It is not likely that the Vatican's new rules for Anglicans becoming Catholic will entice many members to leave St. John's Anglican Church in Park City.

"I am fairly positive that would not be the way that anybody in our church would go," said Charles Cunningham, lay leader of Utah's only congregation to break away from the Episcopal Church.

After the Episcopal Church approved the ordination of a gay bishop, about 20 parishioners left Park City's St. Luke's Episcopal Church in 2004 to form St. John's. It became associated with the Anglican Mission in Africa, or MiA, which was founded in 2000 and based in South Carolina as an offshoot missionary movement of the Anglican Province of Rwanda.

"If there is a worldwide Anglican body with archbishops that have the traditional theology that caused Anglicans to split from the Episcopal Church," Cunningham said Tuesday, "there is no need for us to join the Roman Catholic Church."

Monsignor Terrence Fitzgerald, the Salt Lake City Catholic diocese's vicar general, said he is not aware of even one person who has sought to join the Catholic Church because of the Episcopal Church's ordination of women and gays.

"If that is the case in some local parish, it is not widespread," Fitzgerald said. "I have a good relationship with the Episcopal clergy here and never a word about it has been said."

Bishop John C. Wester, leader of the state's 300,000 Catholics, said some Episcopalians here have

"Catholics and Anglicans are going back and forth all the time," Wester said by phone from San Francisco. "We don't keep any centralized statistics on how many Methodists, Latter-day Saints or Episcopalians join nor do we have any records on who leaves the Catholic Church."

pstack@sltrib.com