Church of England Beliefs Explained

1. What the Church of England Believes

The Church of England professes the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, holds that Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation, baptises infants, celebrates the Eucharist, and ordains bishops, priests and deacons in a succession it traces to the apostles. Its own law, Canon A5, states that its doctrine is grounded in the holy Scriptures and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to those Scriptures, and that this doctrine is to be found in particular in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal. Those three documents, called the historic formularies, are the answer whenever someone asks what the Church of England officially teaches.

What the formularies say is Reformation doctrine housed in medieval buildings. They deny that the Bishop of Rome has jurisdiction in England. They call transubstantiation repugnant to the plain words of Scripture. They count Baptism and the Lord's Supper as the two sacraments of the Gospel and place the other five in a different category. They describe justification by faith in terms Martin Luther would recognise. At the same time they keep the threefold order of ministry, the ancient creeds, the Church year, cathedrals, vestments and a liturgy that is unmistakably descended from the Latin rite. The Church of England has therefore described itself for centuries as both catholic and reformed, and every serious account of its beliefs has to hold both halves of that phrase at once.

One further thing has to be said at the start, because it explains almost everything that follows. The Church of England is a national church with a legal establishment, and its formularies were produced by Acts of Parliament and royal authority as much as by councils of bishops. That is a distinctive fact about England. The wider question of Anglican belief across the whole global Communion, including the Book of Common Prayer tradition, the via media, and the Anglican provinces outside England, is treated in our guide to Anglican beliefs and the Anglican Communion. This page stays with the English church: how it broke from Rome, how it became Protestant, and what it holds today.

2. The Refused Annulment

The Church of England as a separate jurisdiction begins with a marriage case. Henry VIII had married Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his elder brother Arthur, under a dispensation granted by Pope Julius II. By the late 1520s Catherine had borne him one surviving child, Princess Mary, and no living son. Henry became convinced that the marriage was invalid from the beginning, citing Leviticus 18:16 and 20:21 on marrying a brother's wife, and in 1527 he began pressing Rome for a declaration of nullity.

The legal argument was arguable on its own terms. Canon law recognised the impediment of affinity, and dispensations from it were not beyond challenge. What sank the case was politics. Catherine was the aunt of the Emperor Charles V, whose troops had sacked Rome in May 1527 and whose power over the papacy afterwards was considerable. Pope Clement VII played for time. A legatine court under Cardinal Campeggio opened at Blackfriars in 1529, heard Catherine declare that she had come to Henry a virgin, and then adjourned the case to Rome without deciding it.

Henry's response was to change the question. If Rome would not rule, England would rule for itself. The instrument was Parliament, and the theory, supplied in part by Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, was that England was an empire whose king held final jurisdiction within his own realm in spiritual causes as well as temporal ones. The Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 forbade appeals to Rome and opened with that claim. In May 1533, with Anne Boleyn already pregnant, Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury declared the marriage to Catherine void and the marriage to Anne good.

Why This Origin Story Matters

Anglican writers have often objected, fairly, that the annulment is only the occasion of the break and does not explain what the English church became. Reforming ideas were already circulating in England through William Tyndale's English New Testament of 1526 and through Cambridge readers of Luther. Anti-clerical feeling and resentment of papal taxation had a long history. The theological case for the settlement was later built on Scripture and the Fathers rather than on Henry's domestic troubles.

The objection is worth taking seriously, and the sequence still stands. The legal separation happened first and for dynastic reasons, and the doctrine came afterwards. Catholic teaching holds that jurisdiction in the Church is not a possession of the state, which is why Rome regarded the Act of Supremacy as an act of schism rather than a reform. For the underlying question of who holds authority in the Church, see our guide to the papacy and the office of Peter.

3. Henry's Church: Catholic Without the Pope

The Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared the King to be the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, and the Treasons Act made denial of that title a capital offence. Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher refused the oath and were executed in 1535. Both were canonised by Pius XI in 1935. The Act for the Submission of the Clergy bound Convocation to the King's assent, and the Act in Absolute Restraint of Annates transferred to the Crown the payments and the appointments that had gone to Rome.

Between 1536 and 1541 the monasteries were dissolved, their communities scattered and their endowments taken into the Crown's hands and then largely sold. The scale of the transfer is one reason the break proved permanent: a large part of the English gentry acquired a direct financial stake in it. The Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, a mass rising in the north demanding the restoration of the monasteries and of the old religion, was suppressed with executions.

Doctrinally, Henry's church stayed close to Rome. The Act of Six Articles of 1539 affirmed transubstantiation, communion in one kind for the laity, clerical celibacy, the binding force of vows of chastity, private masses and auricular confession, and it attached severe penalties to denial. Reformers called it the whip with six strings. Henry permitted the Great Bible in English in 1539 and Cranmer's English Litany in 1544, and he died in January 1547 having broken the jurisdiction of the papacy while leaving most Catholic sacramental practice in place.

4. Edward VI and the Protestant Turn

Edward VI came to the throne in 1547 at the age of nine, and the government under Protector Somerset and then the Duke of Northumberland moved the English church decisively toward continental Protestantism. The Six Articles were repealed. Clergy were permitted to marry. Chantries, endowed to fund masses for the dead, were abolished in 1547, which removed at a stroke the institutional expression of belief in purgatory and prayer for the dead. Images, roods and wall paintings were removed from parish churches, and stone altars were replaced with wooden communion tables.

The Two Prayer Books

Thomas Cranmer produced the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, a single vernacular liturgy imposed on every parish by an Act of Uniformity. Its communion service was conservative enough that Bishop Stephen Gardiner argued it could be read in a Catholic sense, and conservative enough to provoke the Prayer Book Rebellion in Devon and Cornwall in the same year, whose rebels demanded the Latin Mass back.

The second Book of Common Prayer of 1552 removed that ambiguity. Prayers for the dead were cut. The vestments were reduced to a surplice. The words at the administration of communion changed from "The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life" to "Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving," a formula in the memorialist idiom. The Black Rubric, added late in the process, explained that kneeling to receive implied no adoration of any real and essential presence of Christ's natural flesh and blood.

Cranmer also drafted the Forty-two Articles, issued in 1553, which became the basis of the later Thirty-nine. Edward died in July 1553 at fifteen. The Protestant England he left had existed for six years.

5. Mary I and the Roman Restoration

Mary I, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, restored the Catholic religion and the papal obedience between 1553 and 1558. The Edwardian religious legislation was repealed, the Latin Mass returned, married clergy were deprived of their livings, and in November 1554 Cardinal Reginald Pole, as papal legate, formally absolved the realm from schism and received England back into communion with Rome. Pole became Archbishop of Canterbury and set about a programme of reform that included a plan for seminaries which anticipated the Council of Trent.

The restoration is remembered chiefly for the burnings. Under the revived heresy laws, Protestants were burned in numbers historians usually put at close to three hundred between 1555 and 1558, a total built from the lists John Foxe compiled. Among them were the bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley at Oxford in 1555 and Thomas Cranmer at the same place in March 1556. Cranmer had signed several recantations and then repudiated them at the stake, holding into the fire the hand that had written them. John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, published in English in 1563, made these deaths the founding narrative of English Protestant identity and shaped how the English read their own history for three hundred years.

Mary died on 17 November 1558. Pole died within hours of her. Their programme had lasted five years, and its collapse left the field to Mary's half-sister.

6. The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559

The Elizabethan Settlement is the arrangement that gave the Church of England its permanent shape. Two Acts passed in 1559. The Act of Supremacy restored the royal jurisdiction over the church and gave Elizabeth I the title Supreme Governor of the Church of England rather than Supreme Head, a change that met some Protestant scruple about a lay person, and a woman, holding headship over Christ's body. The Act of Uniformity imposed a Book of Common Prayer on every parish and attached fines for failing to attend the parish church on Sundays.

The 1559 Prayer Book was the 1552 book with small and deliberate adjustments. The Black Rubric was dropped. The Ornaments Rubric restored the vestments in use in the second year of Edward VI. Most tellingly, the words of administration joined the 1549 and 1552 formulas end to end, so that the priest said both "The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life" and "Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving." A worshipper who believed in a real presence and a worshipper who believed in a memorial could both receive under the same words.

Comprehension by Design

That doubled formula is the settlement in miniature. Elizabeth's government wanted political peace in a country that had changed its official religion four times in twenty-five years, and it bought that peace with texts capacious enough to hold more than one belief. The settlement demanded outward conformity in worship and asked comparatively few questions about interior conviction. Elizabeth's reported reluctance to make windows into men's souls, whether or not she said it in those words, captures the policy accurately.

The policy hardened after 1570, when Pope Pius V issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis declaring Elizabeth a heretic, purporting to depose her and to absolve her subjects of allegiance. The bull made every English Catholic a suspected traitor by construction. Penal legislation followed, seminary priests trained at Douai were executed as traitors rather than as heretics, and recusancy fines pressed Catholic families for generations. Edmund Campion, executed at Tyburn in 1581, is the best known of these priests and was canonised in 1970.

The remaining pieces fell into place across Elizabeth's reign. The Thirty-nine Articles were agreed by Convocation in 1563 and given their final form in 1571. Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, published from 1594, gave the settlement its classic theological defence and its account of Scripture, tradition and reason working together. After the Civil War and the Commonwealth, the Restoration Parliament passed a further Act of Uniformity in 1662 with the Book of Common Prayer that still stands as an authorised text. Roughly two thousand ministers who could not accept it left their livings, and English Nonconformity dates from that ejection.

7. The Thirty-nine Articles

The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion are the doctrinal standard of the Church of England, printed in the back of the Book of Common Prayer and named in Canon A5 as a place where its doctrine is found. They are short, polemical in places, and written to fix the English church's position against both Rome and the radical Reformation. Reading them is the fastest way to see what the Church of England committed itself to in the sixteenth century.

What the Articles Affirm

Articles I to V set out the Trinity, the incarnation, the descent into hell, the resurrection and the Holy Spirit in terms any Catholic would accept. Article VI states that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation, so that nothing required as an article of faith may be demanded of anyone unless it can be read in Scripture or proved from it. Article VIII receives the three creeds. Article XI teaches that we are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings. Article XVII treats predestination and election in a Reformed idiom while stopping short of the double decree.

Article VI also lists the canon, naming the books whose authority was never in doubt and placing the deuterocanonical books in a second category read for example of life and instruction of manners, though not used to establish doctrine. That is a real difference from the Catholic canon fixed at Trent in 1546, which is set out in our guide to the deuterocanonical books and the Catholic canon.

What the Articles Deny

Article XIV rejects works of supererogation. Article XXII says that the Romish doctrine concerning purgatory, pardons, worshipping and adoration of images and relics, and invocation of saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, grounded upon no warranty of Scripture. Article XXV names Baptism and the Supper of the Lord as the two sacraments ordained of Christ in the Gospel, and says the five commonly called sacraments are not to be counted sacraments of the Gospel. Article XXVIII calls transubstantiation repugnant to the plain words of Scripture and teaches that the Body of Christ is given, taken and eaten in the Supper only after a heavenly and spiritual manner, the means of receiving being faith. Article XXXI calls the sacrifices of masses, in which it was commonly said that the priest offered Christ for the living and the dead to obtain remission of pain or guilt, blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits. Article XXXVII states that the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.

Those are strong words, and Catholics should read them as the Church of England's own members read them. Anglicans commonly argue that the Articles attack late medieval abuses and popular distortions rather than the doctrines as Trent defined them, and John Henry Newman argued exactly that in Tract 90 of 1841, reading the Articles in a sense compatible with Catholic teaching. The argument cost him his standing in Oxford and he was received into the Catholic Church in 1845.

How Binding Are They Now?

Clergy of the Church of England no longer subscribe to each Article individually. Since 1975 they make the Declaration of Assent under Canon C15, which professes the faith uniquely revealed in the holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, and affirms loyalty to an inheritance of faith to which the historic formularies, the Thirty-nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal, bear witness. The formularies are witnesses to be honoured rather than a checklist to be signed. That formula gives the Church of England considerable room, and it is one reason two clergy in the same diocese can hold genuinely different views of the Eucharist while both being in good standing.

8. The Prayer Book and Anglican Worship

The Book of Common Prayer is the Church of England's liturgy and one of its two chief carriers of doctrine, on the old principle that the law of praying shapes the law of believing. Cranmer built it out of the Sarum Use, the form of the Latin rite followed at Salisbury and across much of medieval England, compressing the monastic hours into Morning and Evening Prayer and translating the whole into English of remarkable quality. Its collects, its funeral sentences and its marriage vows have shaped English speech for four and a half centuries.

The 1662 edition remains an authorised text. In practice most parishes now use Common Worship, the family of services authorised from 2000, which offers a wide range of eucharistic prayers and modern language alongside traditional forms. An attempted revision in 1927 and 1928 was rejected twice by the House of Commons, which is the clearest illustration available of what establishment means in practice: Parliament refused a liturgy the Church's own assembly had approved, on the grounds that the revised communion service was too Catholic.

What a Service Looks Like

A Church of England parish Eucharist follows the shape a Catholic would recognise at once: gathering and confession, collect, readings from Old Testament, epistle and Gospel, sermon, creed, intercessions, the peace, the eucharistic prayer, the Lord's Prayer, communion, and dismissal. Vestments, candles and ceremonial vary enormously by parish. Evensong, the sung form of Evening Prayer, is the service the English cathedral tradition is famous for, and its music by Tallis, Byrd, Purcell, Stanford and Howells is one of the genuine gifts the Church of England has given to the wider Christian world. William Byrd, it is worth adding, was a recusant Catholic who wrote for both.

The Church of England follows the liturgical year of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost, with the seasonal colours and a calendar of saints and commemorations that includes both pre-Reformation saints and later Anglican figures. For the shared structure behind this, see our guide to the liturgical calendar and the Church year.

9. Sacraments and Ordained Ministry

The Church of England baptises infants, confirms, celebrates the Eucharist, ordains, marries, anoints the sick and hears confessions. Its formal count of sacraments is two, following Article XXV, which reserves the name sacrament of the Gospel to Baptism and the Lord's Supper on the ground that Christ instituted these two directly. Confirmation, penance, orders, matrimony and unction are described in the Article as states of life allowed in the Scriptures or as rites that grew from a corrupt following of the apostles, and they continue to be practised.

Belief about the Eucharist varies widely within the Church of England, and the formularies permit that variation. Article XXVIII denies transubstantiation and affirms a real reception by faith after a heavenly and spiritual manner. Anglo-Catholic parishes reserve the Blessed Sacrament, hold Benediction and teach a presence very close to the Catholic doctrine. Evangelical parishes teach a memorial and a spiritual feeding on Christ by faith. Both are within the law of the Church of England. Catholic teaching by contrast defines the change of substance at consecration and treats it as binding, which is set out in our guide to the Eucharist and the Real Presence.

Confession, Marriage and Anointing

Private confession to a priest is available in the Church of England and is governed by the old maxim that all may, none must, some should. The seal of the confessional is upheld in its canons. Anointing of the sick is provided in Common Worship. Marriage in a parish church is a legal right for those with a qualifying connection to the parish, and Church of England clergy act as registrars of marriage, which is another practical face of establishment.

Bishops, Priests and Deacons

The Ordinal, the third of the historic formularies, provides for consecration of bishops and ordination of priests and deacons, and the Church of England has maintained an unbroken line of episcopal consecration from before the Reformation. Its bishops hold dioceses, confirm, ordain and sit in a House of Bishops. Whether these orders are sacramentally valid is precisely what Rome denies, and section 16 sets out why. On the Catholic doctrine of orders itself, see our guide to the Catholic priesthood.

The Church of England column follows Canons A5, B and C of the Canons of the Church of England, the Thirty-nine Articles as printed in the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, and the legislation on women's ordination described in section 13. The Catholic column follows the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Individual parishes and clergy on the Church of England side vary in emphasis and practice.

10. What Establishment Actually Means

Establishment is the legal relationship between the Church of England and the English state, and it is concrete rather than ceremonial. The monarch is Supreme Governor of the Church of England, is crowned in a religious service conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and must be in communion with the Church of England under the Act of Settlement of 1701. Senior appointments are made by the Crown on advice, through the Crown Nominations Commission for diocesan bishops.

Twenty-six bishops sit in the House of Lords as Lords Spiritual, where they may speak and vote on any legislation before Parliament. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester hold seats by office, and the remainder come by seniority of appointment, with a temporary provision favouring women bishops.

The figure of twenty-six Lords Spiritual is set by the Bishoprics Act 1878. The provision advancing women diocesan bishops to vacant seats ahead of the ordinary seniority rule is the Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015.

Legislation is the sharper point. The Church of England's General Synod passes Measures, which go before both Houses of Parliament and, once approved and given royal assent, have the force of an Act of Parliament. Parliament cannot amend a Measure, and it can reject one, which is what happened to the Prayer Book revision in 1927 and 1928. A Measure can also fail before it ever reaches Parliament, which is what happened to the draft legislation on women bishops in Synod in 2012.

The Parish System

Every square metre of England lies inside an ecclesiastical parish, and each parish has a church and, in principle, a priest with a duty of care toward every person living there, whatever that person believes. The parish system is why a village with no regular congregation still has a church that will bury the dead and marry the willing, and it is the strongest practical argument the Church of England makes for its own establishment. The endowment that pays for much of this is managed by the Church Commissioners, a body whose investment returns support clergy pensions and poorer dioceses.

Establishment Is English Only

The Church of England is established in England alone. The Church in Wales was disestablished by legislation passed in 1914 and taking effect in 1920. The Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1871. The Scottish Episcopal Church has never been established, and the national church of Scotland is the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which is not subject to the Crown in spiritual matters. Anyone who writes that Anglicanism is the state religion of Britain has made a straightforward factual error.

11. How the Church of England Is Governed

The Church of England is organised in two provinces, Canterbury and York, each headed by an archbishop. The Archbishop of Canterbury holds the title Primate of All England and is the senior figure; the Archbishop of York is Primate of England. The provinces are divided into forty-two dioceses, including the Diocese in Europe, which covers Anglican congregations across continental Europe and beyond. Dioceses divide into archdeaconries and deaneries, and deaneries into parishes.

Since the Synodical Government Measure of 1969, national decisions are taken by the General Synod, which meets in three houses: Bishops, Clergy and Laity. Contested business commonly requires a two thirds majority in each house separately, which gives the laity and the clergy a real veto. That threshold is why the draft legislation on women bishops failed in November 2012 despite passing in the Houses of Bishops and Clergy, falling short by a handful of votes in the House of Laity, and why revised legislation had to be brought back.

Below the national level, each parish has a Parochial Church Council with legal responsibility for the church building and finances alongside the incumbent, and each diocese has a synod and a bishop's council. Clergy since the Ecclesiastical Offices (Terms of Service) Measure of 2009 generally hold office under Common Tenure rather than the old freehold, with capability procedures and a right to review.

Money and Numbers

Parish churches are funded mainly by the giving of their own congregations, pooled through a diocesan share, and supported by the historic endowment held by the Church Commissioners. Attendance has fallen substantially over recent decades, a decline the Church of England documents in its own annual statistical reports, and the pressure that decline puts on stipends and on the maintenance of listed buildings is the constant background to its internal debates about parish reorganisation.

Attendance trends are reported annually by the Church of England Research and Statistics unit in its Statistics for Mission series. We give the direction of travel rather than a figure, because the published measures have changed definition more than once and a single number quoted out of context would mislead.

12. Churchmanship Inside One Church

Churchmanship is the English word for the schools of belief and practice that coexist inside the Church of England. Three broad families are usually named, and a parish can be identified within minutes of walking in.

Anglo-Catholic

Anglo-Catholics understand the Church of England as a branch of the ancient catholic Church that reformed its abuses and kept its substance. The tradition takes its modern form from the Oxford Movement, which began with John Keble's Assize Sermon of 1833 and the Tracts for the Times written by Newman, Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey. Anglo-Catholic parishes use eucharistic vestments and incense, reserve the Blessed Sacrament, hear confessions, keep Marian devotion and often call the Sunday service Mass. The Society of Mary and the Anglican shrine at Walsingham belong to this tradition. Newman's own path into the Catholic Church in 1845, and the reception of others since, is a live part of the story.

Evangelical

Evangelicals in the Church of England hold Scripture as supreme authority, preach conversion and justification by faith alone, and take the Thirty-nine Articles in their plain Reformation sense. The tradition runs from the eighteenth-century revival through Charles Simeon at Cambridge and the Clapham Sect, whose members including William Wilberforce drove the abolition of the slave trade. Conservative evangelical parishes hold the Articles in that plain sense today, and open evangelical parishes have absorbed much charismatic renewal, including the Alpha course developed at Holy Trinity Brompton. The Wesleys began within this church and their movement became Methodism after separating from it.

Broad Church and Liberal

The liberal or broad church tradition emphasises reason, scholarship and openness to modern learning, and has generally led the arguments for revised positions on gender and sexuality. It traces itself to Hooker's account of reason alongside Scripture and tradition, and to nineteenth-century figures such as Frederick Denison Maurice.

These families disagree about the Eucharist, about the ordination of women, about biblical interpretation and about sexuality, and they remain in one church. Comprehension of this width is either the Church of England's great gift or its central problem, depending on which member you ask, and both answers are given sincerely.

13. Women as Priests and Bishops

The Church of England ordains women as deacons, priests and bishops. Women were made deaconesses from the nineteenth century and ordained deacon from 1987. The General Synod voted in November 1992 to permit the ordination of women to the priesthood, and the first thirty-two women were ordained priest in Bristol Cathedral in March 1994. Legislation for women bishops failed in Synod in November 2012, was reworked, and passed in July 2014; Libby Lane was consecrated Bishop of Stockport in January 2015.

The Church of England made structural provision for members who cannot in conscience accept the change. Five Guiding Principles agreed in 2014 commit the Church to holding both positions with integrity, and provincial episcopal visitors, commonly called flying bishops, offer alternative oversight to parishes that request it. Two societies organise the dissenting constituencies: the Society under the patronage of Saint Wilfrid and Saint Hilda for the Anglo-Catholic objection, which turns on the priest's representation of Christ and on the sacramental tradition of East and West, and the Church Society, into which the Reform network merged in 2017, for the conservative evangelical objection, which turns on the New Testament texts about male headship, chiefly 1 Timothy 2:11 to 14 and 1 Corinthians 11:3.

A number of clergy and laity left over the 1992 and 2014 decisions, some of them for the Catholic Church and later through the Personal Ordinariate described in section 16. The Catholic position is that the Church has no authority to confer priestly ordination on women, stated by John Paul II in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, and that this is a matter of what the Church received rather than a policy the Church could revise. Anglican proponents answer that the ministry of women is a legitimate development consistent with Galatians 3:28 and with the recognition of women's ministry in the New Testament, naming Phoebe in Romans 16:1 and Junia in Romans 16:7. Both arguments are made carefully and neither side treats the matter as trivial.

14. Marriage, Sexuality and the Current Dispute

The Church of England's doctrine of marriage is stated in Canon B30, which holds marriage to be in its nature a union permanent and lifelong of one man with one woman. That canon has not been changed. The dispute of recent years has been about what the Church may do for same-sex couples without changing it.

Living in Love and Faith was a multi-year process of study and consultation, and its resources were published in 2020. In February 2023 the General Synod voted to welcome the bishops' proposals for Prayers of Love and Faith, prayers of blessing and dedication that may be offered for same-sex couples, while restating that the doctrine of marriage remained unchanged and that same-sex marriages would not be solemnised in Church of England churches. The prayers were commended for use in December 2023, and questions about their use in standalone services and about the discipline expected of clergy in same-sex civil marriages have continued through Synod since.

The decision produced strong reactions in both directions inside the Church of England and across the wider Anglican Communion. Conservative provinces, notably in Africa and in parts of Asia, treated it as a departure from apostolic teaching and some declared themselves in impaired communion with Canterbury. Progressive members regarded the prayers as insufficient and continue to press for equal marriage. The dispute is unresolved as this page is written, and we describe the state of the question rather than predict its outcome.

15. England and the Wider Anglican Communion

The Church of England is one province among more than thirty in the Anglican Communion, and it holds no jurisdiction over any of the others. Each province is self-governing, elects or appoints its own bishops, and legislates for itself. The Archbishop of Canterbury has historically served as a focus of unity and as the see with which the other provinces are in communion, and that role carries no power to command.

The Communion grew from the Church of England chiefly through British colonial expansion and through missionary societies, and its centre of numerical gravity has moved decisively to Africa and Asia. Provinces such as Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya report memberships far larger than those of the English church that sent the first missionaries, and their leaders have said so with increasing directness in the disputes over sexuality. The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches and the Gafcon movement organise much of that constituency.

Consultation across the Communion runs through four instruments: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference of bishops held roughly every decade, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates' Meeting. None of them can bind a province. Lambeth Conference resolutions, including Resolution I.10 of 1998 on human sexuality, carry moral weight and no legislative force, which is exactly why the current disputes have no mechanism for settlement.

The theological character of Anglicanism as a whole, the via media, the Chicago Lambeth Quadrilateral and the range of provinces, is the subject of our companion guide to Anglican beliefs and the Anglican Communion. The wider map of Christian bodies and how they relate is set out in our guide to Christian denominations and how they differ.

16. Where Rome and the Church of England Stand

Rome and the Church of England are not in communion, and the relationship between them is warmer than the formal position alone suggests. Three documents carry most of the weight.

Apostolicae Curae, 1896

Pope Leo XIII declared in the bull Apostolicae Curae that ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been and are absolutely null and utterly void. The reasoning rested on defect of form and defect of intention in the Edwardian Ordinal of 1550 and 1552, which Leo judged to have been stripped of any expression of the priesthood as an order to offer sacrifice, and on the intention of those who framed it. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York replied in 1897 with Saepius Officio, arguing that the Ordinal's form was adequate by the standards Rome itself applied to ancient rites and that the Church of England had always intended to do what the Church does in ordaining.

Anglicans often add that Old Catholic bishops, whose orders Rome does recognise, have taken part in Anglican consecrations since the Bonn Agreement of 1931, which they hold complicates any simple judgement of nullity. Rome has not revised the 1896 judgement. In practice a Church of England clergyman received into the Catholic Church and called to orders is ordained absolutely, without any conditional formula. The wider argument about Anglican orders across the whole Communion, including the Old Catholic line and the Anglican replies, is set out in our guide to Anglican beliefs and the Anglican Communion.

Unitatis Redintegratio and ARCIC

The Second Vatican Council decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio 13, singles out the Anglican Communion among the communions separated from the Roman See at the time of the Reformation, saying that in it catholic traditions and institutions in part continue to exist. Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey issued a Common Declaration in Rome in March 1966 announcing a serious dialogue, and Paul VI gave Ramsey his own episcopal ring. The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission has worked since 1970 and has produced agreed statements on the Eucharist, ministry and authority, including the Final Report of ARCIC I in 1982 and later work under ARCIC II and ARCIC III.

Rome's assessment of that agreement has been qualified. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's response to the ARCIC I Final Report in 1991 welcomed the convergence and identified points where the statements did not amount to substantial agreement with Catholic doctrine, particularly on eucharistic sacrifice, the reservation of the sacrament, and papal primacy and infallibility. The decisions on women's ordination from 1994 onward introduced a further obstacle that the dialogue has openly acknowledged.

Anglicanorum Coetibus and the Ordinariate

Benedict XVI issued the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus in November 2009, creating personal ordinariates in which groups of former Anglicans can enter full communion with the Catholic Church while keeping elements of Anglican liturgical and spiritual patrimony. The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was erected for England and Wales in January 2011, with further ordinariates in the United States and in Australia. Married former Anglican clergy may be ordained Catholic priests in the ordinariates by dispensation. The rule against ordaining married men to the episcopate stands, so a married former Anglican priest appointed as ordinary governs the ordinariate as a priest rather than as a bishop.

Christ prayed that his disciples might all be one, so that the world would believe (John 17:21). Five centuries after a refused annulment, English Christians remain divided along a line that a marriage case first drew. Catholics who want that division healed should learn the Church of England accurately, name what it holds in common with Rome without exaggeration, name the genuine differences without softening them, and pray for the unity that neither side can legislate.

17. Related Topics