# 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 Office is headed by its Secretary General, the Reverend Canon Kenneth Kearon.

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.

The various Lambeth Conferences, expressing the Anglican viewpoint, mirror the gradual change that has taken place among Protestants generally.

Of course, the crowning event that has dramatically upset the traditional pattern of English religious history was the friendly visit paid by Dr. Fisher, then Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, to the Vatican last December.

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

In line with the suggestion of the Windsor Report, Williams has recently established a working group to examine the feasibility of an Anglican covenant which would articulate the conditions for communion in some fashion.

Simultaneous with debates about social theology and ethics, the Anglican Communion has debated prayer book revision and the acceptable grounds for achieving full communion with non-Anglican churches.

Since 1867 he has convened more or less decennial meetings of worldwide Anglican bishops, the Lambeth Conferences.

Along with primacy over the Archbishop of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury also has a precedence of honour over the other bishops of the Anglican Communion.

Widely accepted among Western Christians, including the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, the Lutheran Church and most liturgical Protestant denominations, the Athanasian Creed has been used in public worship less and less frequently.

In most provinces of the Anglican Communion, however, an archbishop has metropolitical and primatial power.

Since Pope Leo XIII issued the bull Apostolicae Curae in 1896, the Catholic Church has insisted that Anglican orders are invalid because of changes in the Anglican ordination rites of the 16th century and divergence in understanding of the theology of priesthood, episcopacy and Eucharist.

Since the Oxford Movement there has also been a modest flourishing of Benedictine monasticism in the Anglican Church and Protestant Churches.

It was this edition which was to be the official Book of Common Prayer, during the growth of the British Empire, and, as a result, has been a great influence on the prayer books of Anglican churches worldwide, liturgies of other denominations in English, and of the English language as a whole.

The Anglican Church of Korea has made a 1965 translation of the BCP in Korean and called it " gong-do-gi-do-mun " meaning common prayers.

This book ( which owes much to Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and other sources ) has widely supplanted the 1959 book, though the latter remains authorized.

Since the English Reformation, only Saint Charles Stuart has been canonized in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion.

But Linebarger's daughter Rosana Hart has indicated that he did not become an Anglican until 1950, and was not strongly interested in religion until later still.

Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has described homophobia as a " crime against humanity " and " every bit as unjust " as apartheid: " We struggled against apartheid in South Africa, supported by people the world over, because black people were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about ; our very skins.

Anglican opinion has differed as to the way in which episcopal government is de jure divino.

This has been reinforced by the Lambeth Conferences of Anglican Communion bishops, which first met in 1867.

A study of beliefs about miraculous healing among the more religiously committed has indicated that there are significant differences in belief about miraculous healing even among people within the same denomination ( Anglican ).

( Confusion has also been occasioned through his friendly controversy with one John Ainsworth, who left the Anglican for the Roman Catholic church.

It should be added, however, that a number of individual Orthodox theologians hold that under no circumstances would it be possible to recognise the validity of Anglican Orders.

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.

Anglican, Nontrinitarian and Protestant Christians have no permanent presence in the church – and some regard the alternative Garden Tomb, elsewhere in Jerusalem, as the true place of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection.

The draft presented to the Council on 8 March drew no serious criticism, but a group of 35 English-speaking bishops, who feared that the opening phrase of the first chapter, " Sancta romana catholica Ecclesia " ( the holy Roman Catholic Church ), might be construed as favouring the Anglican Branch Theory, later succeeded in having an additional adjective inserted, so that the final text read: " Sancta catholica apostolica romana Ecclesia " ( the holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church ).

According to Kallistos Ware, some Western theologians, both Roman Catholic and Anglican, see the theology of Palamas as introducing an inadmissible division within God ; however, others have incorporated his theology into their own thinking, maintaining, as Jeffrey D. Finch reports, that there is no conflict between his teaching and Roman Catholic thought.

As Anglicanism represents a broad range of theological opinion, its presbyterate includes priests who consider themselves no different in any respect from those of the Roman Catholic Church, and a minority who prefer to use the title presbyter in order to distance themselves from the more sacrificial theological implications which they associate with the word “ priest .” While priest is the official title of a member of the presbyterate in every Anglican province worldwide, the ordination rite of certain provinces ( including the Church of England ) recognizes the breadth of opinion by adopting the title The Ordination of Priests ( also called Presbyters ).

An assistant priest is a priest in the Anglican and Episcopal churches who is not the senior member of clergy of the parish to which they are appointed, but is nonetheless in priests ' orders ; there is no difference in function or theology, merely in ' grade ' or ' rank '.

John Macquarrie, described in the Handbook of Anglican Theologians ( 1998 ) as " unquestionably Anglicanism's most distinguished systematic theologian in the second half of the twentieth century ," wrote that " there should be an end to proselytizing but that equally there should be no syncretism of the kind typified by the Baha ' i movement " ( p. 2 ).

" The Anglican 33, no.

Census data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2004 reported that Sinhalese Australians are by religion 29. 7 percent Catholic ; 8. 0 percent Anglican, 9. 9 percent other Christian ; 46. 9 percent " Other Religions " ( mainly Buddhist ), and 5. 5 percent no religion.

Williams had read their writings, and his own experience of persecution by Archbishop Laud and the Anglican establishment and the bloody wars of religion that raged in Europe at that very time convinced him that a state church had no basis in Scripture.

The document acknowledges that there are serious problems facing prospects of reunion with Reformation communities that make no attempt to claim apostolic succession such as the Anglican communion does.

The Anglican Prayer Beads are not a Marian devotion, and there are no appointed meditations.

The night before her execution, she told the Reverend Stirling Gahan, the Anglican chaplain who had been allowed to see her and to give her Holy Communion, " Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.

St Paul's Anglican Cathedral is a Pro-Cathedral commissioned by Queen Adelaide on a visit to Malta, when she discovered there was no permanent place of Anglican worship on the island.

Others have left Anglicanism altogether for the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches, in the belief that liberal doctrinal innovations in the Anglican churches have resulted in Anglicanism no longer being a true branch of the " Church Catholic ".

The Church of Ireland has a similar declaration for its clergy, while some other churches of the Anglican Communion make no such requirement.

Following the Revolution, in 1784, the Commonwealth of Virginia enacted disestablishment of the Anglican Church, meaning it was no longer the state church.

By the turn of the century this was no longer sufficient and it was decided to create an additional parish, St Mellitus, the first in the Anglican Communion to bear that name.

Leeds has no Anglican cathedral, so the Parish church acts as a second base in the diocese, after Ripon Cathedral.

They are anomalies in the English ecclesiastical law, having no parish area, but being able to have an Anglican clergyman licensed there.