Anglican Bishop, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali has left the Church of England and will be ordained into the Catholic priesthood.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales has announced that he will join what is known as the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, a group set up by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 for Anglican exiles.
Dr Nazir-Ali has been a leading figure in the Gafcon movement which describes itself as a global family of authentic Anglicans standing together to retain and restore the Bible to the heart of the Anglican Communion. He was President of Gafcon GB and Europe (GBE) (formally Gafcon UK), since the formation of the regional branch in 2016 and has now resigned.
In thanking Dr Nazir-Ali for his work for Gafcon, Archbishop Foley Beach Chairman of Gafcon said: ‘Michael … has shared with me his willingness to continue to assist the Gafcon movement in any way that might be suitable. While we are still exploring what this might look like, in the near term we look forward to continuing to partner with him in support of the suffering church.’
Meanwhile, the Gafcon GBE trustees said in a statement: ‘While respecting Bishop Michael’s decision to join the Roman Catholic church, we remain committed to the vision of a renewed, Biblically orthodox, global Anglicanism here in Britain and Europe under the ANiE leadership of Bishop Andy Lines and those that we stand with under the Jerusalem Declaration.’
