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Summary
- Anglicans are not Roman Catholics: the Church of England calls itself “catholic and reformed” and broke with Rome under Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy of 1534, a break made lasting under Elizabeth I.
- The Catholic Church teaches that the Pope has “full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church”; the Anglican Communion’s 42 member churches govern themselves, with the Archbishop of Canterbury as their focus of unity.
- Article 28 of the Thirty-nine Articles rejects transubstantiation, and Pope Leo XIII’s Apostolicae Curae (1896) declared Anglican ordinations “absolutely null and utterly void,” so the two churches do not share Communion.
- Anglican clergy may marry, and the Church of England ordains women as priests and bishops; Sarah Mullally, the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, is a married woman.
- The Church of England keeps feasts of Mary but does not require the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption, and Article 22 rejects “the Romish Doctrine concerning… invocation of Saints.”
- Since 2009 the Catholic Church has received groups of former Anglicans through personal ordinariates that keep parts of Anglican worship.
Bibliography (Click to show)
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