Since publishing this article, I received an email from the person renting the rectory. It says, in part:
Yes, I am a witch by faith, and yes, I rent an office space at the Rectory. What I do there is tutoring, and offer some small spiritual services to a small group of people. We are an interfaith group. The Church itself is Anglican, and friendly, but not involved in my personal activities, or that of my business partner Scarlet. Further, a lot of what Scarlet is quoted as saying in the original article, was taken out of context from a conversation between her and the writer.
Since the original article has been deleted, I have removed the quote from it below and also, at the request of my email correspondent, have removed the name of the parish involved.
An Anglican church which shall remain nameless in the Diocese of Montreal prides itself on being, “an open-hearted, welcoming, inclusive church.” It is so inclusive, it is renting office space in its rectory to a witch.
Both church and rectory are wheelchair and broomstick accessible.
Where’s SNL’s Church Lady when we need her??
The buzzword “space” has become very tired, very quickly. From bizarre college protests to pagans renting a room in a heretical church, the term “space” is typically inaccurate, vague, and magical-sounding. An effort to disguise mundane realities.
The writer of the article managed to sneak the word in at least three times. They bumped it up a notch with “community space” (which used to be called a “public area”, until the term “community” started meaning sub-groupings that wanted to be segregated from the broader community). But also made mention of “sacred space”.
Investing spatial zones with mystical and magical significance has been the essence of paganism for thousands of years. Wicca, the devalued modern version of witchcraft, obsesses about “spaces”, which are often called “circles”. Having “sacred spaces” during pagan rituals is a must.
In contradistinction to this concept of power isolated to one spot, our Lord taught a similarly space obsessed woman, “The hour shall come when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father… a time is coming and now has come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth.”
Thank you for commenting in this sacred digital community space! 😉
Too amusing for words!
This story/incident was really quite bizarre even from the Pagan end of things. I’m an American witch who read about this on the Wild Hunt website two days ago. The story presented then was done from an interview with one of the witch partners who recently rented the rectory space. It was pitched as a model of interfaith (and economic) cooperation. The host Anglican group was held to be very accepting, but I offered a criticism of that idea because apparently the witch group would not be allowed to hold its rituals outdoors where the public could see them. The other witch partner replied in the comments that no, everything is good, and the story was written out of context. Then…POOF….the story was gone from Wild Hunt. No editors note, no nothing. It simply ceased to exist as if Jan. 5 never happened. Evidently things were not so cool between the Anglicans and the witches.
I did email the Wild Hunt asking:
and received this reply:
The original article is still available here in Google cache for those who wish to peruse it.
I would stay away from witchcraft. Fortune telling, Ouija boards, tarot cards, and astrology can expose a person to control by powers of evil. These things can lead people into the world of the occult, séances, Satanism, and black magic. By the power of God, we can turn the lost “from darkness to light” (Acts 26:18).