The Rev. Calvin Robinson, the religious internet personality, recently became a cleric in a continuing Anglican denomination founded in 2024: the English Catholic Church in North America. Robinson has been temporary licensed in this denomination since 2025, and was permanently incardinated into it on February 4.
Since his ordination as a deacon three and a half years ago, Robinson has served in the Reformed Episcopal Church (a jurisdiction of the Anglican Church in North America), the Anglican Catholic Church, the Nordic Catholic Church, and the Free Church of England. First, he was a layman in the Church of England.
Robinson serves as the minister at St. Paul’s Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a church that previously belonged to the Anglican Catholic Church but left when that denomination removed Robinson after he imitated Elon Musk parodying a Nazi salute after the Presidential Inauguration in 2025. Robinson was then licensed for ten days as a priest in the Reformed Episcopal Church.
“Bishop Jayden Hagood stepped in and provided me with faculties and episcopal oversight when the REC unexpectedly dropped me last year, following now former Archbishop Steve Wood’s libelous smear. After a year of fruitful ministry, he is making my temporary license permanent,” Robinson wrote on X.com. (Wood remains Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, though he is inhibited pending an ecclesiastical trial).
“The amount of people who are big mad about me incardinating @calvinrobinson are the very reason I took Calvin on,” Hagood tweeted on February 6.
“I’m a Benedictine. Opinions don’t matter,” the bishop added. “Calvin is a great man, and an even better Priest. Get over it or don’t but know you’re not getting free rent in my head.”
Robinson, who previously hosted a TV show, Calvin’s Common Sense Crusade, is known for his brash internet comments, particularly related to his frustration with liberalism in both the Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions. He identifies himself as having “Catholic orders and Anglican patrimony,” although he has also celebrated the Eucharist using the Tridentine Rite.
The English Catholic Church in North America has two parishes in Nebraska led by Hagood and a handful of missions elsewhere in the United States. It says its mission is “to provide episcopal protection and oversight for Catholic believers and organizations—Churches, parishes, Religious Orders and other ecclesiastical organizations—who cannot currently be aligned with the Roman, Anglican or Orthodox Communions for various Dogmatic, Doctrinal, and Disciplinary reasons.”
Jayden Hagood was consecrated as a bishop in June 2025 by bishops from other small Anglican denominations. Hagood describes himself on Twitter as “Archbishop. Old Roman Catholic (1889). Unapologetically Trad. Liturgy Nerd. Author. Daily TLM Celebrant.” He is also Superior General of the Fratelli Della Croce, a religious order with four members that dates its origins to 1974.
The English Catholic Church in North America is a member church of the English Catholic Communion, led by Archbishop Scott McLaughlin, former Archbishop of the Orthodox Anglican Communion, another international network of continuing Anglican churches that dates from the mid-1960s. In addition to the North American church and the religious order that Hagood leads, the English Catholic Communion claims churches in Kenya, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Costa Rica.
“In 24 hours I’ve fielded over 75 phone calls from Priests and a fair number of Bishops about coming into the English Catholic Church,” Hagood posted on Facebook in October 2025. The degree to which these inquiries materialized is unclear.
The English Catholic Church sees itself as a place for individuals from a variety of Christian traditions to land. Its Evangelical Catholic Ordinariate webpage says, “In this Ordinariate, the streams of Wittenberg, Canterbury, and Aldersgate converge and flow into the great river of Catholic unity,” referring to Lutheran, Anglican, and Methodist traditions.
It is also, however, frustrated by actions of the Roman Catholic Church, such as the removal of Bishop Joseph Strickland from his see of Tyler, Texas. This appears to be the primary reason for the foundation of the denomination.
“The need for an alternative where you, a Catholic, can get the unchanged and unchangeable truth of the Catholic Faith as it was handed down by Christ and His Apostles, and their Successors the Bishops without interference from the Vatican or the Roman Catholic Church and free of ‘Church Politics’ was ever present. That need necessitated the resurrection of the English Catholic Church from her Reformation Ashes and the work began in March 2024 spreading to over 35 Countries in just 8 months,” the website of the English Catholic Church says.
Hagood identifies himself as “Monsignor,” a distinctively Roman Catholic title conferred by the Pope.
Greta Gaffin is a freelance writer based in Boston. She has a master of theological studies degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
