The Most. Revd. Thomas Orville Gore, OCR, SSC, DD, MD, has been appointed as Provincial of the South in the Apostolic Episcopal Church and will also serve as a Deputy to the Primate and Member of Metropolitan Synod. He has additionally been appointed as Exarch of the United States of America for the Catholicate of the West and as Titular Bishop of Acadia in that communion. His ecclesiastical designation will be Mar Thoma.

Mar Thoma is President of the Anglican Heritage Society, Inc., in Lubbock, Texas, which now becomes a chartered mission of the Apostolic Episcopal Church. He has close links with our church, having counted such prelates as the late Archbishops Paul Schultz and Charles White among his friends. He was ordained priest in the Episcopal Church in 1968 and was then ordained to the diaconate and priesthood sub conditione by the late Archbishop Francisco de Jesus  Pagtakhan, who was Missionary and Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the Philippine Independent Catholic Church (IFI) in 1982. He was further ordained deacon and priest sub conditione by the late Archbishop Forest Barber of the PICC and the Apostolic Episcopal Church, and then received episcopal consecration from Archbishops Barber, Pagtakhan and Bayani Mercado of the PICC in 1986. Subsequently he was further consecrated sub conditione by the Obispo Maximo of the PICC, Macario Ga. His ministry has centred on the mission of the PICC in the United States, where he and the late Bishop Murray Farrell were the first American Aglipayan (named after Supreme Bishop Gregorio Aglipay, the co-founder of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente) bishops, for the PICC Anglican Rite Diocese of Texas, led by Archbishop Pagtakhan.

He is a graduate of Indiana University (BA, 1961) and Nashotah House Theological Seminary, where he earned his Master of Divinity degree in 1967. He then trained as a medical practitioner in Mexico, where he graduated MD from the Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara in 1973 and received the Titulo of Medico Cirujano from the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico in 1978.

He has been in the private practice of Adult and Addiction Psychiatry in Lubbock since 1989. He is married to Deaconess Sharon, who is now part of the lay ministry of the AEC. He has four grown children. His son Thomas has recently been ordained deacon and also joins the ministry of the AEC.

We send Mar Thoma our best wishes and prayers as he begins this new chapter of his ministry with us.