Tag Archives: Dean Paul Kennington

Ex Dean of the Diocese of Montreal gives the Church of England the benefit of his insight

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In 2011 Paul Kennington was installed as Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in the Diocese of Montreal. Kennington is in a same-sex civil partnership with Jonathan Bailey, so he would have had little difficulty blending in with the prevailing ethos of the diocese – he was imported from the UK since, presumably, there were no qualified gay Canadian applicants for the job.

Kennington has now returned to the UK, is a priest in “an inclusive” church in the Diocese of Chelmsford and is continuing what he sees as his calling to straighten – unstraighten, really – the church of England out on its antediluvian view of sex.

He does get one thing right. He says: “The bishops … really need to catch up with what the clergy are doing in the church”. There are many actively homosexual clergy in the Church of England. It’s time for the bishops to acknowledge the fact and either take disciplinary measures or admit that homosexual sex is permissible and ratify the pronouncement by approving same-sex marriages, giving the Church of England a head start in jostling with North American Anglicans for the first to be sucked into the vortex of extinction.

From here:

AN OPENLY gay priest has praised The Church of England’s clergy for throwing out a report that refuses to recognise same-sex marriages.

Father Paul Kennington, parish priest of St Andrew’s Church in Leytonstone, said the House of Clergy were “brave” to reject the report put together by the House of Bishops.

The church’s synod voted against the report that upholds marriage as a lifelong union between a man and a woman, at a general assembly on Wednesday, February 15.

Fr Kennington said: “As a gay man seeing your church talk about you as if you are an issue doesn’t feel good and I was delighted the report wasn’t taken note of.

[…..]

The Anglican Church of Canada recognises same-sex marriage while the Anglican Church of England does not. It recognises same-sex relationships and civil partnerships.

Fr Kennington said: “I have been open about my relationship with Jonathan for 22 years while I was working in four parishes. This is not something new.

“The bishops have this idea that they are holding the church together but they really need to catch up with what the clergy are doing in the church.”

Diocese of Montreal needs $8 million to repair its cathedral

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The diocese is launching into a fundraising campaign with all the energy that a church less preoccupied with the temporal might devote to the saving of souls. No matter, this is the interesting part:

The cathedral had no spire from then until 1940, when a new one of aluminum panels mounted on a steel structure replicated the previous stone spire. That structure lasted through 1987-88, when the whole cathedral was, for a time, on a concrete slab supported by piles during construction of a shopping mall underneath the cathedral.

The foundations of the cathedral are resting on an altar dedicated to the  consumer god of a decaying civilisation: a shopping mall.  A perfect metaphor for the Diocese and, indeed, the entire Western Anglican edifice.