Episcopal Innovations 1960-2004

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3600

[VirtueOnline] Februayr 13, 2006--The religion professed by the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA from the 1780s through to the 1960s is best described as Reformed Catholicism. That is, neither Roman Catholicism nor Orthodox Catholicism of the East, but that form and shape of Christianity which originally came into being as the Church of England underwent a reformation and renewal in the middle of the sixteenth century. From this Reformed Church of England, worship, doctrine, discipline and polity were taken around the world, including to the thirteen colonies of Britain in America. Thus after American Independence, English Reformed Catholicism was the religion given a specifically American dress and context in the Formularies (local editions of the traditional Book of Common Prayer, Ordinal and Articles of Religion) by the newly organized Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA. The churches of the thirteen colonies became the first dioceses of this national Church [PECUSA], later to be a province in the Anglican Communion of Churches, and they embraced Reformed Catholicism. Some of them expressed it as "Low Church" or "Latitudinarian" and others as "High Church" and later in the nineteenth century it had "Anglo-Catholic" and "Evangelical" expressions as well.