Mr. McKerracher found that actual membership in the Anglican Church has declined by 53 percent since 1960. Project those trends forward (a generous assumption, since the rate of decline has accelerated in the last two or three years) and the last Anglican exits on the solitary path of the dodo bird in just about a generation or so. This may help to explain the near total absence of young families to be seen in Anglican churches; after all what parent would entrust the spiritual instruction of their children to a church on palliative care.

Now, of course, membership is falling in most mainline protestant denominations, so much so that there are recent books suggesting that the protestant reformation has about run its course. This will not surprise Roman Catholics, who always considered Protestantism like a severed limb which, when cut off from the body, may twitch for a time but must inevitably shrivel and die.

Since 1961, Canadian Anglicans have fallen from 1.3 million to 642,000. The United Church in the same period has lost nearly half its members (from 1.04 million to 638,000). Presbyterians are down by 39 percent; Baptists by 7 percent; Lutherans by 4 percent. The only bright light in the protestant firmament are those wild-eyed Pentecostals, where membership has grown by 38 percent.

But in the race to the finish line, Anglicans are well in the lead; at least since 2002 when the Bishop of New Westminster, Michael Ingham, decided to break with Christian teaching and the rest of the worldwide Anglican Communion by blessing same-sex unions, Canadian Anglicans have been in free fall. Incidentally, U.S. Anglicans, called Episcopalians, have fared no better since their 2003 decision to ordain Vicki Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, a man who had left his wife and family to set up house with his homosexual lover. This was not what many Episcopalians meant by "family values". Of course, most Bishops will tell you there's no connection between cause and effect.

At a recent meeting (optimistically reported in the Anglican Journal under the headline: "Canadian Bishops meet to discuss church growth"), Mr. McKerracher told the Bishops: "Listen, guys, we're declining much faster than other churches. We're losing 12,836 Anglicans a year. That's two percent a year." But McKerracher did not think the blunt message got through: "The church is in crisis .[but] I don't think the Anglicans will do anything. They just talk things to death."

The Anglican Primate, Archbishop Andrew Hutchinson, was quoted as saying that McKerracher's Report was "a wake-up call"; Hutchinson admitted that his church had been preoccupied with "the residential schools affair", and he promised a new focus on "church development". The trouble is that having spent tens of millions on the largely bogus residential schools imbroglio, and having lost more than half its membership, there are no longer the resources - financial or human - to build a future. In any event, having abandoned the authority of Scripture, and having relinquished their place as part of that ".one, holy, catholic and apostolic church" that the Nicene Creed professes, this church has nothing of significance to say to a postmodern world.

In the sad plight of Canadian Anglicanism, there is an important lesson for the Roman Catholic Church. Within Catholicism there are also voices, lay and clerical, who propose gay marriage and women priests, who promote the triumph of individual conscience over church teaching. Take it from a former Anglican: if you want to know where that road leads, examine the Anglican Church. It leads to extinction.

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