Category Archives: Diocese of Ottawa

St. Alban’s and chaos in Sandy Hill

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In 2008, St. Alban’s church in downtown Ottawa voted to join the Anglican Network in Canada, at which point the building was turned over to the Anglican Church of Canada.

The church runs Centre 454 for homeless people, a program that was started in 1979. Now the residents of the Sandy Hill neighbourhood are “urging the city to cut off funding for a drop-in centre they blame for sowing fear and chaos”.

The city is considering moving it elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if the church survives if its funding and raison d’être are removed.

From here:

St. Alban’s rector Rev. Michael Garner said the centre first opened in the church in 1979, relocated to Murray Street, and then returned to the King Edward site around 2012.

It was bursting with activity when CBC visited on Wednesday. Young said demand has doubled in the past year.

“The need is increasing,” she said. “Abject poverty, lack of affordable housing, increased cost of food, a very toxic drug supply are some of the things that are contributing to some of the behaviours that are more visible, because more people are suffering.”

But for four neighbours who appeared at a city budget meeting on Tuesday, those behaviours are intolerable. They blamed Centre 454 for a wave of theft, violence and intimidation that has left them terrified. They said the centre’s clients harass and threaten them, break into their properties, defecate in their gardens and use drugs on their laneways.

Sandy Hill resident Susan Khazaeli said Centre 454 staff are unresponsive to the community’s concerns and take no accountability for their clients once they walk out the door.

“Centre 454 is responsible for endangering the welfare and security of everyone near it,” she told council’s community services committee. “I am begging everyone here to defund this service. It does not belong here.”

Bishop affirms sanctity of life for 2SLGBTQI+, conveniently forgets about the unborn

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In advance of Ottawa’s Pride March on August 27th, Shane Parker, the bishop of Ottawa urged us all to read his letter “Global Interfaith Commission on LGBT+ Lives”. The heading for the letter is: “Declaring the Sanctity of Life and the Dignity of All”.

Not quite all as it turns out. The handwringing is reserved for 2SLGBTQI+ people because “all sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions are a precious part of creation and are part of the natural order.”

Around 100,000 abortions per year are performed in Canada. In 2021, 55,073 of them were surgical or aspiration abortions: the baby is sucked out of the uterus with a pump. Or, if you would like to use the euphemism employed by the abortion industry, it uses gentle suction to pull pregnancy tissue out of the uterus. My emphasis.

Some of the 55,073 aspiration abortions, would have been performed by dilation and evacuation (D&E). These are performed for late term abortion and, of course, it is another euphemism. Using normal English, it is a dismemberment abortion. The baby is torn apart in the womb in order to remove it. Oh, and the baby’s skull is crushed. Here is a detailed description:

To prepare for a D&E, the abortionist must first dilate (widen) the woman’s cervix. Generally, this is done by placing laminaria sticks, which are osmotic dilators made from sterilized seaweed, in the cervix 24 hours before the surgery and allowing them to expand. Synthetic osmotic dilators, used to slowly widen the cervix, and misoprostol can also be used for cervical dilation. After the woman’s cervix is dilated, a suction catheter is used to suck out the amniotic fluid. The abortionist then uses metal forceps (sopher clamp) with sharp metal “teeth” to grab and tear away parts of the baby until her whole body is extracted from the womb. Since the baby’s skull has usually hardened to bone at this point (calcified), it is often crushed so that it can be removed.

However, the important thing to remember when considering the sanctity of life of a human, the bearer of God’s image, is affirmation of 2SLGBTQI+ individuals. Let’s not forget that.

From here:

Declaring the Sanctity of Life and the Dignity of All

  • We come together as senior religious leaders, academics, and lay leaders from around the world to affirm the sanctity of life and dignity of all.

  • We affirm that all human beings of all sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions are a precious part of creation and are part of the natural order.

  • We affirm that we are all equal under God, whom many call the Divine, and so we are all equal to one another.

  • We, therefore, call for all to be treated equally under the law.

  • We recognize with sadness that certain religious teachings have often, throughout the ages, caused and continue to cause deep pain and offense to those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex.

  • We acknowledge, with profound regret, that some of our teachings have created, and continue to create, oppressive systems that fuel intolerance, perpetuate injustice and result in violence. This has led, and continues to lead, to the rejection and alienation of many by their families, their religious groups and cultural communities.

Anglicans in the Ottawa Pride parade

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The Anglican obsession with homo-eroticism is hardly news of course, nevertheless, here are some Anglicans in the recent Ottawa Pride parade:

What is beginning to change is the further indoctrination of children by initiating them into the whole sordid business. Here, in the same parade, is a drag queen teaching children to imitate the repulsive gyrating contortions that seem to pass for dancing these days. Unless I am missing something, this is the blatant sexualization of children, child abuse, potential grooming for nightmarish paedophilia and unabashedly demonic.

Click on image to play video

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The bishop of Ottawa, Shane Parker, seems to have no problem having his clergy participate in this evil fiasco, making him, his organisation and clergy just as repugnantly wicked  as the drag queen in the video.

Anglican clergy complain that town is not flying a Pride flag

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The Petawawa town council voted against flying a Pride flag this June.

This has upset some Anglican clergy in the area, prompting them to write a letter to the mayor saying that this sends the wrong “message to the members of the LGBTQ2S+ community”.

Petawawa, for those who might be unfamiliar with it, is a town of around 17,000 people located in the Ottawa Valley. It is the home of a Canadian Forces base and attracts hikers, fishermen and canoeists.

As you can imagine, a rural town of 17,000 is positively seething with LGBTQ2S+ residents. Are there enough to form a community, though? Do they have their own community hall? Are they comprised entirely of the five complaining Anglican clergy? I’m not sure.

Funnily enough, one of the clergy is the Right Reverend Michael Bird. That name rings a bell, although I can quite put my finger on why.

From here:

Five Anglican ministers are expressing disappointment with the recent decision by the Petawawa town council to not fly the Pride flag because of a 23 year old municipal resolution prohibiting such public displays.

The ministers from the Parish of the Valley made their point about Resolution 11 in an open letter addressed to Mayor Bob Sweet released Wednesday.

All Saints Anglican Church, one of the churches in the parish, is steps away from the Petawawa Town Hall and it has raised a Pride flag in solidarity with LGBTQ2S+ residents of Petawawa.

“We pray that the presence of the flag at the church will be a visible reminder of members of our community of God’s unconditional love for all people,” the letter, which is signed by five ministers — The Right Reverend Michael Bird, Archdeacon of Pembroke, Rev. Susan Clifford, Rev. Matthew Brown, Rev. Gillian Hoyer and Rev. Richard Durrett — states.

St. Alban’s Ottawa is too inclusive

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St. Alban’s Anglican Church in Ottawa used to house a thriving orthodox congregation that left the Anglican Church of Canada to join ANiC in 2008. A small, less than entirely orthodox ACoC congregation now meets in the building. Naturally, they pride themselves on their commitment to inclusion:

It is the policy of the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa that no one be excluded from any ministry or leadership position, including ordination, on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. All are welcome in our Spirit-Led, Christ-Centred, Contemporary Urban Church.

It is, therefore, a source of considerable embarrassment to have to admit that the notorious racist, colonizer and misogynist Sir John A. Macdonald used to attend the church. To make atonement, the parish is displaying a page of self-flagellation, Uriah Heep humility, and faux remorse on behalf of their ancestors’ flagrantly wicked wrong-inclusion.

Read all about it here:

Sir John A. Macdonald and his wife, Agnes Bernard of Jamaica, were early parishioners of St. Albans. While Sir John A. Macdonald is rightly remembered as the first Prime Minister of Canada, he is also remembered by First Nations as an architect of the residential schools, and by Métis for the execution of Louis Riel. Many decisions integral to Canadian nation building undermined the rights and needs of Indigenous peoples, who were the first to make this land their home.

[…..]

St. Albans is the oldest Anglican church building in downtown Ottawa, and we are proud of our Church’s longstanding commitment to inclusion. As Ottawa’s first free church, parishioners of St. Albans did not have to pay for the right to sit in a pew; Sir John A. Macdonald and other government leaders and officials worshipped alongside carpenters and labourers. However, we are not proud of the dispossession, mistreatment and exclusion of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and we acknowledge and repent of our sins in that regard. Through our prayers and our actions, we are working towards reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. We invite you to join us on this journey.

Anglican Church of Canada, infertility cult

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The Canaanites worshipped the fertility god, Baal; they abandoned themselves to orgiastic excesses in order to please their god. And possibly, themselves.

It goes without saying that this did not please the triune God who created the heavens, the earth and all that is in them. It is, however, a step up from the gods before which the Anglican Church of Canada has chosen to abase itself: infertility and death.

Here is the Diocese of Ottawa inviting its members to participate, not in a fertility rite, but in a bacchanalia of orgiastic homoerotic infertility.

Even worse, when, in May, the national March for Life took place in Ottawa to protect the most vulnerable in our society, unborn babies, there was no invitation and no representation from the diocese.

An infertility and death cult.

Non-Christian ‘spiritual teacher in residence’ appointed at Ottawa cathedral

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A current fad amongst those who have an uneasy feeling that there may be something to Christianity but are too lazy to get up early to attend church on Sunday is to protest that they are “spiritual not religious”.

To the modern mind – or the muddled randomly firing synapses that have replaced the mind – spirituality is inherently superior to religion. Religion is just too physical: you are expected to present yourself bodily in church, the Eucharist is physical, the liturgy demands activity, “present your bodies as a living sacrifice“, and so on. All a regurgitation of Gnosticism where the immaterial is good, the material bad, secret knowledge or spirituality rather than Jesus is our salvation and ignorance is our problem, not sin. Contemporary Anglicans who, in their heart of hearts, have never liked the idea that not only did God choose to inhabit a body but physically brought it back to life and then, horror of horrors, continued to inhabit it find all this quite appealing.

Latching on to this fad and go one better – or worse, really – the Diocese of Ottawa is becoming “spiritual but not Christian”.  “How is this different from what has been going on for the last 30 years?” you may be thinking. Up until recently, clergy in the Anglican Church of Canada have been too shy to admit their heterodoxies, preferring to continue reciting the Creeds while changing the meaning of the words in their heads. Now they are out of the closet.

The Diocese of Ottawa has appointed a spiritual teacher who is not a Christian. He, unlike many of our bishops, doesn’t even pretend to be a Christian.

From here:

Algonquin spiritual teacher in residence appointed at Ottawa cathedral.
In a historic appointment, local Indigenous spiritual leader Albert Dumont has been named Algonquin Spiritual Teacher in Residence for a two-year term at the cathedral. During his term, Dumont will help educate members of the cathedral community on traditional Indigenous spirituality, while deepening the relationship between the Diocese of Ottawa and the Algonquin nation upon whose unceded territory most of the diocese sits.

Dumont’s appointment marks the first time that a non-Christian Indigenous teacher in residence has been assigned to a cathedral of the Anglican Church of Canada.

[…..]

The Very Rev. Shane Parker, dean of Christ Church Cathedral, appointed Dumont as Algonquin spiritual teacher in residence. The appointment came with the full support of Bishop John Chapman, as well as Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg Chief Jean Guy Whiteduck.

Both Dumont and Parker highlighted the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a crucial impetus for the appointment. The recommendations included recognition of the equal value of Indigenous spirituality.

“Albert is not a Christian,” Parker said. “He is an Algonquin man who has been shaped by the spirituality of his community, of his ancestors, throughout his life. I feel that having him in the cathedral will help us to understand Algonquin spirituality in particular, but [also] Indigenous spirituality in the context of a relationship, because I believe at the heart of reconciliation is developing a meaningful relationship between non-Indigenous and Indigenous people.

“Having Albert at cathedral signals our mutual concern … to learn and to share from one another’s spiritual traditions, and recognize them as equivalent.”

Cornwall church holds its first Pride service

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Trinity Anglican Church in Cornwall, Ontario held its first Pride service this year.

The idea was to demonstrate a willingness to be “open and accessible to all”,  a quality that was apparently eluding them before September 9th, 2018, the date of the first Pride service.

Oddly enough, in spite of drawing the circle wider, the church was more than half empty, confirming my suspicion that the wider the circle, the fewer the people:

From here:

Drawing the Circle Wide
Cornwall September 9, 2018 marked the inaugural Pride Service held at Trinity, Cornwall. It came just a year after Trinity and the parishes of Stormont Deanery became the first ‘church’ group—of any denomination—to march in the Cornwall Pride Parade. The idea of a ‘Pride Service’ arose out of discussions with the presidents of Diversity/Diversité Cornwall, Stephanie Nadeau and Liz Quenville, and Trinity’s Assistant Curate Mary-Cate Garden. It marked the growing bonds between the LGBTQ2+ community in Cornwall and Trinity.

The church plans to have more Pride services in the “hope that these will become a sign that the Anglican churches of Stormont Deanery are welcoming places.” Or as a sign of a desperate church willing to try anything but Christianity to entice people through its doors, depending on your perspective.