Oxford movement

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 a sermon by John Keble in 1833 criticizing the increasing secularisation of the Church of England. Other prominent Tractarians were Thomas Keble, Archdeacon Henry Edward Manning, Richard Hurrell Froude, Robert Wilberforce, and Sir William Palmer.

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.