Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a tiny parish by Roman Catholic standards, has hired Matthew Larkin, one of Canada’s top organists and choir directors from the Anglican tradition.

It may seem odd a Catholic parish is hiring a music director from the Anglican world, but this move stems from Pope Benedict XVI’s vision of unity that led to his 2009 Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus. It created Ordinariates for Anglicans wishing to become Catholic Church while retaining elements of their liturgical, spiritual and musical patrimony. 

Annunciation, a former traditional Anglican parish, entered the Catholic Church in 2012, becoming part of the newly erected Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, a diocese-like structure covering North America with its cathedral in Houston, Texas.

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“I had the privilege of meeting with Matthew Larkin over the last few years as he prepared for entrance into the full communion of the Catholic Church,” said Fr. Doug Hayman, a former Anglican priest who was ordained a Catholic priest in 2013. “I knew something of his reputation in Anglican circles, and among musicians and choir directors more widely, and I found it quite humbling that he would join us in our little Ordinariate community.”

Larkin entered the Catholic Church last November. Trained in the Anglican cathedral tradition since childhood, he got his start at the age of eight as a chorister in St. George’s Anglican Cathedral in Kingston, Ont.

“Music was my gateway to Christian formation,” he said. “I think I knew very shortly after joining the choir for the first time that the Church was going to be the life to which I was called, and I have tried to live up to being an artist-in-service ever since.”

That service has taken Larkin to serve in Anglican cathedrals and large Anglo-Catholic venues in Toronto, Victoria and Ottawa. He has also built a reputation as a concert organist and harpsichordist in various venues. In 2017, he launched the Caelis Academy Ensemble, a concert choir that features many choristers who have sung under Larkin since their childhood.

His work as a musician took him into Catholic venues as well. He played regularly at Ottawa’s Notre Dame Cathedral for its Sunday English language Masses in the 1990s

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In 1997, Larkin heard the late Archbishop Marcel Gervais “preach very powerfully about what it meant to be Catholic, and what it was that the Church taught about God.”

“In that moment, a desire to be Catholic was kindled within me, and while it stayed on the margins of my professional work, I began to see the Catholic Church in a very real way as the authority and as the way forward in my Christian witness,” he said. “But any formal decision to move ahead with things remained on the backburner.”

A move by Annunciation last year to share space with St. Theresa Church, a beautiful downtown parish of the Archdiocese of Ottawa-Cornwall, helped put that desire on the front burner.

Annunciation had entered the Catholic Church with its own building, but its small size impeded its growth.

“Last September saw us step out in faith to explore St. Theresa as a larger space in which to develop our liturgical life — a church with phenomenal acoustics to allow us to spread our wings somewhat musically,” said Hayman. “Matthew Larkin has the experience and expertise to move us forward to the next level, to discover something more of our potential.”

Hayman stresses the purpose is not simply to “become bigger and richer.”

“The end of all growth in the Church is to produce fruits of the Kingdom of God, to enrich the whole body of Christ and to be salt and light in the world,” he said. “Beauty in music and liturgy honour God and give Him glory, and are great evangelistic tools as well, to draw people to Him.”

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Larkin noted the Church of England and Anglican denominations more generally “have embraced a more relativistic way of believing and ministering, and while that was discomforting for many of us, the musical pattern of worship keeps us grounded.”

“But worship is so much more than music, and faithful Christian witness is so much more than processing in and out of choir stalls and singing beautifully,” he said. “Sacred music is written, though, to enhance and beautify worship, though not to distract from it, and that is the balance we must always endeavour to strike.”