Types of Catholic Churches

The Anglican Catholic Church (ACC) is a body of Christians in the continuing Anglican movement, which is separate from the Anglican Communion centered on the Archbishop of Canterbury. The continuing Anglican movement and the Anglican Catholic Church grew out of the 1977 Congress of St. Louis.

The head of each Orthodox church is called a “patriarch” or “metropolitan.” The patriarch of Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey) is considered the ecumenical—or universal—patriarch. He is the closest thing to a counterpart to the Pope in the Roman Catholic Church.

The Oriental Orthodox communion is composed of six autocephalous churches: the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church.

Protestantism is the second largest form of Christianity with collectively more than 900 million adherents worldwide or nearly 40% of all Christians. It originated with the Reformation, a movement against what its followers perceived to be errors in the Roman Catholic Church. Ever since, Protestants reject the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal supremacy and sacraments, but disagree among ...

The Catholic religion is the religion of the Catholic Church—i.e., that group of churches in communion with the pope. If a group isn’t in communion with the pope, it isn’t part of the Catholic Church. Within the Catholic Church there are a number of individual churches, sometimes called rites. One of these is the Roman rite or Roman church.