Fuelled by a school system in Quebec that long divided beliefs into two categories, Catholic and Protestant, many people understand churches in those seemingly simple terms. Even people who know next to nothing about the Christian religion operate on a basic understanding that anything that is not a catholic church is a protestant church, whatever it is that those words mean.
The Anglicans beg to differ.
“Many people do think we’re protestant, but we’re not,” said Edward Simonton, Archdeacon of the Saint Francis region. The Anglican church is a reformed catholic church. The mass may be identical in the Roman Church and the Anglican Church, but the Anglicans have a different aesthetic, slightly different musical sensibilities, and we tend to rely on the laity a good deal. We have woman priests, woman bishops, woman archbishops (…) things in that area we have been much more progressive about, not because we are progressive by definition, but because we balance out science, reason and scripture.”
