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A new study has revealed the scale of Anglican clergy who entered into full communion with the Catholic Church over the past three decades, with hundreds of vicars and even entire groups of ministers making the journey to Rome.
The research, published on 20 November by St Mary’s University, Twickenham, shows that roughly a third of all Catholic priests ordained in England and Wales between 1992 and 2024 were formerly Anglican, marking what scholars describe as one of the most significant shifts in the religious landscape since the Oxford Movement.
The report finds that about 700 clergy and religious from the Church of England, the Church in Wales and the Scottish Episcopal Church, have been received into the Catholic Church since the early 1990s.
Among them were 16 Anglican bishops and two from the Continuing Anglican movement, a cluster of churches with an Anglican identity but outside the Anglican Communion.
The trend is long-running but began in earnest following the Church of England’s vote in 1992 to ordain women priests, an event that the study identifies as a watershed moment for many.
Prof Stephen Bullivant, co-author of the study from the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society, said the findings showed “unequivocally a surge” in conversions after the contentious Synod vote.
The legislation passed by a margin of just two votes after hours of debate, as demonstrators gathered outside Church House in Westminster to voice both support and opposition.
Prof Bullivant said those Anglcian priests who subsequently entered the Catholic Church did so “for various reasons”, but acknowledged that “the Synod vote on women priests was a big one in the 1990s”.
For others, he said, the decision emerged from deeper spiritual reflection: “Some had reached a point in their lives where they felt that the time was right, this was something which had been on their conscience for a long time.”
The report also points to Pope Benedict XVI’s state visit to Britain in 2010 as another catalyst. During that visit, he beatified Cardinal John Henry Newman, himself a former Anglican priest whose reception into the Catholic Church in 1845 reshaped the ecclesial landscape of Victorian England.
Saint (and now Doctor of the Church) Newman, known for his pastoral commitment to impoverished Irish communities in Birmingham, continues to hold a special place in the imagination of both Anglicans and Catholics.
“Cardinal Newman is a real hero among Anglicans and Catholics,” Prof Bullivant said. “However, most of these people [converts] have a long and very personal journey.”
The study reveals that from 1992 to 2024, among Catholic diocesan priestly ordinations in England and Wales, 29 per cent were former Anglican clergy. When the clergy of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham are included, the figure rises to 35 per cent.
By contrast, between 2015 and 2024 the proportion falls to 9 per cent for diocesan ordinations and 19 per cent when including the Ordinariate.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, writing in the foreword of the report, reflects on the complexity of these stories, noting that “the movement of clergy from the Church of England into full communion with the Catholic Church in recent times is a story of many parts”.
He describes their journeys as “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”.
Photo: Then Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby with the Reverend Canon Philippa Boardman, then treasurer of St Paul's Cathedral, during a service to mark the 20th anniversary of the ordination of women as priests in the Church of England at St Paul's Cathedral, London, England, 3 May 2014. More than 600 women priests attended the service which came ahead of a vote in July that year when the CofE was expected to pass legislation (which it did) that would allow women be ordained as Bishops. (Photo by Yui Mok - WPA Pool/Getty Images.)
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