(Staff) CANADA was a much more overtly religious nation a hundred years ago, when over 500 chaplains served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) during the Great War. Yet of that huge number, only two wrote lengthy first-hand accounts of their experiences, and they did so quite soon after the 1918 Armistice.
One was an older Anglican, Canon Frederick George Scott from Quebec City. The other was Benedict Joseph Murdoch, a young, recently ordained Roman Catholic priest from Chatham, NB. He saw everything imaginable at the front in Europe, including actual combat, when he was armed only with the Sacrament and holy oil.
He records being strafed by airplane machine-gun fire as he anointed the wounded and of being bombed nightly while sleeping in the open without trenches. At war’s end Murdoch returned home a changed man. He suffered from what was later called “shell shock” but which we today know as PTSD.
And like Scott, he felt compelled to write of his experiences, not for glory or profit (he paid publishing costs out of his own pocket) but to honour the “great hearted Catholic lads” of the CEF. The Red Vineyard was first published in 1923 and went through ten printings totalling over ten thousand copies, but has been out of print since 1959.
A Canadian Chaplain in the Great War:
Revisiting B.J. Murdoch’s The Red Vineyard
Edited by Ross Hebb
Nimbus Publishing Ltd., 2024
Now there is a fine annotated edition of this war memoir from priest and historian Dr. Ross Hebb, a fellow Maritimer, and the author of A Canadian Nurse in the Great War.
Initially Murdoch was Padre to the 132nd Infantry Battalion of the CEF, which was 80 percent Roman Catholic. But when he reached the front in 1917, he was responsible for all Catholics in the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade, which amounted to all the Catholics spread across four battalions of almost one thousand men each.
He was a perceptive young man with an eye for detail; he tells us not only of nurses and wounded soldiers but also of the beauty of the French countryside. He reveals the horrific trench warfare but also the relief offered by baseball games, amateur plays and entertainments and moving picture shows.
The nurses working in the military tent hospitals “were most attentive to the wounded without the slightest display of maudlin sympathy; but they worked hard and long and one never heard the least complaint from their lips.”
One of Murdoch’s tasks was to write to wives and mothers telling them of the death of their loved ones “and how they had been prepared to meet God.” Many of these women wrote back to Murdoch thanking him for his ministry. “I thought of how many women there must be over the world bearing great sorrows, but the eyes of the world are not focused on these.” Hebb, himself an Anglican priest, notes that, “For Murdoch, the only solace at this point was to link their sorrow with another mother, Mary, and her son, Jesus.”
The Red Vineyard is republished in full, with a valuable running commentary as well as an insightful introduction and epilogue and a helpful timeline.
More than a war diary, A Canadian Chaplain in the Great War offers an exceptional window into the world of the time. TAP
This will be Bp Critch’s inaugural sermon as the newly
elected bishop of the Diocese of Mahajanga in St Luke’s
Cathedral in the seaport city of Mahajanga in north-
western Madagascar on December 1st. It will be interpreted from English into Malagasy.
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THE ANGLICAN CHURCH of Canada is about to have a big conversation. The Primate’s Commission’s seven Hypotheses will likely dominate the work of COGS and General Synod (meeting June 23-29 in London, ON).
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FOR TOO LONG, we have danced around the reality of the Anglican Church of Canada’s decline in finances and attendance, with Church House releasing statistics only sporadically, and various leaders offering soothing sermons on how God is doing something special — along the lines of our declining numbers being a picture of the upside-down kingdom.
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THE VEN. Darrell Critch, a priest of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), was elected August 24 as Bishop of Mahajanga, Madagascar, a diocese of the Church in the Province of the Indian Ocean. Critch’s new diocese is part of an Anglican church in communion with the See of Canterbury, unlike the ACNA. This will likely make his ministry the first of its kind amid deep division across the Communion.
Now there is a fine annotated edition of this war memoir from priest and historian Dr. Ross Hebb, a fellow Maritimer, and the author of A Canadian Nurse in the Great War.
EVERYONE experiences grief. We have grieved the deaths of friends and family, including our only son, Sean, who died at the age of eleven. For Canadian Tim Challies, a Christian pastor, author and blogger, the sudden death of his son, Nick, on a playing field at the age of twenty, led him to process his grief by keeping a journal of reflections published as Seasons of Sorrow: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God.
In July 2023, Fr. Nathan Humphrey, rector of St Thomas’s in Toronto, was pleased to announce the appointment of Manuel or “Manny” Giovanni Piazza as Assistant Organist and Choirmaster. He had studied under John Tuttle, the Organist Emeritus at St Thomas’s.
The single largest initiative launched in the parish in 2023 was the St. Thomas’s Choristers program. Children ages seven to 17 (in grades two to twelve) rehearse every Thursday and sing at the 9:30 a.m. Sunday Low Mass. The young choristers bring in family members, which swells the congregation somewhat. Currently there are about 60 people in attendance at the 9:30 a.m. B.A.S. service.
Sue Careless spoke with Manuel Piazza about the St Thomas’s Choristers.
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