Category Archives: Diocese of Montreal

St Barnabas, Pierrefonds, Quebec reaches out to the community

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The Rev’d Canon Alan T. Perry is the rector at St Barnabas Church, Pierrefonds, Quebec. He tells us that:

We are an active, multi-cultural parish of the Anglican Church of Canada in the Diocese of Montreal, seeking to share the love of Christ in our midst

One of the many ways Alan T. Perry has found to share the love of Christ in our midst is to rent church land to Rogers for them to build a cell tower. Whether the hazards of living close to a cell tower are real or imagined doesn’t make much difference to the fact that those who are unhappy about it feel more radio waves than love emanating from the church.

Love is a part of this, of course: the love of raking some cash into an impecunious diocese.

It’s all part of being a mission shaped church.

The Diocese of Montreal is on a mission

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This particular mission has nothing at all to do with the Gospel and a lot to do with the anti-gospel: it is a dogged determination to repopulate diocesan clergy with homosexual priests who are “married” to someone of the same-sex.

The diocese has recently imported three such married priests from other dioceses and provinces and has now ordained another.

The latest ordination was protested by six existing priests in the diocese – not, as Bishop Barry Clarke made abundantly clear, that that will make a whit of difference.

This article (page 5) repeatedly refers to the six priests who have such an obstinate determination to cling to Biblical principles as “dissidents”, the currently approved term of opprobrium reserved for such obdurate Biblical obsessives:

The dissidents presented him with a letter, also signed by two absent colleagues, describing Mr. Camara’s marriage as incompatible with scripture and the definition of marriage under Anglican church law.

The preacher at the event – let’s not all it an “ordination” – made this pungent observation:

Walter Asbil (retired bishop of Niagara), often commented that we clergy ordained in the late fifties and early sixties had witnessed a major transition called the end of Christendom. We just hope we hadn’t caused it!

Such an inflated view of the influence of Anglican clergy is clearly preposterous: they have merely caused the end of Christianity in the Anglican Church – a far more modest achievement.

 

 

The Diocese of Montreal ordains another active homosexual

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From here (page 5):

Robert Ledo Camara and Rhonda Waters are the two newest clergy in the Diocese of Montreal but for all their relatively young years they also are old hands around the diocese.

[…..]

But he [Camara] and his partner, Gabriele Spina, still called Montreal home. The two men were married in 2005 in the Birks Chapel at McGill about a year after a decision, A decision of the Quebec Court of Appeals the previous year had legalized same-sex marriage in the province.

As the article points out, Robert Camara wasn’t ordained just because he is married to another man, but because he knows Portuguese: very useful in French speaking Montreal.

 

New Dean installed in Diocese of Montreal’s Christ Church Cathedral

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From here (page 4):

THE NEW DEAN of Christ Church Cathedral, Very Rev. Paul Kennington, right is joined by Bishop Barry Clarke and Rev. Canon Alan Perry, who served as the bishop’s chaplain, as the new dean is applauded after his installation.

The diocese had to go all the way to the UK to find a Dean who is in a same-sex civil partnership. The Very Rev. Paul Kennington is hitched to Jonathan Bailey and they both were at St. Mary’s Battersea which proclaims, “Open Church, Open Heart, Open Mind” – one of the lesser known sayings of Jesus.

Jonathan wrote back to their former church:

You will note Paul’s cassock, with scarlet piping courtesy of Stephen Miles (thanks!) and 39 scarlet buttons sewn on lovingly by Tim, Marie-Ca and Philippa all had a fabulous time in Montreal, and it was wonderful for Paul to have them with him at this big change in his life. It was also lovely for the children to see where Daddy will be working and living

It’s all about the cassock with its 39 darling buttons.

Diocese of Montreal gains new staff member: author of “Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints”

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From here (page 12):

A scholar who once served as dean of students at Concordia University is joined the staff of St. Matthias’ Church in Westmount, effective September 19. Don Boisvert is in his final year of study at the Montreal Diocesan Theological College and is completing his “in-ministry” requirement for graduation. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa and two books and several scholarly articles to his credit.

Born in the United States of French-Canadian parents, he studied for several years at a Roman Catholic seminary and is still on the faculty at Concordia. He specializes in the history of Christianity, religion and sexuality and religion in Canada. He was received into the Anglican Church of Canada last year and is married to Gaston Lamontagne, his partner for 34 years.

“Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints” is Boisvert’s attempt to see the traditional saints through a haze of homoeroticism:

he constructs an image of a perfectly shaped, highly eroticized male body ascribed to each of the saints. This imagined saintly body is repeatedly described as “beautiful,” “erotic,” “titillating,” “handsome,” “bare-chested,” “naked” or “semi-naked,” “muscular,” “glorious,” “ragged” and endowed with “perfection,” “virile masculinity,” “masculine strength,” etc. More often than not, the saints of old appear in a body conforming to the modern norm for gay beauty.

And we mustn’t leave out his homoerotic fantasies of Jesus:

Though Boisvert imagines Jesus to be a “handsome man,” “caring and attentive, sensitive yet principled” and working “bare-chested in the burning sun” (p. 180), he is attracted also to the “broken body” of Christ. The crucified Jesus (a “handsomely glorious body of Jesus [hanging] from the cross” (p. 171)) “elicits strong feelings of comfort and passive submission, the male docile and compliant body.” Yet, this submissiveness is immediately complemented by the symbol of the “lion” with its “brute aggressive force, the male as dominant energy and the definite top” (p. 170). Not surprisingly, the “fully male, genitally endowed” sculpture of Michelangelo’s Risen Christ, with its “muscular arms, thighs and buttocks” (p. 177), commands Boisvert’s admiration.

Just what the Anglican Church of Canada needs on staff: a homosexual, “married” to a man, who is so immersed in his twisted little world of gay sex that, when he writes a book about Jesus and the saints, he cannot see beyond the end of his genitals.

Anglican Diocese of Montreal supports the burka

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A Canadian Muslim, Tarek Fatah, agrees with the banning of burkas in Quebec government offices, schools, and other publicly funded institutions. He cites numerous reasons; this is among them:

I have no reservation in stating categorically that the burka is not just a piece of clothing, but is a symbol of Islamofacism and a rejection of the West as well as our cherished value of gender equality. The cruel reality is the burka castigates women as a source of evil (A’wra), condemning them to a life of isolation away from the gaze of men. Once veiled, they are marginalized, denied equality and made subservient to men. This leads to economic dependency, intimidation, violence and emotional abuse. Under the veil, the woman has no civic or secular identity. Her rights to make civic and political decisions are controlled and usurped by men, and by extension the hierarchy of the organized groups.

None of this deters Anglican Bishop of Montreal Barry Clarke though, who, after plumbing the depths of his Islamic savoir-faire, announced support for the burka:

MONTREAL – A bill that would bar a woman wearing a face veil from receiving government services is an attack on women’s rights in the guise of defending equality of the sexes, say the Anglican diocese of Montreal and the Simone de Beauvoir Institute.

In a statement approved Monday night by local clergy and Bishop Barry Clarke, the diocese said the bill erodes freedom of religion guaranteed under the Quebec and Canadian human-rights charters.

The local church body added that Bill 94 also unfairly targets women, since there are no men who wear the niqab, a veil with slits for the eyes worn by a small minority of Muslim women in Quebec.

“Obliging women to choose between the free exercise of their Charter right to freedom of religion, and the exercise of their rights to participate in society is odious,” the diocese said.

Also undeterred was the Simone de Beauvoir institute which has as its mission:

The Institute strives to stimulate the investigation, understanding and communication of the historical and contemporary roles of women in society, and to encourage women to develop their full creative potential.

There’s nothing that develops a woman’s creative potential quite as effectively as wearing a burka.

A shake-up is coming to the Diocese of Montreal

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The Diocese of Montreal, having lost 45,000 members between 1981 and 2001, is dwindling in much the same way as the Diocese of BC.

A consultant has been hired to find out what can be done; her report says, among other things:

As is her wont, Myrlene Boken does not recommend the closing of any churches in the Diocese of Montreal, preferring to leave the final decision up to parishioners.

But she makes no bones about considering some churches more strategic than others. Her report divides the slightly under 100 churches in the diocese into five categories.

She considers 50 churches – a little more than half – to be in strategic locations and another dozen in “second-level locations” that “round out our coverage of the mission field” but, for example, would not be a priority for replacement if they burned down or needed major repairs.

Another eight are in “tertiary” locations, generally buried in residential neighbourhoods and often dating from the 1950s and 1960s. They often benefit from dedicated local members and leaders even today, so Ms. Boken’s suggestion that the diocese not devote important resources to them could be controversial.

There are 18 “final generation” churches, generally in rural areas and some of them almost “family chapels.” They have few prospects for the future but Ms. Boken thinks it would often cause unnecessary hard feelings to force them to close. (A few of these are already on the way to being wound up by local parishioners.) Finally, there are a half-dozen tourist sites in the Laurentians that she thinks can play a useful role with summer student placements.

Although Boken does not recommend the closing of any churches, she does seem to think that it would not be a bad thing if half of them burned down. And that, after all, is what you pay a consultant for: creative thinking.

As comic relief, in the same issue of the diocesan paper, Rev. Dr. Ian Douglas, a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. rambles on about “God’s mission in a changing world and church”, drawing on a Marxist political theorist for inspiration. His most profound insight is this:

In light of the new Pentecost, Christians in general, and Anglicans in particular, are beginning to ask ourselves: How much does the translatability of the Gospel and the missiological imperative of inculturation inform our worship and common life as Christians today?

Scarcely a day goes by without an Anglican acquaintance piously murmuring in my ear his concern about “missiological imperative of inculturation”.

With Professor Douglas helping to push them over the edge, I’m quite sure that the Diocese of Montreal will soon be following the example of the Diocese of BC and closing churches. Those that don’t burn down first.