Anglican Catholic Church of Canada
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The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada is an Anglican church that was founded in the 1970s by conservative Anglicans who were dissatisfied with decisions made by the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC) to confer priestly ordination upon women and to make liturgical reforms that would evolve into the Book of Alternative Services. The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada continues to maintain an all-male clergy and recently has criticised what it considers to be the parent church's increasing acceptance of homosexuality.
The ACCC is the second-largest Anglican church in Canada. Like the similarly named U.S. body, the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada is a product of the Congress of St. Louis which founded the Continuing Anglican Movement, but it is otherwise unrelated to the American church. The ACCC is a member of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), whose representative in the United States is the Anglican Church in America.
The church has forty-five parishes and missions throughout Canada, as well as one parish in Washington State. Although most ACCC congregations are relatively small, the church has experienced steady growth in recent years, especially in Alberta and Atlantic Canada. The current bishop of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada is the Rt. Rev'd Peter Wilkinson, of Victoria, British Columbia.
The TAC is currently discussing a form of union with the Roman Catholic Church and states that it has no doctrinal differences with Rome sufficient to prevent the success of this proposal.
On January 27th, 2007, two suffragan bishops, The Right Rev'd Bishop Craig Botterill and the Right Rev'd Carl Reid, were consecrated by the Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, Archbishop John Hepworth, assisted by Diocesan and Metropolitan Bishop Peter Wilkinson and retired Bishop Robert Mercer.
