Anglican Catholic Church of Canada

Infobox Christian denomination
name = Anglican Catholic Church of Canada

|center
imagewidth =135px
caption = The ACCC Escutcheon.
main_classification = Continuing Anglican
orientation = Anglo-Catholic
polity = Episcopal
founder =
founded_date = 1977
founded_place = St. Louis, Missouri
separated_from = Anglican Church of Canada
parent =
merger =
separations =
associations = Traditional Anglican Communion
area = Canada, United States
congregations =
members =
footnotes = The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada (ACCC) is an Anglican church that was founded in the 1970s by conservative Anglicans who 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 Anglican Catholic Church of Canada 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 exclusively the 1962 Book of Common Prayer and rejects the possibility of remarriage after divorce.

The ACCC is the second-largest of the Anglican churches in Canada. Like the similarly named American body, the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada is a product of the Congress of St. Louis which founded the Continuing Anglican Movement with the signing of the Affirmation of St. Louis, and was carved out of the original jurisdiction of the Anglican Church in North America. Today, however, it is unaffiliated with the US Anglican Catholic Church. Instead, the ACCC is a member of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), represented in the United States by the Anglican Church in America.

The ACCC has about forty-five parishes and missions throughout Canada, as well as one parish in Washington State. Although most ACCC congregations are relatively small the church has also experienced steady growth in recent years, especially in Alberta and the Atlantic provinces Fact|date=May 2008. The current bishop of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada is the Right Reverend Peter Wilkinson of Victoria, British Columbia.

The TAC is currently discussing a form of union with the Roman Catholic Church and states that it has no doctrinal differences with Rome sufficient to prevent the success of this proposal [http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0506488.htm] [http://www.themessenger.com.au/news01_02%202006.htm] .

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, Bishop Peter Wilkinson and also the retired Bishop Robert Mercer, CR.

External links

* [http://www.anglicancatholic.ca Official website of The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada]
* [http://members.shaw.ca/frdon/index.htm Cathedral Church of Saint John the Evangelist, Victoria, British Columbia]
* [http://www.cathedraloftheannunciation.org Cathedral of the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Ottawa, Ontario]