# redirect Anglican Communion

The Anglican Communion is an international association of national and regional Anglican churches ( and a few other episcopal churches ) in full communion with the Church of England ( which is regarded as the mother church of the worldwide communion ) and specifically with its principal primate, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

With a membership currently estimated at over 85 million members worldwide, the Anglican Communion is the third largest Christian communion in the world, after the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches.

The Anglican Communion considers itself to be part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and to be both Catholic and Reformed.

The Anglican Communion has no official legal existence nor any governing structure which might exercise authority over the member churches.

There is an Anglican Communion Office in London, under the aegis of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but it only serves a supporting and organisational role.

As mentioned above, the Anglican Communion has no international juridical organisation.

The Chair of St Augustine ( the episcopal throne in Canterbury Cathedral, Kent ), seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury in his role as head of the Anglican Communion

The body has a permanent secretariat, the Anglican Communion Office, of which the Archbishop of Canterbury is president.

In response, the American Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada answered that the actions had been undertaken after lengthy scriptural and theological reflection, legally in accordance with their own canons and constitutions and after extensive consultation with the provinces of the Communion.

All 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion are autonomous, each with its own primate and governing structure.

A world map showing the provinces of the Anglican Communion ( Blue ).

Also shown are the churches in full communion with the Anglican Communion: the Nordic Lutheran churches of the Porvoo Communion ( Green ) and the Old Catholic Church | Old Catholic churches of the Utrecht Union ( Red ).

In addition to other member churches, the churches of the Anglican Communion are in full communion with the Old Catholic churches of the Union of Utrecht and the Scandinavian Lutheran churches of the Porvoo Communion in Europe, the India-based Mar Thoma and Malabar Independent Syrian churches and the Philippine Independent Church, also known as the Aglipayan Church.

The Anglican Communion is a relatively recent concept.

Thus the only member churches of the present Anglican Communion existing by the mid-18th century were the Church of England, its closely linked sister church, the Church of Ireland ( which also separated from Roman Catholicism under Henry VIII ) and the Scottish Episcopal Church which for parts of the 17th and 18th centuries was partially underground ( it was suspected of Jacobite sympathies ).

The churches of the Anglican Communion have traditionally held that ordination in the historic episcopate is a core element in the validity of clerical ordinations.

More recently, disagreements over homosexuality have strained the unity of the Communion as well as its relationships with other Christian denominations, leading to another round of withdrawals from the Anglican Communion.

Some churches founded outside the Anglican Communion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, largely in opposition to the ordination of openly homosexual bishops and other clergy are usually referred to as belonging to the Anglican realignment movement, or else as " orthodox " Anglicans.

Representing as it did the efforts of only unauthorized individuals of the Roman and Anglican Churches, and urging a communion of prayer unacceptable to Rome, this association produced little fruit, and, in fact, was condemned by the Holy Office in 1864.

In the Anglican tradition, they are often known as the Daily Office or Divine Office, to distinguish them from the other Offices of the Church.

Most Anglican monastic communities use a Daily Office based on the Book of Common Prayer but with additional antiphons and devotions.

The All Saints Sisters of the Poor also use an elaborated version of the Anglican Daily Office.

" Canon C. 26 stipulates that " Every clerk ( cleric ) in Holy Orders is under obligation, not being let ( prevented ) by sickness or some other urgent cause, to say daily the Morning and Evening Prayer ...." In other Anglican provinces, the Daily Office is not a canonical obligation but is strongly encouraged.

* Daily Office of the Roman Catholic Church According to the Anglican Use-Online version of the Daily Office from the Book of Divine Worship an ecclesiatically approved variant on the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.

Non-Eucharistic vestments are typically referred to as " choir dress " or " choir habit ", in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican churches, because they are worn for the chanting of the Daily Office, which, in the West, takes place in the choir rather than the sanctuary.

" Anglican monks recite the Divine Office in choir daily, either the full eight services of the Breviary or the four offices found in the Book of Common Prayer and celebrate the Eucharist daily.

This was followed by the construction of a number of Government buildings, notably the former Provincial Commissioner's Office ( now State Lodge ) and the Old Prison ( now earmarked for the construction of an Anglican Cathedral ).

Bennett became involved in politics in the 1840s as a leader of the island's Anglican community and an opponent of responsible government, an argument he lost when an alliance of Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants persuaded the Colonial Office to grant Newfoundland self-government.

And Anglican Communion Office is in London.

The Anglican Diocese of Willochra is based in Gladstone, with the Registry ( the Diocesan Office ) housed in building in the main street.

It opens with the Calendar of the Church Year used in Anglican Use, followed by the Daily Office lectionary arranged in a two-year cycle.

* Daily Office According the Anglican Use

There are also used in Anglican communities where the traditional Divine Office is observed.

* Daily Office of the Roman Catholic Church According to the Anglican Use-Online version of the Daily Office from the Book of Divine Worship an ecclesiastically approved variant on the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.

* The Anglican Breviary-Anglican version of the Daily Office

* The Daily Office According the Anglican Use

The Anglican Consultative Council has a permanent secretariat ( the Anglican Communion Office ), based at Saint Andrew's House, London, which is responsible for organizing meetings of the " Instruments of Communion ".

but my primary aim is to transcribe what Englishmen themselves are saying and writing and implying about the Roman and Anglican Churches and about the present religious state of England.

An Anglican clergyman in Oxford sadly but frankly acknowledged to me that this is true.

There is no single " Anglican Church " with universal juridical authority as each national or regional church has full autonomy.

This had the effect of inculcating the principle of lex orandi, lex credendi (" the law of prayer is the law of belief ") as the foundation of Anglican identity and confession.

The oldest-surviving Anglican church outside of the British Isles ( Britain and Ireland ) is St Peter's Church in St. George's, Bermuda, established in 1612 ( though the actual building had to be rebuilt several times over the following century ).

In Western Christianity, this day is observed principally in the Catholic Church, although some churches of Anglican Communion and the Old Catholic Churches also celebrate it.

) In the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite and in the Anglican Communion, All Souls Day is instead transferred, whenever 2 November falls on a Sunday, to the next day, 3 November.

Saint Alcuin ( Alcuin of York ) is considered as a saint by all the main branches of Christianity: Roman Catholic, Anglican and Eastern Orthodox Churches.

In the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, he is a saint and pre-eminent Doctor of the Church, and the patron of the Augustinians ; his memorial is celebrated 28 August, the day of his death.

Under the Act of Settlement, male-preference primogeniture succession of an Anglican legitimate descendant of the Electress Sophia is automatic and immediate, neither depending on, nor waiting for, any proclamation.

Further, as the current monarch is a woman and both her eldest child and, in turn, his eldest child, are Anglican males, any change to the succession laws would have no immediate implications.

In Canada, where the Act of Settlement is now a part of Canadian constitutional law, Tony O ' Donohue, a Canadian civic politician, took issue with the provisions that exclude Roman Catholics from the throne, and which make the monarch of Canada the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, requiring him or her to be an Anglican.

The Porvoo Common Statement ( 1996 ), agreed to by the Anglican churches of the British Isles and most of the Lutheran churches of Scandinavia and the Baltic, also stated that " the continuity signified in the consecration of a bishop to episcopal ministry cannot be divorced from the continuity of life and witness of the diocese to which he is called.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and principal leader of the Church of England, the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury.