Episcopal Church Beliefs Explained

1. What the Episcopal Church Is

The Episcopal Church is the province of the Anglican Communion in the United States, a self-governing church of dioceses and parishes that keeps the historic threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons and worships from the Book of Common Prayer. Its legal name in its own constitution is the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, and the same constitution recognises the shorter name the Episcopal Church as designating the same body. It has no pope, no archbishop who can overrule a diocese, and no confessional standard beyond the creeds and the prayer book.

The word Episcopal points at the church's structure. It comes from the Greek episkopos, overseer or bishop, and it marks a church that is governed through bishops in a line of consecration reaching back beyond the Reformation. American Anglicans chose the name after independence because the word Anglican, meaning English, had become politically impossible in a country that had just fought England.

How Wide the Church Reaches

The Episcopal Church reaches well beyond the United States. Its dioceses outside the fifty states include Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, the Virgin Islands and the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe. The Latin American dioceses together with Puerto Rico make up Province IX of the church, while Haiti and the Virgin Islands belong to Province II. The Episcopal Church's own parochial report statistics have for years listed the Diocese of Haiti among its largest dioceses by baptised membership.

Diocesan and membership figures cited by the Episcopal Church come from the parochial reports collected each year by its Office of the General Convention and published in its own research statistics. Those reports show a long decline in average Sunday attendance and in membership since the 1960s, which the church itself documents and discusses. No independent figure is given here, because the reliable source for this church's numbers is the church's own reporting.

How It Sits Inside the Anglican Communion

The Anglican Communion is a family of self-governing provinces that share the Book of Common Prayer tradition and recognise the Archbishop of Canterbury as a focus of unity, and no instrument of the Communion can legislate for a province. The Episcopal Church is one of those provinces and answers to no other. Our guide to Anglican belief and the Anglican Communion covers the wider family, the Thirty-nine Articles and the via media in detail. This page stays with the American province.

2. What Episcopalians Believe

Episcopal belief is set out in the creeds, in the Book of Common Prayer, and in a short catechism printed in that book under the title An Outline of the Faith. An Episcopalian confesses one God in three persons, the Incarnation, the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of sins, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. The church asks its members to profess the creeds and leaves a wide field of theological opinion open beyond them, which is why two Episcopal parishes in the same city can feel like different religions.

The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral

The clearest statement of what the Episcopal Church regards as essential is the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, adopted by the American House of Bishops at Chicago in 1886 and taken up in modified form by the Lambeth Conference of 1888. It names four things as the basis on which Christian reunion could be built: the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as containing all things necessary to salvation, the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith, the two sacraments ordained by Christ himself, baptism and the Supper of the Lord, and the historic episcopate locally adapted. The Quadrilateral is printed in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer among the Historical Documents, and Episcopalians still cite it as the shortest answer to what their church holds.

Scripture, Tradition and Reason

Episcopalians commonly describe their authority as a threefold cord of Scripture, tradition and reason, a formula drawn from the sixteenth-century divine Richard Hooker and given the name three-legged stool in later American usage. Scripture holds the primary place, tradition supplies the mind of the Church across the centuries, and reason applies both to a question the first two do not settle directly. Catholic teaching agrees that Scripture is read inside the living Tradition of the Church, and locates the decisive judgment with the teaching office of the bishops in communion with the pope, a difference we set out in our guide to Sacred Tradition and Scripture.

The Sacraments

The catechism in the 1979 prayer book calls baptism and the Eucharist the two great sacraments of the Gospel given by Christ to his Church. It then names five other sacramental rites: confirmation, ordination, holy matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction of the sick. The catechism says these five evolved in the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and that they are not necessary for all persons in the way that baptism and the Eucharist are. Episcopal practice treats all seven as real means of grace, and the church's formal ranking of them is the Reformation ranking rather than the Catholic one.

The Catholic Church teaches seven sacraments, all instituted by Christ, all necessary for salvation in the sense that they are the ordinary means by which grace is given to the Church, though no individual receives all seven. The difference in list order is small on paper and large in practice, because it decides whether confession and ordination are optional rites or divinely given channels of grace.

The Eucharist

Episcopalians overwhelmingly believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the church has defined no single account of how. The catechism says the outward and visible sign is bread and wine, and the inward and spiritual grace is the Body and Blood of Christ given to his people and received by faith. Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians hold a doctrine indistinguishable in practice from transubstantiation, reserve the sacrament and genuflect before it. Evangelical Episcopalians hold a receptionist or spiritual account closer to Calvin. Both are in good standing.

Catholic teaching defines the change: the whole substance of the bread and wine becomes the Body and Blood of Christ, the appearances remaining, a change the Church calls transubstantiation (Council of Trent, session 13; Catechism of the Catholic Church 1376). Our guide to the Eucharist and the Real Presence sets out the Catholic doctrine and the Scriptural case behind it.

Salvation

Episcopal teaching on salvation holds that human beings are saved by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, received in faith, and that good works follow from that grace as its fruit. The Thirty-nine Articles, printed in the 1979 prayer book as a historical document rather than as a required subscription, state justification by faith in strong Reformation terms in Article XI. Modern Episcopal preaching rarely presses the sixteenth-century formulas, and the practical emphasis falls on baptism as incorporation into Christ and on a life of discipleship. The Catholic account of how grace, faith and works fit together is set out in our guide to faith and works.

What the Church Leaves Open

The Episcopal Church has no binding position on a long list of questions that Catholics expect a church to settle. Contraception, the moral status of most end-of-life decisions, the interpretation of Genesis, the fate of the unevangelised and the details of eschatology are all matters of conscience and pastoral judgment. The church has adopted General Convention resolutions on many social questions, and a resolution is a position of the Convention rather than a doctrine binding on members. Anyone trying to find out what the Episcopal Church teaches on a particular moral question should expect to find a range, and should read the prayer book before reading the resolutions.

3. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer

The Book of Common Prayer is where Episcopal doctrine actually lives, because the church teaches by what it prays. The current American book was authorised in 1979, following the American books of 1789, 1892 and 1928, and it is the single most important text for understanding Episcopal belief. An Episcopalian who cannot recite the Thirty-nine Articles can recite the Eucharistic prayers, and those prayers carry the church's theology. Our guide to the Book of Common Prayer traces the book from Cranmer through its English and American revisions. This section covers what the 1979 American book carries for Episcopal belief.

What the 1979 Book Changed

The 1979 revision was shaped by the same liturgical movement that produced the Catholic reforms after the Second Vatican Council, and the family resemblance is deliberate. It made the Eucharist rather than Morning Prayer the normal principal service on Sunday. It put baptism at the centre of the church's self-understanding, with the Baptismal Covenant as a series of questions and answers renewed by the whole congregation. It offered Rite I in Tudor English and Rite II in modern English. It restored the Great Vigil of Easter and gave the ordination rites their present form.

The 1928 book still has devoted users, and a number of continuing Anglican bodies use it or the English 1662 book. Attachment to the older prayer books runs parallel in some ways to Catholic attachment to the older Roman rite, a subject we treat in our guide to the Traditional Latin Mass.

The Daily Office

The prayer book carries Morning Prayer, Noonday Prayer, Evening Prayer and Compline, with a lectionary that reads through most of the Bible on a two-year cycle. The Daily Office is Thomas Cranmer's compression of the monastic hours into something a parish or a household can pray, and it is one of the genuine achievements of the English Reformation. Catholics who pray the Liturgy of the Hours are doing the same work in a fuller form, and many Catholics use Anglican office material without difficulty. Our collection of daily prayers carries the same morning and evening shape.

4. What an Episcopalian Means by Catholic

When an Episcopalian says the church is catholic, the claim is about faith and order rather than about jurisdiction. It means that the Episcopal Church holds the whole faith of the undivided Church, celebrates the sacraments Christ gave, keeps bishops in a succession of consecration reaching back through the Church of England to the early Church, and belongs to the one Church confessed in the Creed. It does not mean communion with the Bishop of Rome, and no Episcopalian using the word claims that it does.

The Word in the Creed

Every Episcopalian says "I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church" at the Eucharist, and the word there means universal, the whole Church in all times and places. Catholics say the same words and understand the Creed to be describing a visible communion whose unity is guaranteed by the successor of Peter. The Second Vatican Council put it that the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, while many elements of sanctification and truth are found outside her visible confines (Lumen Gentium 8). Both churches say the same clause, and they draw its boundary in different places.

The Branch Theory and Why Rome Rejects It

The classic Anglican account of this is the branch theory, developed in the nineteenth century by writers of the Oxford Movement: the one Catholic Church subsists in three branches, Roman, Eastern and Anglican, each holding valid orders and sacraments, each impaired by separation from the others. On this account an Episcopalian is already a Catholic Christian and the reunion of the branches is the work still to be done.

The Catholic Church rejects the branch theory on two grounds. The first is that visible communion with the Bishop of Rome belongs to the constitution of the Church rather than to its convenience, so a body out of that communion is not a branch of the Church in the way the theory requires. The second is factual: Rome holds that the Anglican succession was broken in the sixteenth century and that Anglican orders are therefore invalid, which removes the sacramental premise on which the theory rests. Section 9 sets out that judgment and the Anglican reply to it. Our guide to the teaching that there is no salvation outside the Church explains what Catholic doctrine does and does not say about Christians in other bodies.

What Rome Grants

The Catholic Church does say something notably warm about the Anglican tradition. The Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio 13, says that among the communions separated from the Roman See in the sixteenth century, in which Catholic traditions and institutions in part continue to exist, the Anglican Communion occupies a special place. That sentence was drafted with care and it says less than Anglicans sometimes read into it, and it is a real acknowledgment that Anglican worship, spirituality and church order preserve a great deal that is Catholic in substance.

The Council also teaches that those baptised into these communities are truly incorporated into Christ and are rightly called Christians, and are accepted as brothers and sisters by the children of the Catholic Church (Unitatis Redintegratio 3). An Episcopalian who was baptised with water in the name of the Trinity is really baptised, and the Catholic Church never rebaptises such a person on reception.

5. How the Episcopal Church Governs Itself

The Episcopal Church governs itself through a General Convention that meets at the intervals its own constitution sets, no less often than once every three years, and consists of two houses, the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies, with the deputies made up of clergy and lay people elected by each diocese. A measure must pass both houses to take effect, and on major questions a vote by orders can be demanded, which requires separate majorities of clergy and lay deputies. Changes to the constitution or the prayer book must pass two consecutive Conventions.

The Presiding Bishop

The Presiding Bishop is elected by the House of Bishops and confirmed by the House of Deputies, serves a fixed term, chairs the House of Bishops and represents the church as its primate. The office carries pastoral and administrative authority and a role in the discipline of bishops, and it carries nothing resembling papal jurisdiction. A Presiding Bishop cannot define a doctrine, cannot depose a bishop by personal decision, and cannot bind a diocese to a teaching the General Convention has not adopted.

Dioceses and Parishes

Each diocese elects its own bishop, subject to consent from a majority of the other dioceses' standing committees and bishops, and holds a diocesan convention that legislates for the diocese. Parishes elect a vestry, and the vestry calls the rector. Lay people therefore hold real legislative and financial power at every level of the church, which is one of the sharpest structural contrasts with Catholic governance, where a bishop is appointed by the pope and a parish priest is appointed by the bishop.

The Episcopal column follows the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church as adopted by its General Convention. The Catholic column follows the 1983 Code of Canon Law and the First and Second Vatican Councils. Both columns describe the ordinary rule and both churches have exceptions and special cases in their own law.

Why the Structure Matters for Everything Else

The two decisions this page has to explain, in 1976 and in 2003, both came out of this machinery. A church that decides doctrine and discipline by a legislature of bishops, clergy and lay deputies will change when the majority in that legislature changes. A church that holds a teaching to be received from the apostles and beyond the competence of any assembly to alter will answer such a question differently, whatever the numbers. The Catholic case for that second structure rests on the commission to Peter and the practice of the councils, and we set it out in our guide to the papacy and the Petrine office.

6. Where the Episcopal Church Came From

The Episcopal Church began as the Church of England in the American colonies and became a separate church after the Revolution, when clergy could no longer swear the oath of allegiance to the Crown that English ordination required. Colonial Anglicans had never had a bishop of their own, and candidates for ordination had to sail to England. Independence made both problems urgent at once, and the solution required going to Scotland.

Samuel Seabury and the Scottish Consecration

Samuel Seabury, elected by the clergy of Connecticut, was consecrated bishop at Aberdeen on 14 November 1784 by bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church, who as nonjurors were not bound by the oath to the Crown that had blocked consecration in England. Parliament then passed an act permitting the consecration of bishops for foreign parts without the oath, and William White of Pennsylvania and Samuel Provoost of New York were consecrated at Lambeth Palace in 1787. The three of them together made an American episcopate, and the Scottish line brought with it a Eucharistic prayer with an explicit invocation of the Holy Spirit, which entered the American prayer book of 1789 and gave American Anglicanism a more Eastern and more sacramental accent than the English book had.

1789 and the First Constitution

The General Convention of 1789 in Philadelphia adopted a constitution, ratified canons, and set out the first American Book of Common Prayer. The bicameral structure of bishops and deputies dates from this Convention, and it was consciously built on the same instincts as the civil constitution being written in the same city in the same years. The name Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America was adopted in the same period and remains the church's legal name.

The Oxford Movement in America

The nineteenth-century Oxford Movement in England, which recovered the Catholic elements of Anglican identity, reached America and reshaped a large part of the church. Its American heirs built ritualist parishes with vestments, incense, weekly Eucharist, confession and religious orders for men and women, and they endured bitter litigation from the evangelical party over ceremonial. That party is what the word Anglo-Catholic names, and it produced the parishes that a Catholic visitor today would find hardest to distinguish from a Catholic church. John Henry Newman, who began in that movement and left it for Rome in 1845, is treated in our profile of John Henry Newman.

The Twentieth Century

The Episcopal Church spent the twentieth century as a numerically small and socially prominent body, deeply involved in American public life and increasingly liberal in theology and social teaching from the 1960s onward. Prayer book revision, the civil rights movement, the ordination of women and the changing sexual ethics of American culture all worked on the church at once, and each of them produced departures. The Continuing Anglican bodies formed after the Congress of St Louis in 1977, and the Anglican Church in North America formed in 2009, both come out of that pressure.

7. The 1976 Decision on Ordaining Women

The General Convention meeting at Minneapolis in 1976 voted to open ordination as deacon, priest and bishop to women, with effect from 1 January 1977. The decision followed years of debate and one act of open defiance: on 29 July 1974 a group of bishops, most of them retired or resigned, ordained eleven women to the priesthood at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia without the authority of the Convention. Four more were ordained in Washington in 1975. The House of Bishops declared the Philadelphia ordinations invalid at the time, and after the 1976 vote the ordinations of those women were regularised.

How the Episcopal Church Argues the Case

Episcopalians who support the decision argue it from baptism and from Scripture. Galatians 3:28 says that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Women were the first witnesses of the resurrection, Paul names women as fellow workers and calls Junia notable among the apostles at Romans 16:7, and Phoebe is a deacon of the church at Cenchreae at Romans 16:1. On this reading the restriction of the priesthood to men reflects the household order of the ancient world rather than the will of Christ, and the Church has already set aside other elements of that order. Supporters also point to the baptismal ecclesiology of the 1979 prayer book, which grounds all ministry in baptism and treats ordination as a particular calling within the baptised body.

The Consecration of Women as Bishops

Barbara Harris was consecrated Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts on 11 February 1989, the first woman consecrated bishop anywhere in the Anglican Communion. In 2006 the General Convention elected Katharine Jefferts Schori as Presiding Bishop, the first woman to lead a province of the Communion as primate. Both events were received very differently across the Communion, and provinces in Africa and Asia in particular did not accept them.

What Rome Said, and When

The Catholic response was made before the vote and repeated after it, which is why 1976 matters so much for the relationship between the two churches. Pope Paul VI wrote to Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan on 30 November 1975 and again on 23 March 1976, saying plainly that the ordination of women to the priesthood would introduce an element of grave difficulty into the dialogue between the two communions and set back the progress that had been made toward reconciliation. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the declaration Inter Insigniores on 15 October 1976, holding that the Church does not consider herself authorised to admit women to priestly ordination, and arguing from the constant tradition, the practice of Christ in choosing the Twelve, and the sacramental sign by which the priest acts in the person of Christ the head.

John Paul II settled the Catholic question in the apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis of 22 May 1994, declaring that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the faithful. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith confirmed in 1995 that this teaching belongs to the deposit of faith and has been infallibly proposed by the ordinary and universal magisterium.

What It Did to the Ecumenical Dialogue

The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission had published agreed statements on the Eucharist and on ministry in the 1970s and completed its Final Report in 1981, work that many people on both sides thought was moving toward real reconciliation. The 1976 decisions in the United States and Canada, followed by the Church of England's decision to ordain women priests in 1992 and bishops in 2014, changed the terms. The dialogue continues and the object it is working toward has moved from the restoration of communion in a foreseeable time to a slower and more modest kind of mutual understanding.

8. The 2003 Consecration and What Followed

In June 2003 the Diocese of New Hampshire elected Gene Robinson, a priest living openly in a same-sex relationship, as its bishop. The General Convention meeting at Minneapolis in August 2003 gave the required consent, and Robinson was consecrated on 2 November 2003. He was the first openly partnered gay man consecrated bishop in the Anglican Communion, and the consecration set off the deepest crisis in the Communion's history.

How the Episcopal Church Argues the Case

Episcopalians who support the decision argue from the baptismal covenant, from a reading of the biblical texts on same-sex conduct as addressed to practices unlike a committed modern relationship, and from the church's experience of gay and lesbian Christians in its own congregations. They point to the Anglican habit of allowing pastoral practice to develop and to the church's own earlier reversals on divorce and remarriage. Opponents inside the Episcopal Church argued that the Communion had asked for restraint, that Lambeth Conference resolution I.10 of 1998 had stated the Communion's teaching that homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture, and that no province is free to alter a matter of this weight alone.

The Marriage Canon

The General Convention meeting at Salt Lake City in 2015 authorised marriage rites for same-sex couples and changed the marriage canon so that its language no longer required a husband and a wife. In 2018 the Convention passed resolution B012, which made those rites available to couples in every diocese, including dioceses whose bishops did not accept them, through arrangements that provided episcopal oversight from another bishop.

The Communion Response

The Anglican Communion tried several instruments in turn and none of them held. The Windsor Report of 2004 asked the Episcopal Church for an expression of regret and a moratorium on further such consecrations. The proposed Anglican Covenant, drafted to give the Communion a way of holding provinces to a common discipline, failed to gain enough adoptions to take effect. The Global Anglican Future Conference, GAFCON, met at Jerusalem in 2008 and became a standing body of provinces holding a traditional position, with many of its bishops absenting themselves from the Lambeth Conference held the same year. In January 2016 a Primates' Meeting at Canterbury asked that the Episcopal Church not represent the Communion on ecumenical and interfaith bodies or vote on doctrine and polity for three years. The Episcopal Church accepted the consequences and did not change its canons.

The Catholic Teaching

The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is a covenant between one man and one woman, ordered to the good of the spouses and to the procreation and education of children, and raised by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament between the baptised. It teaches that homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law and that men and women with homosexual inclinations must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity, and that unjust discrimination against them is to be avoided (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2357 to 2358). The Catholic doctrine of marriage, including its indissolubility and its openness to life, is set out in our guide to marriage as a sacrament.

The consecration of 2003 and the marriage canon of 2015 stand alongside the ordination of women in the Catholic assessment of where the two churches now are. Each of them was a decision that the Episcopal Church regarded as within its competence and that the Catholic Church regards as outside the competence of any church.

9. Anglican Orders and Apostolicae Curae

The Catholic Church holds that Anglican ordinations are invalid, a judgment given by Pope Leo XIII in the bull Apostolicae Curae on 18 September 1896 and never reversed. The bull declared ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite to be absolutely null and utterly void. Everything else about the relationship between Rome and the Episcopal Church runs into this judgment sooner or later, because it decides whether an Episcopal Eucharist is a sacrament in the Catholic sense. Our dedicated guide to whether Anglican orders are valid works through the documents at length. This section gives what an Episcopalian reader needs to follow the rest of this page.

What Leo XIII Actually Argued

The bull rests on two claimed defects in the ordination rite issued under Edward VI in 1550 and revised in 1552, the Edwardine Ordinal. The first is a defect of form: the words of ordination in that rite did not signify the order of priesthood in the sacrificial sense the Church understands, since the ordinal had stripped out the language of offering sacrifice and of the power to consecrate the Eucharist. The second is a defect of intention: the men who framed the rite intended to institute a ministry different from what the Catholic Church means by priesthood, and that intention is expressed in the rite itself. Because the succession passed through bishops ordained by that rite, Leo held that the defect propagated forward through the whole Anglican line.

The Anglican Reply

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York answered in 1897 with the encyclical letter Saepius Officio, addressed to the whole episcopate. They argued that the Anglican ordinal ordains to the priesthood of the Church of God and says so, that the sacrificial character of the Eucharist is present in the Anglican liturgy in the offering of praise, thanksgiving and the people themselves, and that several ancient ordination rites of the Church, including early Roman ones, would fail the test Leo applied. On intention they argued that the Church's intention is what the rite expresses rather than the private theology of the men who composed it, and that the Church of England intended to do what the Church does.

The Dutch Touch

Anglo-Catholics often raise a further argument. Since the Bonn Agreement of 1931 established communion between the Anglican Communion and the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht, whose orders Rome does recognise as valid, Old Catholic bishops have taken part in Anglican consecrations, and by now that participation runs through most Anglican episcopal lineages. The argument is that this repaired the succession whatever happened in the sixteenth century. Our guide to the Old Catholic Churches covers that body and its own history.

The Catholic answer is that valid succession is a necessary condition rather than a sufficient one. Apostolicae Curae found a defect in the rite and in the intention of the ordaining church, and the presence of a validly ordained co-consecrator does not by itself cure a defective rite or supply an intention the ordaining church does not have. Rome has not issued a new examination of the question in light of the Old Catholic participation, and the 1896 judgment stands as the Catholic Church's position.

Where the Judgment Stands Today

The doctrinal commentary published in 1998 alongside the apostolic letter Ad Tuendam Fidem, prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, listed Leo XIII's declaration on the invalidity of Anglican ordinations as an example of a teaching the Church holds definitively. The practical consequences are exact and they are worth stating without softening. An Episcopal priest received into the Catholic Church and called to the priesthood is ordained absolutely, and never conditionally. An Episcopal Eucharist is not the Eucharist in the Catholic sense, because the Catholic Church holds that the sacrament of Holy Orders is lacking (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1400). A Catholic may not receive Communion in an Episcopal church, whatever invitation is given from the altar.

What About Baptism, Marriage and Confirmation?

Baptism and marriage do not depend on a validly ordained minister in Catholic theology, so the picture there is different and much simpler. Episcopal baptism with water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is valid, and a convert is never rebaptised. A marriage between two baptised Episcopalians is a valid sacramental marriage, and the Catholic Church treats it as binding and indissoluble. Confirmation and confession and anointing do depend on valid orders, so an Episcopalian received into the Catholic Church is confirmed, and makes a first Catholic confession before receiving Communion. Our guides to baptism and confirmation set out the Catholic doctrine in full.

10. Episcopal and Catholic Compared

The Episcopal Church and the Catholic Church look alike from the pew and differ at the points that decide communion. Both use a lectionary and a liturgical calendar, both have vested clergy, both keep Lent and Holy Week in recognisable forms, and both pray the creeds. A Catholic at a solemn Anglo-Catholic Mass would recognise almost everything happening. The table below sets out the doctrinal and disciplinary positions rather than the appearances.

The Episcopal column follows the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church, and the acts of its General Convention. The Catholic column follows the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the 1983 Code of Canon Law and the documents named in each row. Individual Episcopal parishes vary widely on the devotional rows, and the doctrinal rows describe the church's official position.

The Practical Questions Converts Ask

Episcopalians who become Catholic are received rather than rebaptised, are confirmed, make a first confession, and then receive Communion. A married Episcopal priest who becomes Catholic may in some cases be ordained a Catholic priest while remaining married, under a dispensation from the requirement of celibacy that has been granted in a number of individual cases and through the Ordinariate provision described in section 11. Catholics who become Episcopalian are received by their new bishop and are, in the Catholic Church's judgment, in a state of separation from the Church into which they were baptised. Our guide to Catholic and Protestant differences covers the wider set of questions converts in either direction raise.

11. Anglo-Catholics and the Ordinariate

Anglo-Catholics are Episcopalians who hold the most Catholic reading of their tradition: seven sacraments in practice, the Eucharist as sacrifice, sacramental confession, devotion to Mary and the saints, prayers for the dead, and ceremonial drawn from the Roman rite. Their parishes descend from the Oxford Movement and the ritualist controversies of the nineteenth century, a history set out in our guide to Anglo-Catholicism and the Oxford Movement. They have been the part of the Episcopal Church closest to Rome and the part most strained by the decisions of 1976 and 2003.

Anglicanorum Coetibus

Benedict XVI issued the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus on 4 November 2009, creating personal ordinariates: structures within the Catholic Church for groups of Anglicans entering into full communion together, keeping elements of their liturgical, spiritual and pastoral patrimony. The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter was erected for the United States and Canada on 1 January 2012, with parallel ordinariates in England and Wales and in Australia. Our guide to the Anglican Ordinariate covers the structure, its liturgy and its clergy in detail. Ordinariate parishes use Divine Worship: The Missal, a Catholic missal that draws on the Book of Common Prayer tradition, so the language of Cranmer is now used at valid Catholic Masses.

Former Anglican clergy received through this route are ordained as Catholic priests, absolutely rather than conditionally, and married men among them may be ordained under the terms of the constitution. Former Anglican bishops are received as priests, and the ordinary of an ordinariate may be a married former bishop who is ordained priest and given the pastoral governance of the ordinariate without episcopal consecration.

Why the Ordinariate Matters for This Page

The ordinariate is the Catholic Church's practical answer to what an Episcopalian means by calling the church catholic. Rome's position is that the Anglican patrimony contains genuine treasures, that those treasures belong properly inside the visible communion of the Catholic Church, and that a whole congregation can bring them with it. The provision also concedes something real: the Catholic Church has judged that Anglican liturgical and spiritual tradition is worth preserving in Catholic worship, and it has put that judgment into a missal.

12. The Realignment and the Churches That Left

Two waves of departure have left the Episcopal Church since the 1970s, and knowing which is which prevents a great deal of confusion. The first followed the 1976 ordination decision and the 1979 prayer book. The second followed the 2003 consecration. Both produced bodies that call themselves Anglican and that are not the Episcopal Church, and a reader searching for Episcopal beliefs will meet them.

The Continuing Anglican Churches

The Congress of St Louis in 1977 gathered clergy and lay people who rejected the ordination of women and the coming prayer book, and adopted the Affirmation of St Louis as their doctrinal basis. Out of it came the Anglican Catholic Church, the Anglican Church in America, the Anglican Province of Christ the King and other bodies. They generally use the 1928 American prayer book or the 1662 English one, ordain only men, and hold a firmly Anglo-Catholic or classically Anglican position. They are small and they have divided repeatedly.

The Anglican Church in North America

The Anglican Church in North America was formed in 2009 out of parishes and dioceses that left the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada after 2003, together with congregations that had placed themselves under African and South American Anglican provinces during the crisis. Four Episcopal dioceses, San Joaquin, Pittsburgh, Quincy and Fort Worth, voted to leave between 2007 and 2008, and years of property litigation followed in state courts with results that varied by state. The Anglican Church in North America is recognised by GAFCON and by a number of Anglican provinces, and it is not a member province of the Anglican Communion. Our guide to ACNA and the Episcopal Church compared sets out the two bodies side by side.

How the Bodies Compare

All of these bodies claim the Anglican tradition and they differ on what they take to be essential to it. The Episcopal Church holds the Communion seat, the endowments and the historic parishes. The Continuing Churches hold the older prayer books and a male priesthood. The Anglican Church in North America holds a broadly evangelical and charismatic majority alongside an Anglo-Catholic minority, and is itself divided internally on whether women may be ordained priest, a question it has left to each diocese. The Catholic assessment of orders in section 9 applies to all of them equally, since all of them stand in the same succession Leo XIII examined.

For the wider map of how American Christianity divided and what the main families teach, see our guide to Christian denominations.

13. Where Rome and the Episcopal Church Stand

Rome and the Episcopal Church stand in an honest and limited friendship, with the theological dialogue continuing and the goal of visible communion further away than it was in 1980. The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission has kept working through successive phases, producing agreed statements on the Eucharist, ministry, authority, salvation and, most recently, on the Church as communion and on moral discernment. Nothing in that work has changed the Catholic judgment on orders, and the decisions of 1976, 2003 and 2015 have added obstacles the earlier commissions did not face.

What the Two Churches Do Together

Catholics and Episcopalians in the United States cooperate widely: in food banks and shelters, in disaster relief, in prison and hospital chaplaincy, in public advocacy on poverty and immigration, and in ecumenical prayer during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in January. Local relations are usually warm. Joint statements from the American dialogue and the international commission are published and read. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism explains the principles the Catholic Church works by in these relationships.

What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

State the Episcopal position accurately before answering it, which means quoting the prayer book and the Constitution and Canons rather than a caricature. Do not tell an Episcopalian that his church is not Christian, because the Catholic Church says the opposite. Do not receive Communion in an Episcopal church, and explain why calmly if you are asked. Know the argument of Apostolicae Curae and the reply of Saepius Officio well enough to represent both. Pray for unity, which Christ asked for in John 17, and which is not going to be produced by anybody winning an argument at coffee hour.

What an Episcopalian Reader Should Do With This

Read the Catholic case at its strongest before deciding against it. The questions worth your time are the ones this page has tried to state plainly: whether the Church has authority to alter what it received, where that authority sits, and whether the visible unity Christ prayed for has a visible centre. Those questions have answers and the answers have consequences. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and a question of this weight is not improved by being left for later.

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