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The archbishop of Canterbury has spoken out against “tyrannical and populist” world leaders in a Christmas message likely to be seen partly as a rebuke against US president Donald Trump. Justin Welby was preaching at Canterbury cathedral at the same time as Pope Francis made oblique criticism of Trump in his traditional Christmas address in St Peter’s Square in Vatican City.

Dear Friends: As leaders of various communities of faith throughout the United States, many of us came together in the past to affirm our commitment to marriage as the union of one man and one woman and as the foundation of society. We reiterate that natural marriage continues to be invaluable to American society. We come together to join our voices on a more fundamental precept of our shared existence, namely, that human beings are male or female and that the socio-cultural reality of gender cannot be separated from one's sex as male or female. We acknowledge and affirm that...

You know gay-rights activism has gone goofy when the New York Times raises an eyebrow at it.Some Christians attracted to the same sex try to “pray the gay away,” to the annoyance of LGBT advocates who believe orientation is inborn and that trying to “cure” homosexuality through prayer further stigmatizes it. Well, good news and bad news. The good news: Praying the gay away is out of vogue.The bad news? Looks like we’re “praying the straight away” instead. In four-year-olds. Mr. Holdsworth, the provost of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow, belongs to the Scottish Episcopal Church, a separate province...

Kensington Palace told The Tablet that Miss Markle is a Protestant but had not previously been baptised or confirmed. In addition, she will seek to become a British citizen, the palace said. Prince Harry's grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, is Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Prince Harry is currently fifth in line to the throne and will become sixth in line after the birth of his brother Prince William's third child next year. Ms Markle went to a Catholic school but is not a Catholic. In any case, the 2013 Succession to the Crown Act 2013 removed the law...

Pope Francis has requested that Roman Catholic priests be given the right to get married. The request applies to priests in Brazil, and is on the agenda for an upcoming synod (church council) in the Amazon region. The controversial move would address the critical shortage of men joining the priesthood

Justin Welby has said he struggles with the question of whether gay sex is a sin and acknowledged that the gulf between conservative and liberal Anglicans on the issue is “irreconcilable”...Welby, who came under fire at the weekend by survivors of sexual abuse for his suggestion that the Church of England had acted with integrity, is likely to disappoint LGBTI campaigners within the church over his “cop-out” on gay sex. Asked by Campbell if gay sex was sinful, Welby said: “You know very well that is a question I can’t give a straight answer to. Sorry, badly phrased there. I...

Highly political synods shattered Anglicanism's fragile unity. Catholics should take noteA former Anglican Chaplain to the Queen, the Revd Gavin Ashenden, is spearheading a revolt in the Church of England Synod over the thorny issue of homosexuality. Anglicans are talking openly about schism. Catholics the world over should be watching very carefully.Anglicanism’s real problem has always been a theological schizophrenia – the result, perhaps, of it having formed to appease a lusty monarch rather than to preach a creed with clarity. Ask a hundred Anglicans what Anglicanism actually is and expect a hundred answers. The Church of England isn’t, really, one Church...

A queer thing happened to the Church of England. In the 500th year of the Reformation it crossed the thin red line from apostolic to apostate. Future seminary students will be grateful for this mnemonic device when mugging up important dates for a Church History exam. Easy peasy! How can one forget? In 1517, the Reformers decided to yank a recalcitrant Church of Rome back to the Bible. In 2017, the Reformers booed the Bible and booted it out of the Church of England. The flashpoint for the Reformation of 1517 was indulgences. The flashpoint for the Reformation of 2017...

Asparagus is so venerated in Worcester that it has been blessed in a special ceremony in the city's cathedral. But the thanksgiving service celebrating the local crop has been criticised by other Anglicans who have called it "absurd". The bizarre Sunday evensong service was defended by the cathedral's Precentor, who said the vegetable was "a sign of the abundant provision and generosity of God".

It's a mighty difficult thing to be incognito as a well-known personage attending Sunday church services. This is most especially true if you are the 48th Vice President of the United States, accompanied by wife Karen. It is well known the Pences are deeply devout Evangelical Christians. Mike Pence calls himself an "Evangelical Catholic". He was raised a Roman Catholic, but later underwent an evangelical conversion experience. Despite their heavy schedules, they are regular churchgoers. Last Sunday, February 26, and the two previous Lord's Days, the Vice President and Second Lady have attended services at The Falls Church Anglican in...

In 1930, the Anglican Communion abandoned the universal Christian moral teaching of two millennia, which condemned artificial birth control as a grave moral evil, contra naturam, and destructive of marriage. It did so by allowing the individual subjective conscience to overrule the absolute moral norm that such actions are intrinsically evil and thus allow no exceptions.This was a death knell for Anglicanism as a moral authority. The result has been not only the total independence of Anglicans from their traditional moral teaching but the collapse of religious practice among the laity (except for the African branches of this once vibrant...

An influential seminary affiliated with The Episcopal Church has announced that it will no longer issue degrees starting next year, and is reporting a net loss of $7.9 million in assets since last year. The Episcopal Divinity School of Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced in July that they will stop granting degrees at the end of the 2016-2017 academic year. Last week, the divinity school sent out an update to supporters and members of its campus community wherein they noted that the net assets of the seminary had declined rapidly over the past couple of years. "At our meeting, we also accepted...

Sex within a committed homosexual relationship is perfectly “proper”, the Archbishop of Wales has said, arguing that Christians who support same-sex marriage are not “abandoning the Bible”. Dr. Barry Morgan used his final address to the governing body of The Church in Wales to suggest that biblical stories should be re-examined and re-interpreted in a way that fully accepts homosexual lifestyles.

A new $5 million Anglican Centre is to be built in Spain in Santiago de Compostela, the end of the world-famous Catholic pilgrimage route the Way of St James. The Reformed Episcopal Church of Spain, which is part of the Anglican Community under the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury, is to begin fundraising with the help of Trinity Church, Wall Street in the United States. The new Anglican centre in Spain will have instant and enormous appeal to Christians from through the Anglican Communion worldwide. Santiago de Compostela is believed to be the burial site of the disciple James,...

For more than thirty years now I have been an observer and sometime participant in what I will here call the conservative Episcopalian mess. The departure of more orthodox Episcopalians from an apostatizing mainstream headed by weak and clownish English archbishops and astoundingly aggressive heretics in North America, contained no real surprises, for this is the predictable fruit of religious liberalism hatched upon an ignorant, passive, and venal laity, that we have seen in other major Protestant churches, and from which modern Roman Catholicism, especially under a Nice Pope, is unlikely to be much of a refuge. What I have...

After nearly 50 years of discourse between the Catholic and Anglican communions, the official dialogue body wants to fine-tune how it studies the differences and similarities between two churches which both call themselves Catholic. “ARCIC III hasn’t proved itself yet,” Sir David Moxon, Anglican co-chair of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, told The Catholic Register following an ecumenical evensong on Pentecost Sunday. This third stage of the dialogue has been meeting since 2011, but has yet to publish a major document. It is currently studying how the Church arrives at moral teaching. The official dialogue sponsored by the Vatican and...

"My parents were killed by a drunk driver, but my parents did not die in vain," he says in the advertisement, which was slated to start airing Friday in South Carolina. "I was transformed. I discovered my purpose by discovering the Lord. I believe the Lord put us on this earth to use the gifts that we've been given to bring about a healing. And that's the motivation for me." Kasich, who worships at an Anglican church and regularly attends a Bible study group, has always made his spirituality central to his pitch to voters, telling attendees of his over-100...

HOUSTON — In a majestic Mass at Houston’s Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart on Tuesday evening, history was made for the Anglican ordinariates established by Pope Benedict XVI: Their first bishop was ordained. “In a nutshell, it means we’re here to stay,” summarized Msgr. Harry Entwistle, the ordinary of Australia’s ordinariate, which is under the patroness of Our Lady of the Southern Cross. The new bishop, Stephen Joseph Lopes, 40, a native of California, was in fact instrumental in the creation of the ordinariate that he now leads — the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. The...

The Anglican Communion voted to censure its American branch, the Episcopal Church, during a meeting in Canterbury, England, called to reflect on the future of the communion. The vote Thursday (Jan. 14) to suspend the Episcopal Church from voting and decision-making for a period of three years was leaked a day ahead of a press conference that had been scheduled for Friday.

Attendance at Church of England services has plunged to its lowest level ever as the Archbishop of Canterbury warned it was battling to maintain its place in an increasingly “anti-Christian” culture. Official figures – based on an annual pew count – show that only 1.4 per cent of the population of England now attend Anglican services on a typical Sunday morning.