Anglican Diocese of Rupert's Land

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Crest of the Diocese of Rupert's Land

The Diocese of Rupert's Land is a diocese of the Ecclesiastical Province of Rupert's Land of the Anglican Church of Canada. It is named for the historical British North American territory of Rupert's Land, which was contained within the original diocesan boundaries.

The diocese comprises 72,500 square kilometres of southern Manitoba, consisting of the area immediately surrounding Winnipeg, stretching north from the Canada-US border to near the top of Lake Winnipeg. Its See city is Winnipeg, and its approximately 14,000 Anglicans on the parish rolls are served by 74 congregations, of which 32 are located in Winnipeg. Major centres, apart from Winnipeg, include Selkirk and Portage la Prairie.

The area of the diocese was the cradle of European settlement in western Canada, and was thus the original locus of Anglican missionary activity there. The first Anglican service was held at the Red River Colony in 1820, and three years later the first Anglican church in western Canada was constructed. In 1849, the diocese was formally established with jurisdiction over all the territory of present day Canada west of Ontario, as well as parts of northern and western Ontario. The first synod was convened twenty years later, and the diocese was incorporated in 1886.

The diocese played an important part in the growing autonomy of Anglicanism in Canada. Its second bishop, Robert Machray, helped divide the sprawling diocese into four smaller ones, creating in consequence the ecclesiastical province which (rather confusingly) bears the diocesan name. Machray would go on to become the first Primate of the Church of England in Canada, playing an instrumental role in establishing the Lambeth Conference of worldwide Anglican bishops, now one of the instruments of unity of the Anglican Communion. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the diocese also played a key role in the missionary activity of the Anglican Church in western Canada, particularly in the prairie provinces and the Arctic.

Over the decades, the geographical expanse of the diocese has shrunk to its present size. The original territory of the Diocese of Rupert's Land is now served by eighteen dioceses.

The Bishop of Rupert's Land (the twelfth) is the Right Rev. Donald D. Phillips, who was consecrated in 2000. The Dean of St. John's Cathedral is The Very Rev. Robert Osborne.

The diocese sponsored the lay order, the Company of the Cross which ran a controversial school for boys called Saint John's Cathedral Boys' School, which was closed in the 1990s. The school was conservative and prided itself in pushing boys to their physical and psychological breaking points. It spawned two other schools, Saint John's School of Alberta and Saint John's School of Ontario where 12 boys and a teacher died on a poorly planned canoe trip.

[edit] External links

• Diocesan website.
• Province of Manitoba Act of incorporation.
• Anglican Journal article on the election of Bishop Phillips.
• The Rainbow in the North: A Short Account of the First Establishment of Christianity in Rupert's Land by the Church Missionary Society, by Sarah Tucker (1851).