Anglican Beliefs and the Anglican Communion

1. What Do Anglicans Believe?

Anglicans believe the faith set out in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, hold the Bible to contain all things necessary to salvation, baptise with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, celebrate the Eucharist as the central act of Christian worship, and retain an ordained ministry of bishops, priests and deacons standing in historic succession. Anglicans reject the universal jurisdiction and the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome. Those commitments are shared across the Anglican Communion, and almost everything else varies.

The most compact Anglican statement of that core is the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, adopted by American bishops in 1886 and by the Lambeth Conference of 1888 as the basis on which Anglicans would seek reunion with other churches. It names four things: the Holy Scriptures as containing all things necessary to salvation, the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds as the sufficient statement of the faith, the two sacraments ordained by Christ himself (baptism and the Lord's Supper) administered with Christ's own words and the elements he appointed, and the historic episcopate locally adapted to the varying needs of nations and peoples.

What the Quadrilateral Leaves Open

Read carefully, the Quadrilateral is a floor rather than a full doctrinal system. It does not settle what happens to the bread and wine, whether the Eucharist is a sacrifice, how many sacraments there are in a wider sense, who may be ordained, or how Scripture is to be interpreted when Christians read it differently. Anglicanism has generally treated that openness as a feature, holding that a church can be united in worship and order while its members hold a range of theological opinions. Critics inside and outside Anglicanism reply that a floor without walls cannot hold a house together, and the strains described later on this page are the practical test of that objection.

For where Anglicanism sits on the wider map of Christian bodies, see our guide to the Christian denominations and how they divide. This page stays with Anglicanism itself.

2. Where Anglicanism Came From

Anglicanism began as the English Reformation, a break with Rome that started as a jurisdictional quarrel and became a doctrinal one over the following three decades. In 1534 the Act of Supremacy declared Henry VIII the supreme head on earth of the Church of England, after the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Henry died holding much of Catholic doctrine and practice, and the theological reformation of the English church happened mainly under his son and his younger daughter.

The Sequence in Brief

• 1534. The Act of Supremacy severs English jurisdictional ties to Rome. Thomas More and John Fisher are executed for refusing the oath, and are canonised by the Catholic Church in 1935.
• 1547 to 1553. Under Edward VI, Thomas Cranmer produces the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 and the more thoroughly Reformed revision of 1552, and the Edwardine Ordinal of 1550 replaces the medieval rites of ordination.
• 1553 to 1558. Mary I restores communion with Rome, and roughly three hundred Protestants are burned, Cranmer among them. The persecution fixes an anti-Roman memory in English Protestantism that lasts for centuries.
• 1559. Elizabeth I's Act of Supremacy and Act of Uniformity establish the settlement that survives. Elizabeth takes the title Supreme Governor rather than Supreme Head, and a revised Prayer Book becomes the mandatory liturgy.
• 1571. The Thirty-nine Articles receive their final form and are given statutory force.

The Elizabethan Settlement

The Elizabethan Settlement is the hinge of everything that follows. It kept the medieval structures of the English church intact (dioceses, cathedrals, bishops, parish system, a single mandatory liturgy) and filled them with a Reformed theology, then required outward conformity while declining to interrogate private belief closely. That combination produced a national church broad enough to contain people whose convictions were far apart, and the breadth was deliberate policy.

The settlement also produced two groups it could not hold. English Catholics who refused to attend the parish church became recusants and paid heavy fines, and priests trained abroad who returned were executed as traitors under Elizabeth and her successors. Puritans who found the settlement insufficiently Reformed pressed for further change, and their failure to secure it eventually produced the Congregational, Presbyterian and Baptist bodies of English dissent. For the wider European story behind these events, see our guide to the Protestant Reformation.

3. The Book of Common Prayer

The Book of Common Prayer is the single most important document in Anglicanism, and Anglicans have often said that their theology is found in their prayers rather than in a confession of faith. Thomas Cranmer compiled the first English Prayer Book in 1549 out of the Sarum Use and other medieval Latin sources, revised it in a more Protestant direction in 1552, and the book that shaped the tradition longest is the revision of 1662, still legally the doctrinal standard of the Church of England.

What the Prayer Book Does

Cranmer's book compressed the eight monastic hours into Morning and Evening Prayer, arranged the Psalter to be read through every month and most of the Bible to be read through every year, and set the whole in English prose of enormous durability. Phrases from it (dearly beloved, to have and to hold, till death us do part, ashes to ashes, dust to dust) entered the English language and never left. An Anglican formed by daily Morning and Evening Prayer absorbs a great deal of Scripture without ever opening a study guide.

Anglican theologians describe this arrangement with the ancient formula lex orandi, lex credendi, the law of praying establishes the law of believing. Because Anglicanism has no magisterium able to define doctrine for the whole Communion, the liturgy carries a weight that in Catholicism is shared with the teaching office. That gives Anglican worship real doctrinal authority, and it also means that liturgical revision becomes doctrinal revision, which is why Prayer Book revisions have been among the fiercest fights in Anglican history.

Where the Prayer Book and the Missal Differ

A Catholic attending Evensong will recognise nearly everything: the psalms, the canticles Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, the collects, the creed. The divergences appear in the Communion service. Cranmer's 1552 rite removed the language of offering the sacrifice, moved the prayer of oblation to follow reception, and prescribed ordinary bread. The words of administration in 1559 combined a 1549 phrase affirming the Body of Christ with a 1552 phrase directing the communicant to feed on Christ in the heart by faith, deliberately allowing communicants of different convictions to receive the same sacrament with different understandings of what they were receiving.

The Catholic position is that the Eucharist is the true Body and Blood of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine, and that the Mass makes present the one sacrifice of Calvary rather than repeating it. For the full account, see our guides to the Real Presence in the Eucharist and the Mass as sacrifice.

4. The Thirty-nine Articles

The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion are the confessional statement of the Church of England, given final form in 1571 and printed at the back of the Book of Common Prayer ever since. They were written as boundary markers for a national church, and they show it: some articles state the catholic faith held by all Christians, some take a clear Reformed position, and some are addressed to sixteenth-century controversies in language that presumes the reader knows what was being argued about.

What the Articles Affirm

• The catholic core. The Trinity, the incarnation, the descent into hell, the resurrection, the Holy Spirit, the sufficiency of Scripture, and the three creeds (Articles 1 to 8).
• Reformation soteriology. Original sin and the bondage of the will apart from grace, justification by faith only, good works as the fruit of faith rather than its cause, and predestination described as a comfort to godly persons (Articles 9 to 18).
• Church and sacraments. Two sacraments of the Gospel ordained by Christ, with confirmation, penance, orders, matrimony and unction described as commonly called sacraments yet grown partly of corrupt following of the apostles and lacking a visible sign ordained by God (Articles 19 to 36).
• Church and state. The royal supremacy and the flat denial that the Bishop of Rome has any jurisdiction in England (Article 37), together with the right of Christians to hold property and the lawfulness of an oath sworn before a magistrate (Articles 38 and 39). Permission for clergy to marry stands earlier, at Article 32.

What the Articles Deny

Article 22 rejects what it calls the Romish doctrine concerning purgatory, pardons, the veneration of images and relics, and the invocation of saints, describing it as a fond thing vainly invented and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture. Article 28 states that transubstantiation cannot be proved by Holy Writ and overthrows the nature of a sacrament, while affirming that the Body of Christ is given, taken and eaten in the Supper in a heavenly and spiritual manner, received by faith. Article 31 calls the sacrifices of Masses, in which the priest was said to offer Christ for the living and the dead to have remission of pain or guilt, blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits.

Those are strong words, and Catholics should read them for what they targeted. Article 31 attacks a late medieval commerce in Masses said for money, and Article 22 attacks the abuses in the trade in indulgences that provoked Luther. The Council of Trent condemned the same abuses. The doctrines themselves are another matter, and the Catholic Church continues to teach the sacrificial character of the Mass, the reality of purgatory as final purification, and the intercession of the saints.

How Binding Are They Now?

The force of the Articles varies across the Communion, and this is one of the sharpest divides inside Anglicanism. In the Church of England, clergy make a Declaration of Assent affirming that the Church's faith is set forth in the historic formularies including the Articles, and that they will make that faith their own in their preaching. The Diocese of Sydney, the Church of Nigeria and the provinces aligned with GAFCON treat the Articles as a live confessional standard. The Episcopal Church prints them among its Historical Documents. The 1968 Lambeth Conference recommended that subscription to the Articles be dropped or heavily qualified, and many provinces did so.

Text of the Articles quoted from the Book of Common Prayer (1662). The 1968 Lambeth recommendation appears in that conference's Resolution 43. Provincial practice is summarised from the constitutions and canons published by each province.

5. The Via Media and Its Critics

The via media, the middle way, is Anglicanism's classic description of itself: a church both catholic and reformed, standing between Rome and Geneva and taking what is true from each. The phrase became current in the nineteenth century through John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement, though the underlying argument is older and its greatest exponent is Richard Hooker, whose Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity appeared from 1594.

Hooker's Argument

Hooker wrote against Puritan critics who held that anything without express biblical warrant must be removed from the Church. His reply was that Scripture is supreme in matters necessary to salvation, and that in matters of church order and ceremony the Church may use reason and follow the practice handed down to it, provided nothing contradicts Scripture. Anglicans later summarised this as the three-legged stool of Scripture, tradition and reason, a phrase Hooker never used and which flattens his position, since he plainly subordinated the other two to Scripture rather than balancing all three.

Hooker's Anglicanism is genuinely attractive, and Catholics should say so. He defends the visible Church, the sacraments as instruments of grace, a settled liturgy, and the authority of the Church's continuous practice, all against a biblicism that would sweep them away. His account of the Eucharist teaches a real participation in Christ. The Catholic difficulty lies elsewhere.

The Catholic Objection

The Catholic objection to the via media is that a middle way requires something able to hold the position when the two sides pull. Newman began as the via media's most brilliant defender and ended by concluding that the middle way existed on paper and not in history, that the ancient councils showed a Church that decided disputed questions with authority, and that the Anglican settlement had inherited the structures of that Church while removing the office that made them work. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1845, and was canonised in 2019.

Anglicans answer that dispersed authority is a deliberate choice rather than an accident: Scripture read in the Church, tested by reason and by the councils of the ancient undivided Church, and received by the whole body of the faithful. They point out that Rome's answer requires accepting an office whose scope they believe the New Testament does not support. That argument is set out in full in our guide to the papacy and Petrine authority, and the underlying question of how Scripture and Tradition relate is covered in Sacred Tradition.

Catholics read Acts 15 as showing the apostolic Church settling a disputed question by a decision that bound the churches. Anglicans read the same chapter as a model of conciliar deliberation in which the whole assembly, and the local churches receiving the letter, share in the outcome. The two readings account for much of the distance between the traditions.

6. Churchmanship: Anglo-Catholic to Evangelical

Churchmanship is the Anglican word for the parties inside Anglicanism, and knowing them is the only way to make sense of the tradition. Two Anglican parishes in the same city can differ so widely in worship, doctrine and piety that a visitor would take them for different denominations. The three broad currents are Anglo-Catholic, evangelical and broad or liberal, with charismatic renewal cutting across all three since the 1960s.

Anglo-Catholics

Anglo-Catholics hold that the Church of England is a branch of the one catholic Church that kept its bishops, sacraments and priesthood through the Reformation, and that Anglican practice should reflect that inheritance fully. The movement began at Oxford in 1833 with John Keble's Assize Sermon and the Tracts for the Times of Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey and others. Anglo-Catholic parishes commonly use eucharistic vestments, incense and reservation of the sacrament, hear confessions, pray the rosary, honour Mary and the saints, and celebrate a rite close in shape to the Roman Mass.

Anglo-Catholicism also produced the slum priests of the Victorian industrial parishes, who took the movement's sacramental theology into the poorest districts of London and the northern cities and paid for it in health and reputation. That combination of high sacramentalism and social work is one of the tradition's real achievements.

Evangelicals

Anglican evangelicals stand in the line of the Reformation formularies and of the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival, and hold that the Church of England is a Reformed church whose doctrine is stated in the Thirty-nine Articles. They emphasise the authority and sufficiency of Scripture, justification by faith, penal substitutionary atonement, expository preaching, and personal conversion. Their worship is typically simple, the sermon is long, and the Lord's Supper is understood as a memorial and a spiritual feeding rather than a sacrifice offered by a priest.

Anglican evangelicalism produced William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect who drove the abolition of the British slave trade, the Church Missionary Society whose work planted much of the Communion in Africa and Asia, and, in a strongly Reformed form, the Diocese of Sydney. John Wesley was an Anglican priest who died in communion with the Church of England, and Methodism grew out of this current before separating into its own body.

Broad Church and Liberal Anglicans

Broad Church Anglicans hold that Christian doctrine develops as human understanding develops, that the Church should engage modern scholarship and modern moral questions openly, and that comprehensiveness is itself an Anglican virtue. The current runs from the Latitudinarians of the seventeenth century through the contributors to Essays and Reviews in 1860 to much of the leadership of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church today. Its critics inside Anglicanism, from both other parties, argue that it concedes too much to the surrounding culture.

Charismatic Anglicans

Charismatic renewal reached Anglicanism from the 1960s and now runs through parishes of every churchmanship. Holy Trinity Brompton in London is the best known example, and the Alpha Course it developed has been used by Catholic parishes as well. Charismatic Anglicans emphasise the gifts of the Spirit, extended sung worship and prayer for healing, alongside whatever eucharistic theology their parish holds. Our guide to the Holy Spirit and his gifts covers the Catholic teaching on the same territory.

7. How the Anglican Communion Works

The Anglican Communion is a fellowship of self-governing national and regional churches, called provinces, which recognise one another and are in communion with the See of Canterbury. No province can legislate for another, no central body can discipline a province, and the Archbishop of Canterbury has no jurisdiction outside England. Authority in the Communion is moral and relational, and every crisis in Anglican life since the 1990s has tested how much weight that kind of authority can carry.

The Anglican Communion Office describes the Communion as more than forty autonomous member churches in over 165 countries, with a worldwide membership it reports as around 85 million. The figure is the Communion's own self-description and is not an independently audited count.

The Four Instruments of Communion

• The Archbishop of Canterbury. The focus of unity and the historic see with which member churches are in communion. The office carries precedence and convening power, and no power to overrule a province.
• The Lambeth Conference. A gathering of the Communion's bishops held roughly every ten years since 1867. Its resolutions carry great moral weight and no legislative force. Lambeth 1998 Resolution I.10 on human sexuality is the most contested example, treated by many provinces as the Communion's standing teaching and by others as advisory.
• The Anglican Consultative Council. Founded in 1971, the only Instrument that includes clergy and laity as well as bishops. It is a registered body with a permanent secretariat, and it advises.
• The Primates' Meeting. Convened first in 1979 as a forum for the senior bishop of each province for consultation and prayer. Recent meetings have attempted disciplinary measures, and their non-binding character has been demonstrated by the results.

Why Canterbury Cannot Settle Disputes

The limits are structural rather than personal. Each province has its own constitution, canons, synod and property, and derives no legal authority from Canterbury. When the Primates' Meeting of 2016 asked that the Episcopal Church be excluded for three years from representing the Communion in ecumenical and interfaith bodies, the request had no mechanism behind it, and the Anglican Consultative Council seated Episcopal representatives that year. The proposed Anglican Covenant of 2009, which would have created an agreed process for handling disputes, failed to secure adoption in the Church of England itself.

Catholic doctrine holds that the college of bishops has a visible head, and that the Bishop of Rome exercises full, supreme and universal power over the whole Church which he can always freely exercise (Lumen Gentium 22). Anglicans regard that claim as the very thing the Reformation rejected. What both sides can observe is that the Anglican Communion is currently testing, in real time and at real cost, whether a worldwide church can hold together without a universal office of final decision.

8. The Major Provinces

The Anglican Communion's centre of gravity has moved decisively from England to Africa, and the provinces that shape Anglican life today are not the ones that did so a century ago. Each province below governs itself, and the differences between them in size, theology and practice are large.

The Church of England

The Church of England is the mother church of the Communion and the established church of England, with the monarch as Supreme Governor, twenty-six bishops sitting in the House of Lords, and governance shared between the General Synod and the two provinces of Canterbury and York. Its own Statistics for Mission series records attendance that has fallen substantially over recent decades, and the Church of England remains woven into English public life through parish churches, cathedrals, chaplaincies and around four and a half thousand schools it maintains with the state.

Attendance trends are described from the Church of England's own annual Statistics for Mission reports. School and Lords figures are from the Church of England's published information about its own institutions.

The Episcopal Church

The Episcopal Church is the historic Anglican province in the United States, organised after the American Revolution when clergy could no longer swear allegiance to the crown, and its first bishop, Samuel Seabury, was consecrated in 1784 by Scottish bishops who required no such oath. It is governed by a General Convention of bishops, clergy and lay deputies, meeting with a legislative structure closer to American civil government than to English synodical practice. Its own parochial reports show baptised membership under two million and declining, and it holds substantial historic endowments and prominent buildings.

The Anglican Church in North America

The Anglican Church in North America was formed in 2009 by congregations and dioceses that separated from the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, chiefly over the authority of Scripture and questions of sexuality and marriage. ACNA is not a member province of the Anglican Communion, and it is recognised as authentically Anglican by a number of Communion provinces, principally those aligned with GAFCON. It ordains women to the priesthood in some dioceses and not in others, a compromise written into its own constitution.

Episcopal Church membership and attendance figures are drawn from that church's own annual parochial report tables, published by its Office of the General Convention, and are self-reported by parishes. ACNA's structure and its provision on women's ordination are stated in its published constitution and canons.

GAFCON and the Global South

GAFCON, the Global Anglican Future Conference, first met in Jerusalem in 2008 and issued the Jerusalem Declaration, a fourteen-point statement of Anglican orthodoxy affirming the creeds, the Thirty-nine Articles, the 1662 Prayer Book, the authority of Scripture, and marriage as between one man and one woman. GAFCON describes itself as representing the majority of the world's practising Anglicans and functions as a movement of provinces and dioceses rather than as a separate communion. The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches, which adopted the Cairo Covenant in 2019, pursues similar aims through a covenanted structure.

The claim about representing a majority of practising Anglicans is GAFCON's own, made in its published statements. The Jerusalem Declaration text is published by GAFCON.

Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya

The Church of Nigeria is the largest province in the Anglican Communion by the membership it reports, and the Anglican churches of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and South Sudan are among the largest and fastest growing. These provinces are theologically conservative, largely evangelical with strong charismatic currents, and they were planted in the nineteenth century by the Church Missionary Society and have long since become self-governing and self-propagating. Their leaders have argued consistently that the numerical weight of the Communion now sits in the Global South and that Communion decisions should reflect that.

Provincial membership figures are self-reported by each province to the Anglican Communion Office and are not independently audited. Comparative growth in African Christianity is documented by the Pew Research Center and the World Christian Database.

The Diocese of Sydney

The Diocese of Sydney is a single diocese within the Anglican Church of Australia and one of the most influential centres of conservative evangelical Anglicanism in the world, largely through Moore Theological College and its publishing. Sydney holds the Thirty-nine Articles as a binding confession, teaches a memorialist understanding of the Lord's Supper, ordains women as deacons and not as presbyters, and has debated permitting lay and diaconal administration of the Lord's Supper, a proposal that follows from its view that presiding is a function rather than a priestly act.

Sydney's theology is the furthest Anglican point from Anglo-Catholicism, and it demonstrates how wide the tradition's internal range actually is. A Sydney Anglican and an Anglo-Catholic from an English shrine parish share bishops, a Prayer Book heritage and the creeds, and hold materially different doctrines of the Eucharist, the priesthood and the Church.

9. Anglican Sacraments and Ministry

Anglicans recognise two sacraments of the Gospel, baptism and the Eucharist, as ordained by Christ himself, and treat confirmation, ordination, marriage, reconciliation and anointing of the sick as sacramental rites commonly called sacraments. The Thirty-nine Articles put the distinction sharply, and Anglo-Catholic teaching has softened it, with many Anglican catechisms now speaking of two sacraments of the Gospel and five other sacramental rites of the Church.

Baptism and Confirmation

Anglicans baptise infants and adults with water in the name of the Trinity, and Anglican baptism is fully recognised by the Catholic Church as valid. A person baptised in an Anglican church who is later received into full communion with Rome is not baptised again, because there is one baptism (Ephesians 4:5) and it cannot be repeated. Confirmation is administered by a bishop by the laying on of hands and has historically been the gate to receiving Communion in Anglican practice, though many provinces now admit baptised children to Communion before confirmation. See our guides to baptism and confirmation for the Catholic theology.

The Eucharist

Anglican eucharistic theology covers a wide range, and the range is deliberate. Anglo-Catholics affirm the real objective presence of Christ, reserve the sacrament and offer eucharistic adoration. Central Anglicans typically hold a doctrine of real presence without specifying its mode, often drawing on the language of receptionism or of a spiritual but genuine feeding on Christ. Conservative evangelicals, Sydney most explicitly, hold a memorialist view close to Zwingli's. All of them use rites descended from the same Prayer Book.

Catholic teaching holds that by the consecration the whole substance of the bread becomes the Body of Christ and the whole substance of the wine his Blood, a change the Church calls transubstantiation (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1376). The Catechism also states that the ecclesial communities issuing from the Reformation have not preserved the proper reality of the eucharistic mystery in its fullness, chiefly because of the absence of the sacrament of Holy Orders (CCC 1400). That judgment is the reason Anglicans and Catholics do not share Communion, and it is directly connected to the question of orders taken up in the next section.

Bishops, Priests and Deacons

Anglicanism retained the threefold ministry when many Reformation churches did not, and the preface to the Ordinal states plainly that these three orders have existed in Christ's Church since the apostles' time. Anglican bishops confirm, ordain and govern dioceses, and the historic episcopate is one of the four points of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. Anglican understandings of what ordination confers differ by party: Anglo-Catholics speak of an indelible priestly character, evangelicals more often of a public appointment to the ministry of word and sacrament.

The Ordination of Women

Anglican provinces began ordaining women to the priesthood in the twentieth century, and the practice is now widespread while remaining contested inside the Communion. Florence Li Tim-Oi was ordained a priest in 1944 by R. O. Hall, the Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong, under the pressures of wartime, the Episcopal Church regularised women's ordination to the priesthood in 1976, the Church of England ordained its first women priests in 1994 and consecrated its first woman bishop in 2015. Several provinces and dioceses, including Sydney and most GAFCON provinces, do not ordain women as priests or bishops, and the Church of England maintains provision for parishes that do not accept the ministry of women priests.

The Catholic Church teaches that it has no authority to confer priestly ordination on women, a judgment stated by John Paul II in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994) as definitively held. Anglicans who support women's ordination argue from the equality of all the baptised in Christ (Galatians 3:28) and from the presence of women among Jesus' disciples and the first witnesses of the resurrection. Catholic teaching answers that the question concerns the sacramental sign given by Christ in choosing the Twelve rather than the dignity or capability of women, and our guide to the Catholic priesthood sets out that argument in full.

10. Anglican Orders and Apostolicae Curae

The Catholic Church holds that Anglican ordinations are invalid, a judgment made by Pope Leo XIII in the bull Apostolicae Curae of 13 September 1896, which declared ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite to have been absolutely null and utterly void. The judgment stands today. The Anglican reply was immediate and substantial, and later developments have complicated the picture in ways a fair treatment has to include.

What Leo XIII Argued

Leo's case rests on two claimed defects in the Edwardine Ordinal of 1550 and 1552, the rite by which Anglican bishops and priests were ordained after the break with Rome. The first is a defect of form: the ordination prayers as revised omitted any expression of the office of priesthood as understood by the Church, in particular the power to offer the sacrifice of the Mass and to forgive sins. The second is a defect of intention: the bull argues that the framers of the rite deliberately removed sacrificial language because they rejected the doctrine, so the rite as used did not carry the intention of doing what the Church does in ordaining a priest. Because a defective rite cannot make a bishop, Leo concluded that the succession itself was broken and could not be repaired by later revisions that added clearer wording.

The Anglican Response: Saepius Officio

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York replied in 1897 with the encyclical Saepius Officio, addressed to the whole Church. Their argument had several strands, and Anglicans still make them. The essential matter and form of ordination, they said, are the laying on of hands with prayer for the grace of the office, which the Anglican rite has always kept. The intention required is the intention to do what Christ instituted and what the Church does, and the Ordinal's preface states the intention explicitly, since it says the offices of bishop, priest and deacon are to be continued as they have existed from the apostles' time. They also argued that Leo's standard proves too much: the ancient Roman rite of ordination, and several Eastern rites Rome accepts as valid, lack the explicit sacrificial formulas the bull treats as necessary.

They added a theological point that Anglicans consider the heart of the matter, that the Anglican rites do express the offering of the Church, in the offering of the people's praise, thanksgiving and themselves, and that Anglicanism's objection was to a specific late medieval account of eucharistic sacrifice rather than to the priesthood as such. Anglicans generally hold that Apostolicae Curae answers a version of Anglican doctrine that Anglicans do not hold.

The Old Catholic Complication

A genuine complication entered from 1931. Under the Bonn Agreement of that year the Church of England and the Old Catholic churches of the Union of Utrecht established full communion, and Rome accepts the orders of the Old Catholic bishops as valid, since their succession comes through the See of Utrecht. From the 1930s onward Old Catholic bishops took part as co-consecrators in Anglican episcopal consecrations, and over the decades that participation has spread through much of the Anglican episcopate. Anglicans and some Catholic theologians argue that this injection of undisputed valid succession, sometimes called the Dutch touch, means that at least some Anglican bishops today are validly consecrated whatever the status of the sixteenth-century rite.

The Catholic answer is that valid succession requires valid form and intention in each ordination, so a valid co-consecrator does not by himself supply what Rome judges the rite to lack, and that the ordination of women in most Anglican provinces has raised a further question in Catholic judgment about the lines of succession that pass through them. Rome has never reopened the case formally. The doctrinal commentary issued with Ad Tuendam Fidem in 1998 listed the invalidity of Anglican ordinations among examples of truths connected to revelation that are to be held definitively.

The Practical Position, and the Courtesies

In practice, a married Anglican clergyman received into the Catholic Church who is to serve as a Catholic priest is ordained, and the ordination is treated as a first ordination rather than a repetition. There have been notable exceptions handled with care: Graham Leonard, formerly Anglican Bishop of London, was ordained a Catholic priest conditionally in 1994, an unusual step that acknowledged a genuine doubt in his particular case arising from the consecrators involved.

Rome has also shown real warmth alongside the doctrinal firmness. In 1966 Paul VI gave Archbishop Michael Ramsey his own episcopal ring during their meeting in Rome, and Anglican bishops have continued to wear it as a sign. Those gestures do not change the doctrine, and reading them as though they did would misrepresent both parties.

11. The Ordinariates and Anglicanorum Coetibus

The personal ordinariates are Catholic jurisdictions created for groups of Anglicans entering full communion with the Catholic Church while keeping elements of their Anglican liturgical and spiritual inheritance. Pope Benedict XVI established the arrangement in the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, issued on 4 November 2009, after groups of Anglicans had asked Rome for a corporate path rather than an individual one.

What an Ordinariate Is

An ordinariate is structured like a diocese without territorial boundaries, covering a whole country or region, headed by an ordinary who may be a bishop or a priest and who is a member of the local bishops' conference. Three exist: Our Lady of Walsingham for England and Wales, erected in January 2011, the Chair of Saint Peter for the United States and Canada, erected in January 2012, and Our Lady of the Southern Cross for Australia, erected in June 2012. Members are fully Catholic, in full communion with the pope, holding the whole of Catholic doctrine.

What They Keep

Ordinariate parishes worship according to Divine Worship: The Missal, approved in 2015, a Catholic liturgical book that carries the cadences of the Book of Common Prayer inside a fully Catholic rite, including the Prayer of Humble Access and Cranmer's collects alongside the Roman canon. They keep the Anglican choral tradition, Evensong, and patterns of parish life familiar to those who came from Anglicanism. Married former Anglican clergy may be ordained Catholic priests by dispensation, and the ordinariates do not ordain married men as bishops.

How the Arrangement Was Received

Reaction across the traditions was mixed and worth stating plainly. Many Anglo-Catholics regarded Anglicanorum Coetibus as a generous answer to a request they had made themselves. Other Anglicans, including some sympathetic to Rome, saw it as bypassing forty years of patient ecumenical dialogue between the two churches, and Anglican leaders said publicly that they had received little notice. Some Catholics questioned whether a permanent structure for a small number of parishes was warranted. The ordinariates remain small, and their liturgical books have given the Catholic Church a genuine addition to its patrimony.

The Catholic Church's own position on individuals is unchanged and worth saying clearly: nobody is required to leave Anglicanism to be a Christian, since everyone validly baptised is truly a Christian and stands in a real though imperfect communion with the Catholic Church (Catechism of the Catholic Church 838). The ordinariates exist for those who have come to believe that full communion is what the Church requires of them.

12. The Present Tensions in the Communion

The Anglican Communion is under severe strain, and the strain is structural as much as doctrinal. Provinces have taken opposite positions on questions their members regard as fundamental, and the Communion possesses no organ that can decide between them. What follows is a factual account of what happened and what each side says about it.

The Sequence of Events

• 1998. The Lambeth Conference passes Resolution I.10, which describes homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture and declines to advise the legitimising of same-sex unions or the ordination of those in them, while committing the bishops to listen to the experience of gay and lesbian people. It passes by a large margin with African and Asian bishops voting heavily in favour.
• 2002 and 2003. The Diocese of New Westminster in Canada authorises a rite of blessing for same-sex unions, and the Episcopal Church consents to the consecration of Gene Robinson, a man in a same-sex relationship, as Bishop of New Hampshire.
• 2004. The Windsor Report asks for moratoria on further such consecrations and blessings and on cross-border interventions by bishops of other provinces, and proposes an Anglican Covenant.
• 2008. GAFCON meets in Jerusalem and issues the Jerusalem Declaration. Many conservative bishops decline to attend that year's Lambeth Conference.
• 2009 onward. The Anglican Church in North America is formed, and several Communion provinces recognise it. The proposed Anglican Covenant fails to gain sufficient support in the Church of England.
• 2023. The General Synod of the Church of England votes to commend Prayers of Love and Faith, forms of blessing that may be used with same-sex couples, while leaving the doctrine of marriage as between one man and one woman unchanged in canon law. The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches and GAFCON respond by declaring that they no longer recognise the Archbishop of Canterbury as the leader of the global Communion.

What Each Side Argues

Conservative provinces argue that the question is the authority of Scripture, that Lambeth I.10 states the Communion's mind, that provinces which acted against it broke the fellowship by their own choice, and that a Communion whose senior see does not uphold the agreed teaching cannot look to that see as its focus of unity. They also point out that the provinces holding this position contain the large majority of the Communion's worshippers.

Progressive provinces argue that Anglican polity has always allowed provinces to order their own life in their own cultures, that the Communion has previously absorbed disagreement over remarriage after divorce, contraception and the ordination of women without breaking, and that pastoral responsibility to their own members requires them to act. They regard the cross-border oversight taken up by other provinces as the more serious breach of Anglican order.

The Catholic Observation

Catholics have no standing to lecture anyone, and the record of scandal in the Catholic Church rules out any tone of superiority. The observation that the Anglican crisis invites is narrow and structural: when a worldwide church has no office competent to settle a disputed question of doctrine, disagreement does not resolve, it hardens into parallel jurisdictions. Catholic teaching claims that Christ provided against exactly this by giving Peter and his successors a ministry of unity (Matthew 16:18-19, John 21:15-17). Anglicans dispute the claim, and both sides can watch what follows from its absence.

Catholic teaching on marriage as a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman, open to life, is set out in our guide to the sacrament of marriage. On what a divided Christianity owes to Christ's prayer for unity, see ecumenism and Christian unity.

13. Where Rome and Canterbury Stand

The Catholic Church holds that the Anglican Communion is an ecclesial community with which it shares a great deal and with which it is not in full communion. The Second Vatican Council singled Anglicanism out for particular mention, stating that among the communions of the West in which Catholic traditions and institutions in part continue to exist, the Anglican Communion occupies a special place (Unitatis Redintegratio 13). That sentence was carefully chosen, and it remains the Catholic starting point.

What Is Genuinely Shared

• The Scriptures, and the canon of the New Testament, with the deuterocanonical books read in Anglican lectionaries though not used to establish doctrine (Article 6).
• The Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, the Trinity, and the incarnation as defined at Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon.
• Valid baptism, recognised by the Catholic Church without qualification.
• A liturgical life built on the Church year, the psalms, the lectionary and the eucharistic assembly.
• Bishops, dioceses, cathedrals, religious orders, and a settled sacramental shape to parish life.

What Remains Unresolved

• Authority. The universal jurisdiction and infallibility of the Bishop of Rome, and how the whole Church can decide a disputed question with binding effect.
• Orders. The validity of Anglican ordinations, settled negatively by Rome in Apostolicae Curae and contested by Anglicans since 1897.
• The Eucharist. The mode of Christ's presence and the sacrificial character of the eucharistic action.
• Ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate, practised in most Anglican provinces and held by Rome to be beyond the Church's authority.
• Marriage and sexual ethics, where several Anglican provinces have moved and Catholic teaching has not.
• Marian dogma, specifically the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, defined by Rome and not received as dogma by Anglicans.

Fifty Years of Dialogue

The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, ARCIC, has met since 1970 and has produced agreed statements on the Eucharist, on ministry and ordination, on authority, on salvation, and on Mary. Its 1981 Final Report claimed substantial agreement on eucharistic doctrine and on ministry, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded in 1991 that the agreements did not yet amount to full identity of faith on those points and asked for clarification on several. ARCIC's 2005 statement Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ found more common ground on Mary than most observers expected. Later Anglican decisions on ordination and on marriage have made the practical path to unity longer, and the commission continues.

If You Are Anglican and Reading This

Nothing on this page says that you are outside Christ. Your baptism is real, your Scriptures are the same, your creed is the Church's creed, and the Catholic Church says of you that you are joined to it in a real though imperfect communion (Catechism of the Catholic Church 838). What the Catholic Church does say is that the fullness of the means of salvation, the seven sacraments and the unity Christ prayed for, are found in the communion he established under Peter's successor, and that this is worth examining rather than assuming.

The way to test it is to read. Read John 6 without deciding beforehand what it can mean. Read Matthew 16 and Acts 15 and ask what kind of authority they describe. Read the Fathers of the first five centuries, which is what took Newman where he went. Then decide. Time is the one resource nobody is promised more of, and no one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), so the reading is better begun this week than left for a season that may not come.

For the doctrinal comparison in detail, work through our guides to Catholic and Protestant belief compared, faith and works, salvation, and the Eastern Orthodox Church, whose questions about Rome overlap with Anglican ones at several points.

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