A time capsule inside a cornerstone laid in 1953, which disappeared from the Anglican Church of Canada’s national office more than two decades ago, has finally been recovered.
In April, General Synod archivist Laurel Parson received the time capsule, a copper box containing what the Canadian Churchman—now the Anglican Journal—called “the documents of history.” A contemporary Churchman article reported the laying of the cornerstone on Nov. 25, 1953 for a new building at 600 Jarvis Street in Toronto, which would serve as the church’s national office, known as Church House, until 2004.
Within the cornerstone laid by Archbishop Walter Barfoot, primate of what was then called the Church of England in Canada, were numerous artifacts of the day, from church publications to coins and secular newspapers. But in 2004, months after staff moved from 600 Jarvis to the current national office at 80 Hayden Street, the cornerstone disappeared, and with it the time capsule inside.
Now its fate is known. Parson says when the old Church House building at 600 Jarvis was torn down in 2006, a construction worker found the time capsule inside the cornerstone and kept it. “He opened it and very nicely stored everything in an accordion file folder case and looked after it well, but he didn’t try to return it to where it belonged,” Parson says.
Twenty years later, the worker brought the capsule to the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Toronto—his best guess as to its rightful owner.
“His conscience was bothering him, I guess, as he got older, and he took it to the archdiocese thinking they would want it or know what to do with it,” Parson says. “They recognized it wasn’t Catholic. It was Anglican.”
The Roman Catholics contacted the Anglican diocese of Toronto, where archivist and privacy officer Claire Wilton recognized that the time capsule belonged to General Synod.
“I just assumed that [the worker] found it and maybe didn’t realize [who] it belonged to but thought it was pretty neat and took it home and opened it,” Wilton says. “They’ve cared for it very well. Of that, I am appreciative. They could have just pitched it … Obviously they were interested in history that they wanted to keep that all together.”
Wilton contacted General Synod Archives and waited through winter until after Easter, when schedules allowed for her and Parson to open the capsule together.
“It was very interesting to see all the pieces that they put in a time capsule,” Parson says. “I’ve seen a time capsule being put together, but I’ve never seen one pulled apart afterwards.”
Time capsules offer value as a snapshot of what was going on at a particular time, she says. Parson notes that even astronauts who travelled to the moon took time capsules with them.
“It’s a way of keeping your history,” she says. “We’re not just people from this time period. We’re connected with the past.”
Laying the cornerstone
The Anglican Journal dug into news reports from the time on the laying of the cornerstone at 600 Jarvis Street. Along with the contents of the time capsule itself, media archives offer a glimpse into the state of the church and Canadian society in 1953, and the degree to which both have changed after more than 72 years.
A Toronto Evening Telegram article from Nov. 21, 1953 on the planned laying of the cornerstone for the new church building begins, “Rapid growth of the Church of England in Canada has resulted in more space being necessary for the head office.”
It quotes then-Canon Henry Robert Hunt, at the time acting general secretary of General Synod, who later became full-time general secretary and in 1960 the third suffragan bishop of the diocese of Toronto. “The new church house building will fill a very great need in the expanding work of the Anglican Church in Canada and will relieve the present overcrowded conditions of the buildings now in use,” Hunt tells the Telegram.
A Canadian Churchman article from Dec. 17, 1953 reports on the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone on Nov. 25. Two hundred people attended a luncheon at St. Paul’s Church on Bloor Street, located behind what in 2004 would become the church’s national office at 80 Hayden. Guests included Barfoot, three other archbishops, several bishops, representatives of government and other religious organizations, and dozens of clergy and lay people. The Churchman reports a Toronto bishop saying the erection of the new 600 Jarvis Church House building “would stand as a symbol of the Church’s determination to face courageously the challenge of the future.”
The crowd then marched in a colourful procession east along Bloor and south down Jarvis about 300 metres to the site of the new building. Reginald Soward, then chancellor of the diocese of Toronto who would go on to serve as chancellor of General Synod from 1983 to 1986, deposited the “documents of history” in the copper box inside the grey cornerstone.
Inclusion of the time capsule almost prevented workers from laying the cornerstone. As the Telegram reported afterward, Barfoot found that the cornerstone would not fit into the foundation because the copper box with the documents, set in a cavity carved into the stone, was too large. A skilled worker rushed to the scene but was unable to remedy the problem at the time, so the ceremony continued without the box. A worker later returned with a refitted box and placed it inside the cornerstone.
The Telegram said the cost of the building at 600 Jarvis was $225,000, which, adjusted for inflation, would be at least $2.7 million today.
Inside the time capsule: A glimpse into the past
Contents of the time capsule include multiple church publications: the Canadian Churchman, its national newspaper; The Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society; The Anglican Outlook and News Digest, a monthly publication focused on the church’s role in Canadian society; The Living Message, a monthly magazine published by the Women’s Auxiliary to the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada (MSCC), now Anglican Church Women of Canada; The Living Message for Juniors, a magazine for children; and Wider Horizons, the magazine of the Anglican Young People’s Association.
Articles paint a picture of the church’s views, concerns, and activities in the early years of the Cold War. The Nov. 19, 1953 edition of the Canadian Churchman includes a reprint of an editorial from the English Church Times condemning the atomic bomb and all other “methods of mass destruction.”
Its cover story, “Pioneers of the West honoured,” recounts the 100th anniversary celebration of the founding of the parish of St. Mary’s, Portage La Prairie by “a tiny band of settlers led by an Anglican priest” who “pushed west from the Red River settlement to start a new life on the fertile Portage plains.” A report on the election of then-Archdeacon Harry Hives as bishop of Keewatin includes a photo of Hives translating the Cree language.
Other articles detail an Ontario rural church conference and the diamond jubilee of the Anglican Women’s Training College, linked to Wycliffe College in Toronto. A theological reflection by Spencer H. Elliott ponders human existence beyond death. Unlike today’s Anglican Journal, which only features church-related advertisements, the pages of the Canadian Churchman are full of secular advertisements for products such as insurance, tailors, cleaning services, a hairdressing school, jewelry, shoes and automobiles.
Secular newspapers are also enclosed in the time capsule: issues of the Toronto Daily Star (now the Toronto Star) and The Toronto Evening Telegram from Nov. 24, 1953 and The Globe and Mail from Nov. 25. Reflecting the influence of the church at the time, the latter includes a weekly column by Archbishop Robert Renison, who served as bishop of Moosonee, metropolitan of the ecclesiastical province of Ontario and eventual namesake of Renison University College at the University of Waterloo.
Top news stories include Lester Pearson, Canada’s then secretary of state for external affairs and future prime minister, responding to a U.S. Senate committee request to question Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko; and a visit to Bermuda by young Queen Elizabeth II, who had taken the throne the previous year. Reverence for the monarchy was high among many Canadian Anglicans. The time capsule includes a number of contemporary coins that the Churchman described as “coins of the Realm, especially in connection with the Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.”
Additional church documents in the time capsule include Journal of Proceedings of the Eighteenth Session, the official record of the 1952 General Synod; minutes of the 1953 executive council of General Synod; the 1953 Year Book of the Church of England in Canada, later known as the Anglican Directory, which was discontinued in print form in 2019; and a short history of Church House.
Anglican Church ‘still very much a British institution’ in 1950s, historian says
Examining the contents of the time capsule, Alan Hayes, professor emeritus of church history at Wycliffe College, notes the sheer volume of publications, periodicals, documents and reports that the Church of England in Canada was producing at this time.
“They were just writing a lot,” Hayes says. “You get the sense of a denomination that is very busy, that’s probably got a lot of money, has a lot of people and [is] doing a lot of things and just influencing a lot of people. Of course, that would be true.”
Based on census figures, Hayes says, about 15 per cent of the Canadian population in 1953 identified as Anglican, compared to less than one per cent today. “The numbers tell the story there.” Secular ads in the Canadian Churchman, he says, were a testament to the number of Anglicans in early postwar Canada, with advertisers eager to reach such a large potential market.
The Anglican Church in Canada during this era was “still very much a British institution,” Hayes says. “People are still singing ‘God Save the Queen’ on Sunday mornings at the end of the church services, flying the Union Jack and trooping in the colours. They just think of Canadian Anglicanism as a satellite of the Church of England still.
“That’s going on, but it’s a kind of muscular denomination. It’s got a lot of people. It’s got money coming in and it’s doing a lot of work, publishing a lot.”
The Cold War overshadowed much of the church’s work at this time, Hayes adds. “You get the picture of that from the General Synod report.” On the one hand, he says, many Anglicans saw promoting Christianity as the best way to fight communism.
On the other hand, Hayes says, The Anglican Outlook and News Digest reflected more progressive views among Anglicans rooted in Christian socialism. “In a way, that newspaper is saying, ‘We should spend less time criticizing communism and more time promoting justice for our own people.’ So there are two views going on in the Anglican Church at that point, depending on who you’re reading.”
Record of the 1952 General Synod
Speeches, resolutions and reports at the 1952 General Synod, which took place Sept. 4-12, illuminate the priorities of the church in the early 1950s.
Ecumenism is a major focus, particularly Protestant-Roman Catholic relations. Barfoot’s opening remarks, known as the primate’s charge, include an update on the Third World Conference on Faith and Order in Lund, Sweden. Three Canadian Anglican representatives attended this international ecumenical gathering, which gave rise to the Lund Principle, stating that churches should act together in all matters except those where deep differences of conviction compel them to act separately.
“The Anglican Communion in its world-wide scope is an indispensable factor in the Ecumenical movement,” Barfoot says, adding that the Church of England in Canada can contribute to theological discussions between denominations through the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches.
Another focus is the ideological struggle of the Cold War, which Barfoot describes as continuing the same struggle that two world wars were fought over. “Half the world believes that not only is man not free but that he ought never to be free,” Barfoot says, which he contrasts to “Christian civilization.”
Anglican chaplains in the armed forces at this time were ministering to Canadian troops fighting in the Korean War and others stationed in Europe. Barfoot says from personal experience that “our priests in the Chaplains Corps are doing a magnificent job. I observed it in Korea last autumn and again in Germany this summer.” Yet the 1952 General Synod also adopted a resolution against war—referred to the House of Bishops—which said that halting “the advance of Marxist Communism (which in its nature is godless and materialistic)” and promoting “the spread of the Gospel and a way of life which is genuinely Christian and democratic” would require “a much greater measure of economic relief for the needy multitudes of Asia and elsewhere.”
Business of General Synod included a resolution on providing pensions for “unattached deaconesses” and trained women workers in the church, which was referred to the bishops.
“That was quite a scandal,” Hayes says. Women workers, he notes, were paid very little and female deacons were generally required to be single, meaning they had no income or pensions from husbands and received no income at all when they retired.
“Essentially what happens in those days is you’ve got a male church with a male hierarchy and male governance and a male theological school and male clergy workers,” Hayes says. “Then you have the Women’s Auxiliary, which has its own governance and it has its own training school and its own deaconesses and missionaries and church workers.”
The Women’s Auxiliary, he adds, “is raising a huge amount of money, but there’s this sense that women aren’t really getting recognized for all the work they’re doing. They run things, but they maybe feel like they’re in the shadow, and the men think that they’re really running the real church and the women aren’t.”
General Synod set up a committee on women’s work due to growing pressure, Hayes says, “to see if there’s some way to recognize women more and authorize them more. In due course, that’s going to lead to more women as synod delegates and more authority for deaconesses, and finally 20 years later to ordination of women.”
Another resolution at General Synod 1952 concerns “aliens performing marriages,” i.e. foreigners or non-citizens in the context of high levels of immigration to Canada, which was referred to the Committee on Marriage and Related Problems. A report from the Committee on Radio Broadcasting discusses possibilities for Anglican broadcasts on the new medium of television.
The 1953 executive council minutes note council’s approval of a recommendation from the diocese of Montreal to adopt a flag for the Church of England in Canada, asking members for design suggestions to present to General Synod. The national church would eventually adopt its current official flag in 1955.
MSCC report on residential schools
The 1952 report of the MSCC to General Synod includes an update on “Indian school administration,” referring to the residential schools run by various Christian denominations and funded by Canada’s federal government that sought to assimilate Indigenous children into the broader Canadian population. The schools forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families, forbid them from speaking their own languages and attempted to suppress their cultural identities. The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), published in 2015, documents pervasive neglect and abuse of students at residential schools and calls the Indian residential school system an act of cultural genocide. The Anglican Church administered about three dozen residential schools and hostels across Canada from the 1820s to 1969.
In its 1952 report to General Synod, the MSCC says St. Andrew’s School in Whitefish Lake, Ont. had ceased to function as a residential school in 1950; that two schools in Prince Albert, Sask., St. Alban’s and All Saints’, had been amalgamated to form the Prince Albert Indian School; and that two new schools were scheduled to begin construction that summer in Carcross, Yukon and Moose Factory, Ont. At two schools in the diocese of the Arctic in Fort George, Que. and Aklavik, N.W.T., the MSCC says, “our work is not as effective as it might be due to the lack of sufficient accommodation for all of the children who would like to be residential school pupils.”
Attending residential schools was in fact not voluntary for most Indigenous children. In 1920, the federal government amended the Indian Act to compel all Indigenous children to attend residential school, specifying that every “Indian child” between the ages of seven and 15 “who is physically able shall attend such day, industrial or boarding school as may be designated by the Superintendent General.”
Reporting “gratifying academic achievement” by pupils in the past few years, the 1952 MSCC report says that in co-operation with the Nutrition Branch of the federal government’s Department of National Health and Welfare—which in 1993 was split into Health Canada and what is now Human Resources Development Canada—the administration had “instituted a basic ration for its schools. The children now are assured of well balanced and nutritive meals.”
The TRC report, however, documents widespread malnutrition throughout the history of residential schools, which it calls a deliberate decision by the federal government that left thousands of children vulnerable to disease. Only in the late 1950s, the report says, did Ottawa adopt a residential school food allowance calculated to provide a diet that was “fully adequate nutritionally.” Even with increased funding, “schools still had difficulty providing students with adequate meals.”
The MSCC’s 1952 report continues, “The one ever-present worry and concern of the Administration is the proper staffing of its schools. In that children are now used less and less as workers about the schools our need for ‘general’ workers has increased. We now need more staff workers than formerly to care for the same number of children.”
The MSCC says it had boosted recruitment through offering annual wage increases to staff over the last three years and was preparing a “professionally produced film on its work … for circulation this autumn” to advertise “the need of the Schools for Anglican workers.”
Disappearance of time capsule coincided with tough time for church
In 2004, more than half a century after laying the cornerstone and months after staff had moved to new offices at 80 Hayden Street, the cornerstone and time capsule went missing from the offices of 600 Jarvis.
Brian Bukowski, web manager at General Synod, was early in his tenure working for the Anglican Church of Canada at the time. He says Church House management had planned to hold an event opening the time capsule as the old building was being dismantled.
When it was discovered that the cornerstone and time capsule were missing, he says, the reaction among staff members was one of sadness, reinforcing a more general sense of melancholy at Church House.
“It was a pretty tough time in the church,” Bukowski recalls. The Anglican Church of Canada in 2004 was still deep in the process of responding to its role in the residential school system, he says.
By 1969, the federal government had taken over all remaining Anglican-run residential schools. In subsequent years, many residential school survivors began to speak publicly about physical, emotional and sexual abuse they had experienced, as well as spiritual and cultural harm and intergenerational trauma. In 1993, then-primate Archbishop Michael Peers publicly apologized to survivors on behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada for harm caused by its involvement in the residential schools.
Class-action lawsuits against the government and churches began to appear in 1996. By 2000, Council of General Synod was considering bankruptcy. An Anglican Journal article in May that year warned of the church “being bled to death financially by the legal costs and psychologically from the sheer effort of focusing on a problem with no clear solution.”
Many Anglicans in the early 2000s feared for the church’s survival, Hayes says. “They thought it was going to go bankrupt. They thought that they were going to spend all their money just fighting lawsuits.”
The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which was approved in 2006 and came into effect in 2007, capped churches’ financial liabilities for compensation of claims, which Hayes says freed up money the church had allotted to pay legal fees. “That really turned a corner,” he says.
Finding the time capsule provides a further sense of closure for staff members who worked at 600 Jarvis Street, Bukowski says.
Church growth and decline parallel broader social trends
Hayes says the rapid expansion of the church in the early 1950s reflected broader social trends in Canada during the postwar era, which saw unprecedented economic growth, a population boom, rising living standards and a new sense of optimism after the turmoil of the Great Depression and World War II.
“This was the baby boom generation for sure,” Hayes says. “They were building all these new churches … All these suburbs were being established and growing, and the churches just kind of followed. The churches thought it was going to just last forever, which of course it didn’t.”
Citing historians Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald—who in their book Leaving Christianity document how Canadians began to move away from organized Christianity in the 1960s—Hayes says Anglicans, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Baptists and the United Church shared a similar attitude during the postwar church-building boom.
“They were all just terribly optimistic,” Hayes says. “They were all building suburban churches. They were all raising money and they just thought it was just going to last forever.”
Today, postwar trends for both the church and Canada have reversed. While the Anglican Church of Canada has grappled with declining membership and church attendance, socioeconomic data in Canada reveal growing poverty and declining birth rates.
Statistics Canada figures show food insecurity reached a historic high in 2025, with nearly 10 million people in households struggling to afford food. Canada’s fertility rate hit a record low in 2024 of 1.25 children per woman, which studies have linked to high living costs. The federal government in 2024 declared a national housing crisis.
For Canadian Christians in churches with declining membership, Hayes says, the realization that the dominance of organized Christianity would not return eventually brought about a qualitative shift in attitude.
“When people realized the good old days aren’t going to come back, then they began thinking, ‘Well, we may not have many people, but the people we have are more committed and more educated and more active and give more money … Even though the numbers are down, we’re not proportionally weaker. In some ways we’re stronger.’”
Asked what Canadian Anglicans from 1953 might be able to teach their counterparts in 2026, Hayes says, “Don’t take too much for granted.”
Wilton commends Anglicans of the past for their efforts to document history. “Obviously they cared enough about what was happening,” she says. “They wanted the future to be able to see that and have it preserved.”
Contents of the time capsule will be held together in the General Synod Archives.
