About St. Patrick's & TACA

Founded on the principal of Christ’s making all people and things new (2 Cor. 5:17), St. Patrick’s Anglican Church has grown amid the tares of a globe torn asunder by chaos and lapsed faith. The priests, the Bishop, and the parishioners are people from patristic backgrounds and vocations, such as the police, armed guarding, military, national guard, and academia, but, are highly educated especially in their recognition that souls can still be saved and families can still know honor in Christ’s sigh, even if we have reached the foothills of the Apocalypse.

Begun with the storied charity and relief work of Mike DellaVecchia and his formerly Roman-Catholic ministry, and chartered by the leader of Traditional Anglican Church of America (TACA), Archbishop Rick Aaron Reid, St. Patrick’s takes an old-fashioned approach to ministry. In fact, it exists on small farm and has an offgrid mission in the mountains, the traditional “lonely places” to which Christ would go to pray and organize His Apostles.

Located in an agricultural area of southeastern Pennsylvania on a 4.27-acre parcel of land, upon which the Rector lives with his wife and kids, St Pat’s uses the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. The church resides in the land’s old farmhouse as its sanctuary and vestry. Taking a pre-Roman approach to catechesis, and utilizing modernity only as broadly as basic Internet communication tools and the 1940 hymnal allow, this ministry not merely only reluctantly accepts the outcome of the Synod of Whitby of 664 A.D. (whereby the proto-Gregorian Dionysian calendar was named imprimatur), but it considers it to ring true that Joseph of Arimethia, himself, was, as told by St. Hippolytus, sent by Christ, to the British Isles—arriving at Glastonbury, as one of the 72 disciples, and thereby consecrated the English language for good. For 900 more years, Christians speaking English had Roman-Catholic identities, planning everything in their lives in Roman ways, from the Benedicting rule, to the writing of Almanacs, and still, for better or worse, do.

St. Patrick, the “Apostle of Ireland,” was a Briton, who returned to Ireland after being abducted to its shores during the time of a crumbling Roman Empire. When St. Gildas, the Celtic monk, wrote about how Valentinian III flaccidly refused to help the Britons throw off the invading Picts, Scotts, and Anglo-Saxons, and murdered General Flavius Aetius, the Faith had, for centuries been planted in the Isles, with non-Roman Rites. In fact, the British Bishops, who attended the pre-Milan Council of Arles, France, in 314 A.D., were named Eborius of York, Restitutus, and Adelfius from London. Prayers and Liturgies were spoken in English and in Irish and Scottish Gaelic for hundreds of years before the Venerable Bede wrote his History.

“Ár n-Athair atá ar neamh, Go naofar d’ainim, Go dtagfadh do ríocht, Go ndéantar do thoil ar an talamh mar a dhéantar ar neamh. Ár n-arán laethúil tabhair dúinn inniu, agus maith dúinn ár bhfiacha mar a mhaithimidne dár bhféichiúna féin (Ach ná lig sinn i gcathú, ach saor sinn ó olc,)” 

                 – The Our Father, in Irish Gaelic

Human time required the Anglo-Saxon permanent reinvention of the Isles, and the Reformation, to discard the yoke of Rome, religiously, at least. Of course, there has been a Tractarian reversion to Petrine, even Trentorian, primacy, but only today, has it been realized to be—as a single glowing detail of immediate practical importance to all English-speaking Christians—that a catholic religion that is “pure and undefiled” can only be sanely and sincerely practiced via the employment of an English-language Liturgy of the Word and a Liturgy of the Eucharist, given forth, along with English-presided Sacraments, chiefly by elders raised upon the soil of an English-speaking place and respectful of the civil authority of that land upon which it is ushered, if anarchy and moral ruin are to be avoided. 

Priests are not supposed to be women or homosexuals; divorcees may, if anulled, receive the Eucharist but not simply because their divorces are somehow holy; and, homosexuals are not supposed to be married. 

We have no heart to hate or hurt anybody who errs against these biblical truths, but we have reserve tolerance only for a religion that refuses to make any of these matters be ambiguous, and uses plain simple language, even if we must speak it clearly in 100 different tongues. The Bible remains what Athanasius said it must—unchanged, easily understood, and Sacred Tradition ccnsists of protecting this principal. 

Furthermore, such a Communion’s traditions must be truly orthodox, and its Episcopate and Clergy must solely be men with conservative conventional family and religious traditional values, uncompromised by the worldly mores of an institutional ecclesia that is lapsed morally or given to the caprice and the fancies of lucre, of lust, and of power. We speak several languages, mind you, including Spanish and Italian, but church life cannot be navigated by the brazen oars of laypeople and the indecent ways of spiritually-fallen prelates, using the linguistics of English, Latin, and Greek, to ply their rebellion.

In his Confession, St Patrick wrote, ““I pray to God to give me perseverance and to deign that I be a faithful witness to Him to the end of my life for my God.” 

Our Traditional Anglican Church of America, its pro-Cathedral sharing the noble stature of its Archbishop RIck Aaron and of his honorably appointed Deaconess, Virginia, his wife, in Newton, North Carolina, was formed out of devotion to the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion, and of loyalty to the St. Louis Affirmation of 1978, and it may very well comprise—along with of the Independent Anglican Canada Synod  of 1934, which has issued its jurisidiction—a quite small remnant. 

We may very well be all that is left of all the predominantly English-speaking truly orthodox Christians in the Anglican Continuum, using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. We reach out to recusant members of other Continuers, too. 

TACA ordained Fr. Michael Joseph DellaVecchia in November of 2021.  He and his intrepid Senior Warden, Lisa, and their six children, have succeeded in establishing ministries for the poor, for police, guards, and vets, and for families with autism. They are currently forming a music ministry to do the 1940 Hymnal some due justice. We reach out to Christians in the troubled houses of Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant order, offering fellowship and inclusion. There is much work afoot and we are building that mobile church (Please treat yourselves to Googling the Baptist “Messenger of Peace” railway car chapels that thrived in a younger America, for our precursors in ecclesia)! 

To Fr. Mike, his family, and parishioners, those people suffering in these greater churches are often of a higher moral order than their presbyters and cardinals are. We offer them a place here because we, too, formerly suffered the same tortured loyalty ourselves. 

Please take our hand of fellowship, given with this loud beckoning: 

Do join with us and we’ll explain why it is better here, happier, and healthier here, your future home in the Anglican Continuum. 

We will see that every one of you, good people, becomes properly catechized, and Confirmed with a musical and culinary-celebrated Office of Ordination. The Rector spent years buying Christmas presents for thousands of children in shelters and delivering them as Saint Nicholas, and has no patience for non-redemptive suffering. We’ll go off to church; we’ll feed the poor of our Faith; and, we’ll climb mountains! 

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” (Psalm 133)

The parish of Saint Patrick’s consists conventionally (as it is the sole TACA parish hereabouts) of the entire “five-county” region of Pennsylvania, but, besides its church and grounds, incorporates vast mission property that it owns in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. At the time of this writing, Advent of 2021, parishioners are busy building the official church, specifically, a 150 square-foot chapel on a flatbed trailer that can change its location and visit almost any terrestrial area of the eastern hemisphere. The station of the church is the aforementioned farm, located in the part of southeastern Pennsylvania that was named after the birthplace of its founder, William Penn, Buckinghamshire, England, in the 1700s, which is why it is called Bucks County. The previously mentioned “mission” is that 88.5-acre mountain region dedicated to hiking and other restive pursuits of the soul in contemplation.

To help God alleviate hopelessness in fellow “saplings”—downtrodden folks with “no majestic bearing to catch our eye,” but glowing in Grace, yet “depised and rejected of men.” Shrewdly depicted in Isaiah 53, they benefit from helpful Christians who themselves are willing to undergo the hardships, and the poverty of spirit and of body, described as befalling St Paul the Apostle, in 2 Corinthians 11. Christ’s beneficiaries are poor people, who are endowed with  Grace and have enjoined their sufferings for the sake of other souls’ betterment. They have families to feed and they work hard. Simply put, St. Patrick’s people are suffering like the ancient Celts and Britons did, but who were rich in a Faith that is tend to grow like Mustard Seeds into the mightiest of plants, Trinitarian like Clovers, even in the spiritual shape of St. Brigid’s Cross! We give out groceries and dry gifts. We unite with store owners and give out surplus. We are known to many homeless shelters and missions. We keep a farm in Pennsylvania. We have a mountain retreat on many acres in the North Country of New York. Our priest, Fr. Mike DellaVecchia, with his wife, kids, and ministers, are building a church, on wheels—like a tiny “house” on a trailer, to go anywhere with this. We celebrate the Liturgy of the Word, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and the Office, every day, meanwhile in our homes, using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.