Talk:Church of St Michael and All Angels, Christchurch

Anglo-Catholic

@Graham11: I see that they indeed say that on their homepage. Admittedly, I have little idea how churches organise themselves. Is Anglo-Catholicism something that they decide at a parish-level, or at diocese-level? I'm wondering because they obviously belong to the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch (and as the article says, the church was at two points in time their pro-cathedral) and I've never heard them being described as Anglo-Catholic at the diocese-level, and neither are they categorised as such. Schwede66 03:17, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

In the Anglican tradition, beliefs about theology, liturgy, ecclesiology, etc, are often categorised according to churchmanship. To oversimplify somewhat, often three labels are used: high church / Anglo-Catholic; low church / evangelical; and broad church (the latter also sometimes being associated with latitudinarianism). While some dioceses have noticeable proclivities (an extreme example being Sydney), my understanding is that it is more common to notice this at the parish level. Most parishes don't make a formal decision to associate themselves with the Anglo-Catholic tradition (or evangelicalism, etc.), but naturally, they do have particularly tendencies.

Of course there's no checklist of criteria to determine if a church is "high" enough to be labelled as Anglo-Catholic, so I have only been adding the category to articles that already describe the church as Anglo-Catholic or where the church's website or other reliable sources describe the church as such.

To clarify, while there are churches outside of the Anglican Communion (of which the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia is a part) that would describe themselves as Anglo-Catholic (i.e, churches in the Continuing Anglican and Anglican realignment movements, as well as the personal ordinariates of the Roman Catholic Church), most Anglo-Catholics are within the Anglican Communion in dioceses such as this one. Graham (talk) 04:09, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. Schwede66 05:37, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

@Graham11: If, as you explain, some Anglo-Catholic churches are not now in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury, should Category:Anglo-Catholic churches in New Zealand remain a sub-category of Category:Anglican churches in New Zealand; wouldn't it be better as a separate category? Nedrutland (talk) 07:09, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

@Nedrutland: Self-described Anglicans who are not in communion with Canterbury are not limited to Anglo-Catholics. There are also evangelicals and others who have broken formal ties with the Anglican Communion but who still call themselves Anglicans (see, e.g, the Anglican Church of North America). It should be noted, as an aside, that there are some who would suggest that true Anglicans do not exist outside of communion with Canterbury.

I'm not sure whether there are any Continuing Anglican churches in New Zealand, but if there were, I would think it necessary that they also be included in Category:Anglican churches in New Zealand. Similarly, Category:Anglican churches in the United States contains as subcategories Category:Episcopal churches in the United States (which is for churches that are part of the Episcopal Church which is part of the Anglican Communion), Category:Anglican Church in North America churches in the United States (which is for churches that are part of the schismatic Anglican Church in North America), and Category:Anglo-Catholic churches in the United States (which is for Anglo-Catholic churches which usually, but do not always, also fall under one of the other two subcategories).

While it may come to be that Anglicans outside of the Anglican Communion cease to be generally recognised as Anglicans, as things stand right now, I don't know that we can classify them as being non-Anglican. Graham (talk) 18:36, 30 April 2016 (UTC)