A gem found in the com box over at TitusOneNine in an article about the conversion of Bishop John Lispscomb, formerly of TEC. 
Levi Silliman Ives (1797-1867), Bishop of North Carolina 1831-1852, resigned in 1852 to become a Catholic; he was subsequently Prof. of Homiletics at St. Joseph’s Seminary in New York City. (His wife, a daughter of the famous PECUSA Bishop of New York, John Henry Hobart [d. 1830] converted with him.)
Frederick Joseph Kinsman (1866-1944), Bishop of Delaware 1908-1919, resigned in 1919 to become a Catholic; he was subsequently Professor of Church History at The Catholic University of America.
Ives explained and justified his conversion in his *The Trials of a Mind in its Progress to the Catholic Faith* (1853), Kinsman in his Salve Mater (Longmans, Green & Co., 1920).
Godfrey Goodman (1583-1656), Bishop of Gloucester in the Church of England from 1626, became a Catholic shortly before his death. Graham Leonard, Bishop of London from 1981 to 1991, became a Catholic in 1994, after his retirement. Richard Rutt, bishop of Leicester from 1979 to 1991, became a Catholic in 1995. Two English Anglican suffragan bishops, John Klyberg of Fulham and Conrad Meyer of Dorchester, both became Catholics in that year as well, and I think that they both resigned to do so.
I published this article in 1998:
http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=12-05-046-b
on these and related matters,
POSTSCRIPT:
No bishop of the Anglican Communion has ever become Orthodox, I think (although Bishop Rutt of Leicester’s becoming a Catholic rather than an Orthodox in 1995 was a surprise to many, as he had previously been Patron of the very Orthodoxophile “Anglo-Orthodox Society”), but one Continuing Anglican bishop has: Robert Waggener, a bishop of the Anglican Province of Christ the King and later of the Diocese of the Holy Cross, became Orthodox about a year ago and is currently pastor of a Western-Rite Antiochian Orthodox parish in Alabama.
I always enjoy Dr. Tighe’s comments, wherever I may find them.
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January 25, 2008 at 9:17 pm
What’s a Continuing Anglican? (Excuse my ignorance.)
January 25, 2008 at 9:45 pm
In a nutshell, a CA is someone who would be classified as a traditional (of a sort) Anglican Christian who has withdrawn from the greater Anglican communion to set up a new or alternate church that preserves (according to their vision) a more “traditional” or “classical” form of Anglicanism.
The folks who have done this are manifold, and it has created a bit of a “jurisdiction soup.” Different jursidictions correspond roughly to different movements in the Anglican communion. For example the ACC - Anglican Catholic Church - is very Anglo-Catholic using a liturgy like the Tridentine Mass in English. Still others might be high, broad, or low church.
It is their goal or vision to “continue on” with the version of Anglicanism they knew and were used to…
Problematic to me is that many begin to have a bit of a niche appeal that seems a little esoteric. Many of these jurisdictions are set up by disaffected parties who are already Anglican and cater to them. Fine in and of itself, I suppose… Branch theory being what it is, that seems, on the face of it to be a legitimate option.
But as time moves on, the question is, does the well of disaffected members dry up after they have been siphoned off and the remaining folks find the status quo liveable? For better or worse, the Episcopal Church in the USA seems to do a good job of crossing the line in the sand of conscious for a sizeable minority every few years… People who can live with female deacons can’t live with female priests, female bishops, gay priests, gay bishops, John Shelby Spong…
How well they do in attracting members to their congregation who are new Christians or unchurched, I suppose varies.
At least one major grouping of these folks has recently petitioned Rome to enter into communion with the Catholic Church en masse. Rumor has it that serious consideration is being given to figuring out just how to do that. Time will tell.
I think ultimately many are reconsidering the value and/or flaws of Anglican style church governance and theology. It seems to be occuring to more and more people that if they don’t like what the breakway church they belong to is doing (Anglicanism) perhaps returning to communion with Rome might be a wiser thing to do then forming a new denomination and starting from scratch…
January 26, 2008 at 12:12 am
Yes, Dr. Tighe it is good to have Dr. Tighe on our side. He is Catholic and articulate and vigorous in his apologetics without being crass.
January 26, 2008 at 8:49 pm
I first became aware of Dr. Tighe through his comments on T19 over a year ago. He is articulate and usually far more knowledgeable of Anglican history and theology than many Anglican scholars. I believe that Dr. Tighe is actually an Eastern Catholic (UGCC?). So, it is doubly good to have him on our side!! I sure would not want to debate him.
Regarding the Anglican Continuum, I believe that the bodies who used that term all originate with the Congress of St. Louis in 1977 which rejected women’s ordination in TEC (1976). They regard the ordination of women as nullifying the legitimacy of the Anglican Communion and therefore see themselves as “continuing” Anglicanism. The Congress of St. Louis issued a closing document called the Affirmation of St. Louis and is worth a google search for further information. Unfortunately, the Continuum was very small in number and almost immediately fragmented into 4 jurisdictions which have in some case further fragmented. The TAC is one of the continuum bodies.
January 27, 2008 at 2:07 am
If I recall correctly there is a Continuing Anglican jurisdiction with deaconesses (of the liturgical variety, not the proto-paramonastics that Anglicanism first introduced)…
But it is all so fragmented, I lose track and could be wrong.
January 27, 2008 at 3:31 am
Dr. T is UGCC.