HACKENSACK, N.J. (RNS) For five years, members of Saint Anthony of Padua Episcopal Church, a conservative parish in the largely liberal Diocese of Newark, have sought spiritual guidance from a bishop in a socially conservative diocese in South Carolina.

The reason? They oppose the liberal tendencies of the Newark diocese and their national church, which in 2003 seated an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire. The following year, St. Anthony’s began periodically hosting Bishop William J. Skilton from Charleston, S.C.

The arrangement helps explain why parish members probably will not accept the Vatican’s offer, made last month, to allow dissatisfied Episcopalians and Anglicans to convert to Catholicism, said the Rev. Brian Laffler, Saint Anthony’s pastor.

The Episcopal Church, with about 2 million members, is the U.S. branch of the 77 million-member worldwide Anglican Communion.

“We have a satisfactory situation,” Laffler said. “We have the pastoral care of an authorized bishop who is sympathetic to our situation.”

While significant numbers of Anglicans in Britain are expected to accept the pope’s offer, many Episcopalians in the United States who staunchly oppose their national church’s stances on sexuality and gender already have been severing ties within the Anglican Communion, church observers say.

Approximately 20 parishes in Canada, and the bishops and many members of four dioceses in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania and California, have left the Episcopal Church and aligned themselves with the Southern Cone of the Americas, an Anglican province in South America.

“Conservatives who are leaving, most of them have left the Episcopal Church already,” said the Rev. John Donnelly of Saint Michael’s Episcopal Church in Wayne, N.J. “Those of us that are staying — and there are significant numbers of conservatives who have stayed — we’re staying.”

Donnelly said he opposed the election of the openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson, on the grounds that Robinson lived with a partner.

“I am not supportive of that, but it’s not a chief motivating issue in my life,” he said. “For those people for whom it is a chief motivational issue, they have left the Episcopal Church. For me, it’s a B or C issue.”

Another big reason why many conservatives are staying put: under Episcopal Church rules, individuals can leave the denomination, but property can’t. Churches that have tried to secede with their property have faced long, and expensive, legal fights, and courts usually rule for the denomination.

Episcopalians have always been welcome to convert to Catholicism, of course, but this invitation is noteworthy for provisions allowing former Anglicans to retain treasured religious traditions such as use of the Book of Common Prayer.

Critics have charged that the Vatican is exploiting tensions in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality and the role of women. Vatican officials say the invitation was simply a response to repeated requests by groups of Anglicans around the world hoping to enter the Catholic Church while retaining Anglican traditions.

The invitation would allow male, married Anglican bishops or priests to become Catholic priests after obtaining the pope’s approval, on a case-by-case basis. While a married man could not formally become a Catholic bishop, he could manage a diocese — technically called a personal ordinariate — under the Vatican plan, just as a bishop does.

The Vatican says the new rules do not represent significant changes to its mandate that priests remain celibate. Male, married Anglican priests have been able to become Catholic priests since 1980, and about 80 have done so through a process that Newark Archbishop John J. Myers has overseen in the United States since 2005.

A difference, Myers noted, is that under the prior conversion plan for Anglican clergy, priests have typically switched to Catholic liturgical traditions and no longer use the Book of Common Prayer.

Responses from Episcopal bishops to the Vatican’s invitation have varied. Newark Bishop Mark Beckwith noted that “the door swings both ways,” and that in many Episcopal churches his flock, at least a third to half of the parishioners were raised Catholic.

“As they’re opening their doors to people in the Episcopal Church,” Beckwith said, “we open our doors to people of the Catholic tradition who are looking for a sacramental life and a sense of community and a deep sense of mission that may be different from what they’re finding maybe in the Catholic Church. Our doors are open, and people have been coming through them.”

(Jeff Diamant writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)