Anglican clergy still crossing Tiber after big conversion waves
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Anglican clergy are continuing to join the Catholic Church in the U.K. following spikes in receptions in 1994 and 2011, according to a new study.
The 24-page report “Convert Clergy in the Catholic Church in Britain: The Role of the St. Barnabas Society,” published Nov. 20, concluded that more than 700 former Anglican clergy and religious in Britain have become Catholics since 1992, including 16 former Anglican bishops.
“In any given ‘normal’ year, it seems there are anywhere up to 11 Anglican clergy being received into the Catholic Church, and the same number being ordained,” said the report, issued weeks after the former Anglican clergyman St. John Henry Newman was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church and co-patron of Catholic education, alongside St. Thomas Aquinas.
The study, which sheds light on a topic previously obscured by a lack of reliable data, also found that former Anglican clergy accounted for around 29% of all priestly ordinations in Catholic dioceses in England and Wales from 1992 to 2024.
The figure suggests the local Catholic Church is heavily reliant on convert clergy amid an overall decline in the number of ordinations to the diocesan priesthood. It also raises the question of what will happen when former Anglican clergy from the two big waves retire.
Stephen Bullivant, a sociologist based at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, and one of the report’s co-authors, said it was unclear if a large gap in pastoral provision would open up.
“The dataset didn’t include much age data, so it’s hard to get a sense of if there’s a big wave of retirements about to hit,” he told The Pillar via email Nov. 21.
He noted that some clergy who became Catholics in the early 1990s, after the Anglican Church of England approved the ordination of women priests, have already retired. So have others received into the Catholic Church after Pope Benedict XVI established ordinariates for groups of former Anglicans in 2009 and visited Britain in 2010.
“It’s not as though they’re all going to go at once,” he commented.
The new report was commissioned by the St. Barnabas Society, an organization that offers pastoral and financial assistance to clergy and religious from other Christian traditions who embrace the Catholic faith.
It continues the work of the Converts Aid Society, which was founded in 1896 by Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, the then-Archbishop of Westminster, to support primarily Anglican clergy who became Catholic in the wake of Pope Leo XIII’s apostolic letter Apostolicae curae, which declared Anglican orders “null and void.”
A century later, another wave of Anglican clergy converts entered the Catholic Church in the U.K., in response to a 1992 vote to ordain women priests by the Church of England’s General Synod. The report said that annual receptions peaked in 1994, with almost 160.
Of the roughly 700 former Anglican clergy and religious who became Catholic after 1992, 491 were ordained in the Catholic Church, with 486 becoming Catholic priests and five deacons.
Out of the 700 converts, 35 later returned to Anglicanism. Among the 491 ordained as Catholic clergy, five returned to the Anglican communion, while one became a Russian Orthodox priest.
The second wave of clergy converts began in 2011, when the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was established for groups of former Anglicans in England, Wales, and Scotland. More than 80 former Anglican clergy and religious became Catholics that year, followed by nearly 40 in 2012.
The report said former Anglican clergy accounted for 9% of diocesan priestly ordinations from 2015 to 2024 in England and Wales.
A significant proportion of ordinariate priests serve in diocesan ministry, as priests-in-charge of parishes or chaplains. When diocesan and ordinariate figures are combined, former Anglican clergy comprise 35% of all priestly ordinations between 1992 and 2024 in England and Wales.
Three of the 190 former Anglican clergy received into the Catholic Church since 2010 returned to the Church of England, while one joined a body known as the Anglican Catholic Church, part of the Continuing Anglican movement which rejects the Anglican Communion. Two Continuing Anglican bishops have been received into the Catholic Church in the U.K., the report said.
Stephen Bullivant told The Pillar he did not foresee a third big wave of Anglican clergy converts, despite deepening fractures in the Anglican Communion and the appointment of the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally.
Mullally previously served as the Anglican Bishop of London, where some parishes rejected oversight by a woman but continued to operate semi-independently under a formal pastoral provision known as “alternative episcopal oversight.”
The parishes received sacramental and pastoral ministry from male bishops nicknamed “flying bishops” because they have no territorial dioceses of their own. Anglican parishes that reject women bishops in the Greater London area are served by the Bishop of Fulham, Jonathan Baker.
Bullivant said: “Women bishops have been a fact of life in the Church of England for some years, including for the various ‘flying bishoprics.’ Fulham, for example, is after all a suffragan see of London. So female episcopal jurisdiction, howsoever once or twice removed, is no new thing,” Bullivant said.
“That said, it’s also true that ‘Church of England controversies you will always have with you’ (so to speak), such that there will always be some particular reason, for some people, to think ‘this is the final straw.’”
“So I think the steady stream of anywhere from a couple to a dozen in any one year — it fluctuates quite a lot — will continue. I could even foresee it growing, on average. But I don’t envisage any new big wave on the immediate horizon.”
In a foreword to the new report, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster and president of the St. Barnabas Society, questioned whether the term “convert” accurately described former Anglicans who became Catholics.
He said that for many who become Catholic, it is “not so much a turning away or rejection of their rich and precious Anglican heritage but an experience of an imperative to move into the full visible communion of the Catholic Church, in union with the See of Peter.”
The report itself noted that some former Anglicans found the term “convert” theologically problematic, believing that “conversion” was not an accurate description of the movement from another Christian tradition into full communion with the Catholic Church.
But the report said it used the term because it is “a readily understood shorthand” expression employed by many clergy received into the Catholic Church.
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