For the 20th century Oxford Movement or Group see Moral Rearmament
The Oxford Movement was a loose affiliation of High Church Anglicans 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 effective leader was John Henry Newman, a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. He had been influenced by a sermon by John Keble in 1833 criticizing the increasing secularization of the Church of England. Other prominent members were Archdeacon Henry Edward Manning, Edward Pusey, and Robert Wilberforce.
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. The Movement ended when Newman, driven further than he had expected by his own arguments, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845, to be followed by Manning in 1851. Anglo-Catholicism, which owes its revival to the Oxford Movement, has had a massive influence on global Anglicanism which continues to this day.
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 TractarianMovement 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.
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 bishoprics in the Church of Ireland following the 1832 Reform Act.
The movement, therefore, started, not on Roman ground, but in a panic provoked by the alliance of O Connell with the Whigs, of Dissenters with Benthamites, intent on destroying all religious establishments.
It was given in 1834 and 1835 by the accession to the movement of E.B. Pusey, Canon of Christ Church and Hebrew professor.
Surveying the movement as a whole we perceive that it was part of the general Christian uprising which the French Revolution called forth.
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