Anglican Catholic Church
Anglican Catholic Church belongs to the Anglican and Episcopal family of churches.
Governance: episcopal.
Anglican Catholic Church reports 71 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).
A Continuing Anglican body of the 1977 Congress of St Louis.
The largest church of the 1977 Congress of St. Louis — Anglicans who kept the 1928 Prayer Book and an unapologetically catholic faith when the Episcopal Church changed both.
Heritage
Born from the Congress of St. Louis in September 1977, where nearly two thousand Episcopalians met after the 1976 General Convention approved the ordination of women and a new prayer book. The Affirmation of St. Louis, adopted there, declared the new departures beyond the church's authority to make; the Anglican Catholic Church was constituted from that movement in 1978. It is Anglo-Catholic in doctrine and worship, holding the seven sacraments and the councils of the undivided church. Since 2017 it has been in full communion with the Anglican Church in America, the Anglican Province of America and the Diocese of the Holy Cross — a healing of divisions within the Continuing movement itself.
Theological family
Anglo-Catholic: the faith of the undivided church confessed through the Anglican formularies read catholically — seven sacraments, the real presence, prayer for the departed, and the threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons as of divine institution, restricted to men.
Who decides what
Episcopal: a College of Bishops, a Metropolitan, dioceses and synods including clergy and laity. Its constitution binds it to the Affirmation of St. Louis.
What a first-time visitor would find
The 1928 Book of Common Prayer or the Anglican Missal, celebrated with vestments, chant and ceremony — a sung Mass, often in a small parish where the congregation knows the liturgy by heart.
What it has always cared about
Continuity as the whole point: the conviction that doctrine, order and worship received from the undivided church are not a majority's to amend; the 1928 Prayer Book as a living rule of prayer.
Its gift to the wider church
The Continuing movement, with this church at its head, kept the classical Prayer Book tradition alive in America as a functioning church rather than a preservation society — and its 2017 intercommunion showed that churches born in protest can also reconcile.
Commonly confused with
With ACNA, a much larger and separate 2009 departure that ordains women in many dioceses and uses modern liturgies; with the Episcopal Church, left in 1977; and with the other Continuing jurisdictions, from several of which it is no longer divided.
Range of views inside it
Parishes vary in ceremonial elaborateness and in how strictly missal customs are kept; the doctrinal range is deliberately narrow.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific parish. RCMS 2020 counted 71 Anglican Catholic congregations. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Anglican Catholic parishes typically…" and yield to the parish's own materials.
Sources: Anglican Catholic Church — the Affirmation of St. Louis (Anglican Catholic Church) · Divided We Stand: A History of the Continuing Anglican Movement (Douglas Bess, Apocryphile Press) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)
Where Anglican Catholic Church churches are on the map
4 Anglican Catholic Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 4 states.
- California — 1
- Louisiana — 1
- New Hampshire — 1
- New Mexico — 1
More of the Anglican and Episcopal story · Find these churches on the map