Dear Editor,

The Reverend Canon Peter Alexander Mullings, OD, is dead. He died on January 11, 2021 in Canada.

The former rector of the Church of the Ascension, Mona Heights, served the Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands for almost 50 years, and was one of the few known members of the clergy who had a bishop’s licence to conduct the rite of exorcism, the other being the late Canon Ernle Gordon, who died in November 2020.

Canon Peter, as he was affectionately called, served as chaplain to Jamaica College, and it was as chaplain that he represented the school at the State funeral of former Prime Minister Michael Norman Manley in March 1997.

He was among 40 people who made outstanding contributions to the advancement of education in Jamaica who received the Prime Minister’s Medal of Appreciation for Service to Education in June 2015. It was presented to him by former Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller.

He once shared with me that he was the priest that performed the last rites for Prime Minister Donald Sangster before he died in the hospital while in Canada for medical care. He also said that the former prime minister died one week before it was officially announced in Jamaica in 1967.

Canon Peter was a man filled with the spirit of courage and was never afraid to speak the truth. In one of his last interviews with the Jamaica Observer, he reminded the Church, especially the Anglican Church, that, although it has done a lot, “what it needs now is to realise that the Church is supposed to be the conscience of the nation”. (February 9, 2014).

Condolence to his wife Jean and family. May his soul rest in peace.

Dudley C McLean II

Mandeville, Manchester

dm15094@gmail.com