A Catholic bishop slammed a church choir for altering a popular Christmas carol to include woke ideology and terminology in the song.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, took issue with the song performed by All Saints with Holy Trinity choir in Loughborough, England.

“God rest you queer and questioning, your anxious hearts be still,” an altered line in “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” said, according to Fox News.

“God rest you also, women, who by men have been erased,” another line in the song said. “Through history ignored and scorned, defiled and displaced.”

Nichols responded, “I think what Christmas does, and many other moments, it tells us the importance of ritual.”

“Ritual helps us to step outside of our own little bubble and connect with something we have received, inherited and that we hope to pass on,” he continued. “Those values are the continuation of musical repertoire, of the ability to sing together, of looking at the rituals that have been fashioned over centuries. Those are probably for me more important than particular sensitivities which come and go.”

Earlier this week, Catholic priest Father Frank Pavone fired back after being defrocked by the Vatican for allegedly political reasons, charging that his dismissal was due to cancel culture in the Catholic Church that needs “to be exposed.”

Pavone, who is the founder of Priests for Life, has become known for blasting President Biden and Democrats on social media, The Daily Wire reported. The Catholic News Agency (CNA) obtained a letter from Archbishop Christophe Pierre to U.S. bishops that claimed Pavone was dismissed for his social media activity and “persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop.” In an email to the CNA, Pavone said that the news outlet had learned of the move before he had.

On Monday, Pavone spoke with Fox News host Laura Ingraham about the news.

“This is actually the culmination of 21 years of abuse by church authorities to me and to my ministry despite the fact that we help the Vatican,” he said. “We help to run some of the operations out of the pope’s mission to the United Nations. We help the secretary of state with international pro-life issues. We run the largest ministry for healing after abortion, for which Pope Francis has personally encouraged me to keep going on it. We do all kinds of other pro-life work, which many of our viewers are familiar.”

Pavone then attributed his apparent dismissal to cancel culture. A 2020 tweet from Pavone referred to “supporters of this goddamn loser Biden and his morally corrupt, America-hating, God-hating Democrat party.”

“Why are they doing this?” he asked. “A lot of it obviously is connected with the cancel culture that comes against supporters of President Trump and critics of the Democrat Party, and we’re only gonna get louder about that. We’re not going to be silenced.”

Pavone added that he would continue to be a leader in the pro-life movement.

“My vocation is to be a priest and to be a full-time pro-life leader and I don’t intend to walk away from either one of those,” he stated. Pavone also said he would appeal to the pope to reverse the decision.

“If the pope signs off on something, what they mean is there’s nobody in the church above the pope, we all understand this. But that doesn’t mean there’s no way to change this. The pope himself can reverse it, the next pope can reverse, and the people – I’m appealing to the people of God to continue working with us and show their support for this work of saving lives and healing hearts,” he said.

“It’s a cancel culture in the church. It’s got to be exposed and it’s got to be resisted,” Pavone concluded.

Hank Berrien contributed to this report.

United Kingdom authorities arrested a pro-life woman praying outside an abortion clinic for allegedly breaking a temporary Public Space Protection Order on four separate occasions earlier this month.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a 45-year-old charity volunteer, was arrested and charged on four counts after she told police she “might” be silently praying near the U.K.’s leading provider of NHS-funded abortion services BPAS Robert Clinic in Kings Norton, Birmingham, according to local media.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) published footage earlier this week showing authorities approaching Vaughan-Spruce outside the clinic. During the interaction, authorities questioned why Vaughn Spruce was standing outside the abortion facility “of all places.”

“Are you standing here as part of a protest?” asked the officer.

“No, I’m not protesting,” Vaughan-Spruce said.

“Are you praying?” the police officer asked her.

“I might be praying in my head,” she replied.

ADF said authorities confronted the woman after receiving complaints from an observer who suspected that Vaughan-Spruce was praying silently in her mind.

Following her arrest, Vaughan-Spruce told ADF that it was “abhorrently wrong” that authorities searched, arrested, interrogated, and charged her “simply for praying in the privacy of my own mind.”

“Nobody should ever be subject to harassment,” she said. “But what I did was the furthest thing from harmful. I was exercising my freedom of thought, my freedom of religion, inside the privacy of my own mind.”

“Nobody should be criminalized for thinking and for praying in a public space in the U.K.,” Vaughan-Spruce added.

Police arrested Vaughan-Spruce on December 6 and subsequently charged her on December 15 with four counts of failing to comply with a Public Space Protection Order in so-called censorship zones, which authorities introduced to criminalize individuals appearing to be “engaging in any act of approval or disapproval or attempted act of approval or disapproval.”

Such acts include “verbal or written means, prayer or counseling” in relation to abortion, according to ADF U.K.

Birmingham City Council officials enforced the order earlier this year, which local media reported bans explicitly protesting abortion outside clinics after members of the “40 Days For Life” anti-abortion group began repeatedly posting up outside the center.

Police said such protests reportedly led to verbal and physical confrontations.

Jeremiah Igunnubole, legal counsel for ADF U.K. supporting Vaughan-Spruce, said, “Isabel’s experience should be deeply concerning to all those who believe that our hard-fought fundamental rights are worth protecting.”

“It is truly astonishing that the law has granted local authorities such wide and unaccountable discretion, that now even thoughts deemed ‘wrong’ can lead to a humiliating arrest and a criminal charge,” Igunnubole said.

The Daily Signal reported that Scottish communications officer for ADF U.K. Lois McLatchie said in a statement that “no citizen should be criminalized for legitimate, peaceful activity, even prayer.”

“Isabel’s case demonstrates just how far the state can go if we do not vigilantly guard fundamental rights and freedoms,” McLatchie said.

Vaughn-Spruce posted bail and will appear at Birmingham Magistrates’ Court on February 2.

The arrest follows two other incidents within the last two years where local police told a praying woman in Southern England to leave despite standing outside the local censorship zone, and a grandmother from Liverpool was arrested and fined for praying silently near an abortion facility on a walk during COVID lockdown.