TORONTO (RNS) About 2,000 Canadian members of a breakaway Anglican group have accepted the Vatican’s invitation to join the Roman Catholic Church.

The agreement will allow members of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada to keep their liturgy and have their own bishops, but acknowledge the pope’s supremacy.

In Canada, the denomination claims about 40 churches and fewer than 2,000 members. It is part of the worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion, a movement that numbers some 400,000 adherents who broke from mainstream Anglicanism in 1991 because of what they saw as its liberal drift and ordination of women as priests.

The Canadian announcement comes weeks after a similar move by traditional Anglicans in the United States. Meeting in Orlando, Fla., earlier this month, the House of Bishops of the Anglican Church in America (ACA) voted to take up the offer made by Pope Benedict XVI last October that permits disaffected congregations to defect to Rome while keeping many of their Anglican traditions, including married priests. The move will affect about 100 U.S. churches.

So-called “high-church” Anglicans in Britain and Australia have also signaled their desire to unite with the Roman Catholic Church.

It is all in response to the pope’s invitation to Anglicans last fall to join Rome, as fractures in the global Anglican Communion deepened over the role of women and homosexuals in the church.

A March 12 letter from Anglican Catholic Church of Canada to the Vatican expresses “our gratitude” for the “positive response” to the Canadians’ earlier request to “seek a communal and ecclesial way of being Anglican Catholics in communion with the Holy See,” while “treasuring our tradition.”

Tradition Anglicans in Canada have been petitioning the Vatican for years for an alliance. Peter Wilkinson, head of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, told the Globe and Mail newspaper that the pope’s decision to let Anglicans join Rome en masse was an “extremely generous offer … that just takes your breath away.” He called the split in the overall church “a permanent divide.”

In the past decade, another group of Anglicans split with their Canadian and U.S. national churches over the blessing of same-sex marriages. The Anglican Church in North America counts 700 parishes and about 100,000 members. It remains aligned with conservative Anglicans in Africa and Asia.