The Rev. Andrew DeFusco, pastor of St. Peter’s Anglican Church, 218 E. Jefferson St., embraced the roots of his Anglican faith when he traveled to England this summer.

“It was a pilgrimage. You could call it that. I think it was a vacation, technically,” DeFusco said. “The purpose was to visit spiritually significant sites.”

He traveled through England from June 23 to July 2, visiting such sites as the Canterbury Cathedral and St. Martin’s Church in Canterbury.

DeFusco said St. Martin’s is the first church founded in England, the oldest parish church in continuous use and the oldest church in the entire English-speaking world.

“St. Martin’s is just a little parish church, but it was there before the Roman Catholic Church sent missionaries there in the 500s,” said DeFusco. “It proves there was a Church of England before the Pope or the Roman Catholic Church.”

As to who founded St. Martin’s if not the Catholics, DeFusco said, “It’s very mysterious. No one knows for sure, but the first Christians came to England in the 300s. There was a church here.”

Canterbury Cathedral “is sort of the center of the mother church for the global Anglican Communion.” The Archbishop of Canterbury is the figurehead for the Anglican Church’s global communion, he said.

“All Anglican churches trace their history back to the Church of England,” created when Britain’s King Henry VIII split with the Roman Catholic Church, he said.

“I wanted to see the birthplace of my tradition, stand in the same places as one our most ancient forefathers and pray in the same place where Christians had prayed for 2,000 years continuously,” he said.

“And especially to stand where some of our most significant martyrs would have stood,” he added. He mentioned martyrs such as Thomas Becket of Canterbury, who while engaged in a conflict with King Henry II of England over the rights and privileges of the Church, was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral; and Thomas Cranmer, that Archbishop of Canterbury who printed the first prayer book in English and was condemned to death by the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I.

“I felt a reconnection with the church and its traditions,” DeFusco said. “I think it reaffirmed my commitment to this tradition definitely.”

“We worshipped several times in Oxford. The choral music was especially beautiful,” he said.

The Rev. Robert Duncan, the bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh and the Archbishop Emeritus of the Anglican Church of North America, said many Anglican priests travel to England.

Although, Duncan said, “The Archbishop of Canterbury has no authority but the authority of honor over the American Anglican Church.”

DeFusco said he also spent time in London where he saw Westminster Abbey,

DeFusco said the Anglican Church of North America has 80 million members.

“An Anglican is a reformed catholic. We would still think of ourselves as catholics with a lowercase c, but we would be catholics if it had gone through the Reformation,” said DeFusco.

He noted Anglicans are the closest cousins to the Lutherans.

It was the first time in England for DeFusco, who has been pastor at St. Peter’s since 2010.

He grew up in Pittsburgh, graduated from Grove City College and from the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif.

Duncan said, “St. Peter’s in Butler was founded in 1824. Butler is one of the oldest churches in the diocese.”

According to the history of the diocese, Anglicanism came to Western Pennsylvania on the heels of the British Army.

It’s been suggested the first prayer book service conducted in the diocese was the Burial Office read by no less than George Washington over the grave of Gen. Edward Braddock after the British army’s defeat by the French in 1755.

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