1944 was only averted by the unlikely intervention of SS General Karl Wolff.

The pope was also utterly clear about the evils of communism and vicious Stalinist religious persecution. But he said nothing about it during the war. Allied diplomats in the Vatican understood this, realizing that it was only the pope’s preservation of the Holy See’s neutrality which enabled him to give refuge to thousands of Jews in religious houses in Italy and the Vatican itself. It also allowed him to provide contacts so that information about prisoners of war and the Holocaust could reach the Allied powers.

All this was acknowledged during and after the war, not least by Jews. Albert Einstein, who had escaped Nazi Germany, said in 1940: “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth … I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”

See the article here:

the-end-of-the-hitlers-pope-myth

Trudeau and Abortion Promotion as Canadian Foreign Policy

Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada is leading his government in an activist pro-abortion policy which ignores the democratic will of the people.

Reversing the previous government's policy of giving aid to African mothers and children, the Trudeau government is pouring millions into the promotion of abortion in Africa.

This policy was announced by his foreign minister,  Chrystia Freeland, as a cornerstone of Liberal foreign policy to the horror of the Canadian population which is largely pro-life. 

"By ignoring the will of the people, this is spitting in the face of the very type of democracy we are supposed to have in African countries," Obianuju Ekeocha, the founder of Culture of Life Africa said recently to THE CATHOLIC HERALD.

Abortion “is against the will of the people,” she said. “The polls show overwhelmingly that Africans hate abortion, abhor abortion, both women and men.

This cultural imperialism exercised by Canada and other Western nations in relation to abortion is akin to colonialism in the nineteenth century.  

imposition-of-abortion-is-cultural-supremacy-says-nigerian

Father Sandys Wason

I am reading a biography of the noted Anglo-Catholic, Fr. Sandys Wason who was long persecuted by bishops in the Church of England in the 2oth century.

Fr. Wason served for many years in Cornwall parishes.  His biography, Mr Wason, I Think” states that after he had been ordained a deacon, his bishop refused, for four years, to ordain him priest:

“so long as he insisted on using his Rosary . . . at Gunwalloe he was inhibited for prayer for the departed and at Cury for the service of Benediction.  He was wholly committed to the reunion of the Church of England with the Holy See of Peter and would have agreed with these words of Archbishop Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York in 1555, who said: ‘By the relinquishing and forsaking of the See of Rome, we must forsake and flee from all General Councils… We must forsake and flee from the unity of Christ’s Church, and by leaping out of Peter’s ship, hazard ourselves to be overwhelmed and drowned in the waters of sects and divisions.”

Mr. Wason, I Think

Canada is actually 176 years old in 2017

The Confederation of only four provinces took place in 1867. According to the British North America Act the union was created between "Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick."  

Actually, the first Parliament of Canada was in session from June 15, 1841, until 1843 under the joint premiership of Robert Baldwin and Louis H. Lafontaine.  The English and French cultures in North America were first brought together legislatively in one civil state at that time.

Statue of Baldwin and Lafontaine on Parliament Hill, Ottawa

Often overlooked, this first form of constitutional monarchy marked the actual beginning of Canada as a civil state. This union led eventually to the incorporation of other British colonies into the Dominion of Canada as well as the formation of provinces from 1867 to 1949. Other northern territories have yet to be formed into Provinces though they may do so eventually.  It was not until 1949 that the colony of Newfoundland became the tenth province to enter Confederation.  

There had been a gradual coalescence and move to unity in British North America over the preceding century. This movement began, we might say, in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris. Under the treaty which brought an end to the 'Seven Years War,' France ceded Quebec along with all other North American claims to the British except for the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon.

The first elections for the Legislative Assembly were held in the Province of Canada in April 1841.  All sessions of this first parliament were held at Kingston in what was known as Canada West when the two colonies of Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) merged into one Canada.

It was from this beginning that the road to unity was made possible and so we owe a great debt of gratitude to Baldwin and Lafontaine who, in addition to being political allies against the notorious black Protestant Orange Order were personal friends. 

Baldwin’s children were educated in Quebec becoming perfectly bi-lingual.  One daughter, educated by the Ursuline Nuns, was received into the full communion of the Catholic Church.

Robert Baldwin's statue outside
the Quebec National Assembly

I like to think that Baldwin, a devout Anglican and great advocate of  political unity  achieved by peaceful means (unlike what happened south of the border), would be sympathetic to the unity of the Church that is being achieved through the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter across Canada.  

From small beginnings great oaks grow.  A blessed Dominion Day to all.