From the Telegraph:

Children’s author G P Taylor to leave ‘sinking ship’ Church of England and become Catholic

Vicar-turned-author Rev G P Taylor says he will desert the “sinking ship” Church of England, which he said was the “spiritual arm of New Labour”, for Roman Catholicism.

The Rev Taylor, whose children’s book Shadowmancer became an international best-seller, said he was turning instead to the Roman Catholic church, which he believes is less afraid to stand up for important moral issues.

Writing in the Yorkshire Post, he said the Church of England had ”sunk into a liberal pit that was no earthly use and offered no hope, no love and no grace”.

He added: ”It was going through the motions of faith and was largely irrelevant to the people it once thought it served.

”Like so many other Anglicans, I am at that place where I feel I must desert a sinking ship.”

Rev Taylor said: ”The Church I once loved has become the spiritual arm of New Labour.”

The author said many bishops ”spend more time preaching about climate change or dressing up as Druidic bards than preaching a gospel of salvation that would cure the ills of society overnight if properly embraced”.

This isn’t too surprising, I suppose, since Demurral, the arch-villain in Shadowmancer, is an Anglican vicar who is more interested in gaining power in this world through the occult than he is in the heavenly power of the next. This resonates strongly with the shenanigans of bishops in Canada – a resonance made all the stronger for me by the fact that Taylor drew from the exploits of St. Hilda for inspiration:

Well yeah. Yorkshire is a place that I heavily speak to paganism and the occults. It’s one of those areas that for centuries has been a battle between the principalities and powers of heaven or hell. And St. Hilda herself came to Whitby and very famously she cast out the serpents into the sea. And everybody says that she cast out the snakes. But wherever you see the word serpent, you’ve got to always think, you know, what is the spiritual context behind this? And there was some sort of spiritual warfare going on there that she took command over and cleared the place. But there is, there’s always been this tension between good and evil. There’s lots of folklore, and we have lots of ghosts and demons and all sorts of legends, et cetera. So you know, it’s a place that we just carry on ministering in.

I am sure Mr. Taylor would be happy to know that, in the spirit of St. Hilda, here in Canada we are still casting serpents out – of the church in our case; of course, today, the serpents have access to lawyers.