Anglican parish in Canada asks for ordinariate

BY ANNA ARCO
AN ANGLO-Catholic parish in Calgary has become the first mainstream Canadian Anglican church to request to join an ordinariate in Canada.
St John the Evangelist in Alberta province in Canada’s mid-west overwhelmingly voted to take up an ordinariate when such a structure exists. It is the first parish belonging to the Anglican Communion in Canada to make this move.
After 10 months of meetings and talks about the offer made in the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, the parish overwhelmingly voted to join an ordinariate once it is established in Canada.
Fr Lee Kenyon, the priest in charge of the parish, explained that the Anglo-Catholic parish of St John the Evangelist was something of an anomaly within the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC). He said the ACC had started ordaining women in the 1970s, but Calgary diocese remained conservative and only ordained the first women in 1989.
St John’s continued to exist in “almost splendid isolation” from the tensions that were rocking the Anglican Church of Canada over the ordination of women and acceptance of same-sex blessings, he said.
Fr Kenyon said: “Of course it became clear by last year that the ACC was going in a different direction. One of the things you hear most from parishioners is the question about who left whom. We didn’t leave the ACC, it left us.” With the publication of Anglicanorum coetibus, Fr Kenyon said the parish had an offer to consider. The parishioners and the vestry, the ACC’s version of the Parochial Church Council, were convinced they could no longer continue in the way they were going, he explained.
The parish explored whether to stay in the ACC, join the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, a group which belongs to the Traditional Anglican Communion, or to go through with its own process to join an ordinariate. They contacted Archbishop Thomas Collin of Toronto who is the Catholic liaison officer for the ordinariate in Canada, and began to study the Catechism of the Catholic Church and took up the Evangelium course.
Fr Kenyon said: “One thread going through this process was that we didn’t leave out of anger and that those tensions may well be the occasion for our departure from the Anglican Church of Canada, but that they should never be the reason for our conversion.” In October the vestry voted to accept Anglicanorum coetibus and in November 90 per cent of the parish voted in favour. The diocese will appoint a priest mentor to the parish. The ACCC voted to take up the ordinariate earlier this year. It has 27 parishes.