Classification Continuing Anglican Polity Episcopal | Orientation Anglo-Catholic Region Canada | |
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Associations Traditional Anglican Communion Origin 1977
St. Louis, Missouri | ||
The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada (ACCC) is a Continuing Anglican church that was founded in 1977 by conservative Anglicans who had separated from the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC). It lists fifteen parishes and missions on its website; at its peak, the church listed more than forty parishes in affiliation.
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Affiliation
The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada is one of the churches that trace their origins to the Congress of St. Louis, the assembly that inaugurated the Continuing Anglican Movement and produced the Affirmation of St. Louis. The new church adopted the name, "Anglican Catholic Church." Its Canadian diocese shortly thereafter asked for and received a release from that body in order to become a self-governing Canadian church offering a conservative alternative to the more liberal Anglican Church of Canada.
The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada is a founding member of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC). The ACCC is the third-largest of the Anglican churches in Canada, after the ACC and the Anglican Church in North America.
Traditional worship and morality
The founding members of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada were dissatisfied with decisions made by the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC) to confer priestly ordination upon women and to make liturgical reforms that would evolve into the Book of Alternative Services. The ACCC continues to maintain an all-male clergy and recently has criticised what it considers to be the parent church's increasing acceptance of homosexuality. The church uses the 1962 Book of Common Prayer exclusively and rejects the possibility of remarriage after divorce.
Structure
The ACCC has parishes and missions throughout Canada. Most ACCC congregations are small, but the church experienced steady growth until 2008. On January 27, 2007, two suffragan bishops, the Right Reverend Craig Botterill and the Right Reverend Carl Reid, were consecrated by the primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, Archbishop John Hepworth, assisted by the diocesan and metropolitan of the ACCC, Bishop Peter Wilkinson (2005-2012), and retired former diocesan Bishop Robert Mercer, CR (1988-2005). In March 2013, the Very Reverend Shane Janzen was consecrated fifth diocesan and metropolitan bishop in Victoria, British Columbia.
Proposed ordinariate within the Roman Catholic Church
Until 2012, the TAC discussed a form of union with the Roman Catholic Church and stated that it had no doctrinal differences with Rome sufficient to prevent the success of this proposal. In October 2009, the ACCC welcomed an initiative from Pope Benedict XVI to create personal ordinariates for disaffected traditionalist Anglicans. On March 12, 2010, the ACCC formally requested the erection of an ordinariate in Canada. Since 2009, the ACCC has suffered some divisions over the apostolic constitution; seven of thirty-five parish groups (one fifth) removed themselves from the ACCC, for example. Partly in response to five ACCC priests receiving news from Roman Catholic authorities that they were not eligible for ordination in a future ordinariate, the ACCC divided into two non-geographical dioceses: the original Diocese of Canada (for parishes not ready or unwilling to enter into an ordinariate) and the Pro-Diocese of Our Lady of Walsingham (for parishes desiring to move forward into an ordinariate). Since 2012, however, the remaining Diocese of Canada has explicitly stated that it "will remain an Anglican church" and not enter the Ordinariate.