Anglican Catholic Church of Canada
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| Anglican Catholic Church of Canada | |
 The ACCC Crest. |
|
| Classification | Continuing Anglican |
|---|---|
| Orientation | Anglo-Catholic |
| Polity | Episcopal |
| Origin | 1977 |
| Separated from | Anglican Church of Canada |
| Associations | Traditional Anglican Communion |
| Geographical Area | Canada, United States |
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The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada (ACCC) 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 church uses exclusively the 1962 Book of Common Prayer and rejects the possibility of remarriage after divorce.
The ACCC is the second-largest of the Anglican churches in Canada. Like the similarly named American body, the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada is a product of the Congress of St. Louis which founded the Continuing Anglican Movement with the signing of the Affirmation of St. Louis, and was carved out of the original jurisdiction of the Anglican Church in North America. Today, however, it is unaffiliated with the US Anglican Catholic Church. Instead, the ACCC is a member of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), represented in the United States by the Anglican Church in America.
The ACCC has about 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 also experienced steady growth in recent years, especially in Alberta and the Atlantic provinces[citation needed]. The current bishop of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada is the Right Reverend 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 [1] [2].
On January 27th, 2007 two suffragan bishops, the Right Reverend Craig Botterill and the Right Reverend Carl Reid, were consecrated by the Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, Archbishop John Hepworth, assisted by the Diocesan and Metropolitan, Bishop Peter Wilkinson and also the retired Bishop Robert Mercer, CR.
