Christian feast day: Reginald Heber (Anglican Church of Canada)

Reginald Heber was an English Anglican bishop, a man of letters, and hymn-writer. After 16 years as a country parson, he served as Bishop of Calcutta until his death at the age of 42. The son of a rich landowner and cleric, Heber gained fame at the University of Oxford as a poet. After graduation he made an extended tour of Scandinavia, Russia and Central Europe. Ordained in 1807, he took over his father's old parish, Hodnet, Shropshire. He also wrote hymns and general literature, including a study of the works of the 17th-century cleric Jeremy Taylor.

The Anglican Church of Canada is the province of the Anglican Communion in Canada. In 2016, the Anglican Church of Canada responded to a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Anglican Studies published by Cambridge University Press reporting that the church has 1,447,080 total baptized members. In 2022, the Anglican Church counted 294,931 active members on parish rolls in 1,978 congregations, organized into 1,498 parishes. The 2021 Canadian census counted 1,134,315 self-identified Anglicans, making the Anglican Church the third-largest Canadian church after the Catholic Church and the United Church of Canada.