The first Oxford (Tractarian) Movement tract was published in 1833; it marked the birth of the Anglo-Catholic party. Last year, 160 years later, the Movement came to an end. After months of quiet negotiation and much deliberation, Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster, invited those Anglican clergy and laity opposed to the ordination of women to join the Roman Catholic Church. Many notables, ranging from government ministers to former Anglican bishops, have already decided to enter into full communion with the Church.
Spokesmen for the Catholic bishops of England and Wales have been quick to point out that it takes more than an opposition to female priests to join the Catholic Church; significant doctrinal obstacles, such as the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, may remain for certain individuals. Most Anglo-Catholics who opposed the General Synod’s vote to allow ordination of women did so on deeper issues of authority. They felt the Anglican Church had an obligation to remain “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” and was none of these as it acted unilaterally on this controversial issue.
Many in the Anglo-Catholic party would have no objection to the vote had it been coordinated with the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. The significant issue for them concerns more the authority of the Synod to act alone rather than the actual content of the decision.
Cardinal John Henry Newman was familiar with such questions of authority when he helped start the Oxford Movement. Times were different then for both the Anglican and Catholic Churches. Newman lived in a time when members of Parliament helped form the Synod of the Church of England and the Church’s official status was more explicitly affirmed.
Indeed, Newman himself campaigned against Sir Robert Peel, M.P. for Oxford, for supporting the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, an indirect result of the protests of the Catholic Irish who refused to tithe to support the establishment of an Irish Anglican Church. While Anglicans enjoyed the privileges of an established faith, Catholics suffered the punishments of a persecuted faith. Although some amelioration of the penal laws was evident as early as the end of the seventeenth century, Catholics were forbidden to hold public office, attend universities, and exercise other common rights for the next two centuries.
Abuses continue in this supposedly enlightened age: It is still University policy that the chairs in theology at Oxford must be held by Anglican clergy, a preacher at Pembroke College was recently heard comparing the Pope to the likes of David Koresh, and the reigning monarch of Great Britain may marry anyone but a Catholic. In Newman’s time the English often viewed Catholicism as subversive, and the term “Jesuitical” was associated with “deceptive.” Against this background, Newman and a few of other Oxford fellows started a movement to return the Anglican Church to its early roots.
Newman, John Keble, Edward Pusey, and others like them attempted to chart a via media between “Popery” and Protestantism by appealing to the early Church and to seventeenth-century Anglican divines. Although affirming notions such as apostolic succession, baptismal regeneration, Eucharistic sacrifice, “that which is believed by all at all times in all places,” the “prophetical office of the Church,” and other seemingly Catholic beliefs, Newman and his compatriots sincerely believed the Anglican Church would prove truer than would Rome to the legacy of early Christianity.
It was important for Newman to find continuity with the early Church, for he rejected the Evangelical notion of individual interpretation of the Bible as being internally inconsistent: “The Protestant insistence on `the Bible as the only standard of appeal in doctrinal inquiries’ inevitably leads to the conclusion that `truth is but a matter of opinion,’ for `the Bible is not so written as to force its meaning upon the reader,’ nor does it `carry with it its own interpretation.’.
. . “None of the various denominations which claim to derive the Christian faith from the Bible alone actually `embraces the whole Bible, none of them is able to interpret the whole.’ . . . `We [Anglo-Catholics] rely on Antiquity to strengthen such intimations of doctrine as are but faintly, though really, given in Scripture.’ . . . Roman Catholics . . . appeal to Tradition as well as Scripture, maintaining that it was impossible to commit to writing all that Apostles taught.
“`No one you fall in with on the highway, can tell your mind all at once; much less could the Apostles … digest in one Epistle or Treatise a systematic view of the Revelation made to them.’ . . . `Tradition in fullness is necessarily unwritten.’ . . . `We receive through Tradition both the Bible itself, and the doctrine that it is divinely inspired,’ as do most Protestants, who `believe in the divinity of Scripture precisely on the ground on which the Roman Catholics take their stand on behalf of their own system of doctrine, viz. because they have been taught it'” [Ian Ker, John Henry Newman (1990), pp. 141-142].
Although Newman realized that a sola scriptura argument was internally inconsistent, he was wary of accepting the contemporary Catholic Church as the true heir to the inspired traditions of the early Church. Nevertheless, the concept of apostolic succession would prove difficult to reconcile with Newman’s Protestant disposition.
The opposition Newman and his compatriots generated arose from prejudice against the Roman Church and the Protestant need to deny certain Catholic doctrines to justify the Reformation. Newman’s attempts to link a modern Christian faith with the early Church threatened to affirm many of the very doctrines rejected in the aftermath of the Reformation. Accepting sacred Tradition, sacraments, and apostolic succession all threatened to turn Luther, Calvin, and the other fathers of Protestantism into crusaders against corrupt practices (the sins of individuals), not against institutional heresy.
This danger was especially felt by Anglicans, since the origin of their church is rooted not in any significant theological debate, but in the desire of a secular ruler to obtain a divorce and to exercise direct ecclesiastical control. (It is no accident that the prime minister still nominates episcopal candidates or that Parliament must vote on any act proposed by the General Synod.)
This Protestant opposition manifested itself when a group of Anglican bishops joined Oxford fellows in 1839 to propose the adoption of a Protestant “memorial” that would force Newman and other Anglo-Catholics to state their loyalties. The Martyrs’ Memorial and the expansion of a local church were to be done in memory of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, Protestant leaders burned while Queen Mary was in power. Although these three men were indeed killed as heretics, the memorial conveniently neglected the many Catholics tortured and executed for their beliefs under Queen Elizabeth. (Ironically, the excess funds were spent to expand a church which now is a center of Anglo-Catholicism and which routinely loses many of its priests to the Catholic Church.)
In the end Newman refused to support the memorial and was driven by the writings of the Church Fathers to join the Catholic Church. He was convinced that the first Christians professed the same beliefs practiced by the modern Catholic Church and that the Catholic Church taught with divine authority. Newman could not resist the arguments of Ignatius of Antioch, who explicitly defended the Eucharist being linked to the sacramental office of the bishop and who detailed the authority of the apostolic hierarchy. Newman was also swayed by Clement, the fourth bishop of Rome, and his use of authority over the Corinthian Church through appeals to his office and position as Peter’s successor.
The impact of the writings of Origen and Clement on the gradual discernment of revelation–revelation being made better understood through the Holy Spirit working in the Church–would later be evidenced in Newman’s classic work, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. It was while delivering the sermons which later appeared in the book that Newman began seriously doubting the claims of the Reformers. He could no longer see any clear criteria for accepting the early Church and yet rejecting the Council of Trent.
Newman eventually concluded that the Church of England, along with all other Protestant churches, was in schism and that Rome was the only valid successor to the historical and ecclesiastical claims of the early Church. Newman, who as an Evangelical had believed the pope was the Antichrist and had accepted many Calvinistic doctrines concerning predestination, submitted to the doctrinal authority of the Roman Catholic Church and was accepted into full communion on October 8, 1845. The two English Thomases, Becket and More, who had been martyred for their fidelity to the Church and Rome over the state and the Anglican Church, would have been pleased.
Cardinal Hume’s recent invitation to Anglican clergy and laity is a response to Graham Leonard, former Anglican Bishop of London, and other Anglo-Catholics who believe the Anglican Church can no longer claim to be the Catholic Church in England as it has claimed in its “title-deeds, Book of Common Prayer, the Ordinal, and the 39 Articles” (as Graham put it in the London Times).
The invitation, which includes a provision allowing portions of the Anglican Prayer Book to be incorporated into the Catholic liturgy, does not establish a separate rite or uniate church, as allowed in canon 372 and practiced in certain Eastern countries, and it requires that each individual make a commitment to the full teachings of the Catholic Church. Both Anglo-Catholics and the Anglican Church have reacted favorably to Cardinal Hume’s statement, and most believe the Catholic Church has acted sensitively and wisely by integrating, not absorbing, the Anglo-Catholic partisans.
Anne Roche Muggeridge documents the “Protestant principle” of authority, held by certain Catholics as well as Protestants, which states that the Church has no ordained mission from God to defend the faith, but rather that all authority is based within the individual. Writing in The Desolate City Muggeridge argues that allowing each member to judge doctrines by individual conscience results in anarchy, new denominations, and new authority structures. She traces these consequences to the impact of original sin.
The Reformers insisted on individual interpretation of Scripture, but Muggeridge claims that the successful Protestant body might be said to have exercised this principle only once, in its section from its parent communion. “It is the perception of this hypocrisy which has forced many Anglo-Catholics to seek communion with the Catholic Church.”
The Anglican Church contains disparate elements due to its status as the established church. The major constituencies, Anglo-Catholics, Evangelicals, and liberals, have managed to preserve unity in recent years through silence on many issues and equivocation on others. It is no wonder that the Anglican Church has not issued any cohesive policy statement on the issues of homosexuality or abortion. In America certain Anglican churches administer Communion with the words “Bread of Life or Body of God” to appease parishioners on both sides of the Real Presence debate. Similarly, the Synod’s recent decision to permit the ordination of women also allows individual bishops and their congregations to consider the ordinations null and void.
This precarious balancing act has failed to placate Anglo-Catholics, who insist that the Synod’s unilateral action has relegated the Church of England to the status of a sect and who demand that the Synod at least attempt to justify its decision with Scripture, rather than relying on “contemporary fashion” and “secular support.”
In response to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s claim that the “ordination of women to the priesthood alters not a word of the Scriptures, the Creeds, or the faith of our Church,” Bishop Leonard compared the Archbishop’s attitude to that of Humpty Dumpty, who insisted, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.”
As Newman himself was frustrated in attempting to link the early Church to an orthodox Anglicanism or Reformed Catholicism, modern Anglo-Catholics are realizing the impossibility of a via mediabetween Rome and the Reformers. Fr. Ian Ker, the authoritative biographer of Newman, comments that the Synod’s recent decision is a victory for the liberals and may mark the end of the Anglican Church’s unity. He wonders how long Evangelicals will remain in harmony with liberals now that the Anglo-Catholics are leaving or are marginalized.
Fr. Ker repeats Newman’s warning that the Church might become so “radically liberalized . . . as to become a simple enemy of the Truth.” To him it seems “only a matter of time, how long the Anglican Church retains any part of the faith.” At least one thing is clear: The Oxford Movement has served its purpose and has now come to an end.