Oxford Movement

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For the 20th-century "Oxford Movement" or "Oxford Group" see Moral Re-Armament.

The Oxford Movement was a loose affiliation of High Church Anglicans, most of them members of the University of Oxford, who sought to demonstrate that the Church of England was a direct descendant of the Christian church established by the Apostles. It was also known as the Tractarian Movement after its series of publications, Tracts for the Times (1833–1841); the Tractarians were also called Puseyites (usually disparagingly) after one of their leaders, Edward Bouverie Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, Oxford. Another important leader was John Henry Newman, a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, who had been strongly influenced by John Keble. Other prominent Tractarians were Thomas Keble, Archdeacon Henry Edward Manning, Richard Hurrell Froude, Robert Wilberforce, and Sir William Palmer.

The immediate impetus for the Movement was the secularisation of the Church, focused particularly on the decision by the Government to reduce by ten the number of Irish sees following the 1832 Reform Act. Keble attacked these proposals as 'National Apostasy' in his Assize Sermon in Oxford in 1833. Its leaders attacked liberalism in theology, and more positively took an interest in Christian origins which led them to reconsider the relationship of the Church of England with the Roman Catholic Church. In the ninetieth and final Tract, Newman argued that the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, as defined by the Council of Trent, were compatible with the Thirty-Nine Articles of the sixteenth-century Church of England. Newman's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845 as a result of his being taken further than he had expected by his own arguments, followed by Manning in 1851, had a profound effect upon the movement. It was attacked for being a mere Romanising tendency, but it began to have an influence on the theory and practice of Anglicanism. It resulted in the establishment of Anglican religious orders, both of men and women, and an emphasis on liturgy and its ceremonial. In particular it brought the insights of the Liturgical Movement into the life of the Church. Its effects were so widespread that the Eucharist gradually became more central to worship, vestments became common, and a huge number of Catholic practices were introduced into worship. Inevitably this led to controversy which often ended up in court. Partly because bishops refused to give livings to Tractarian priests, many of them ended up working in the slums giving rise to a critique of social policy, local and national. The establishment of the Christian Social Union which debated issues such as the just wage, the system of property renting, infant mortality and industrial conditions, and to which a number of bishops were members, was one of the results. The more radical Catholic Crusade was much smaller. Anglo-Catholicism, as this complex of ideas, styles and organisations became known, has had a massive influence on global Anglicanism which continues to this day.