1833-1845 · Oxford, England

The Oxford Movement and Newman's Conversion

A group of Anglican scholars at Oxford tried to prove that the Church of England was truly Catholic. Their research led John Henry Newman to the opposite conclusion — and he walked across the Tiber to Rome.

In 1833, a group of Anglican clergymen at Oxford began publishing a series of Tracts for the Times, arguing that the Church of England was not a Protestant church but a branch of the ancient Catholic Church, with valid sacraments and apostolic succession. The movement's leaders — John Keble, Edward Pusey, and especially John Henry Newman — were responding to what they saw as the growing secularization and theological looseness of the Anglican establishment. Newman was the movement's intellectual engine. Brilliant, restless, and ruthlessly honest with himself, he spent years studying the Church Fathers to prove that Anglicanism held the true Catholic position. What he found instead was that the arguments used by ancient heretics against Rome sounded uncomfortably like the arguments Anglicans used against Rome. The turning point came when he studied the Monophysite controversy and realized that the position of the Anglican Church mapped onto the position of the heretical parties, not the orthodox Catholic side. He published his findings in Tract 90 in 1841, arguing that the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England could be read in a Catholic sense. The backlash was fierce. The Anglican establishment condemned the tract, and Newman withdrew from public life. After four more years of agonized reflection, he was received into the Catholic Church on October 9, 1845, by the Passionist priest Blessed Dominic Barberi. Newman's conversion sent shockwaves through English society. Over the following decades, hundreds of Anglican clergy and intellectuals followed him into the Catholic Church. Newman became a priest, founded the Oratory in England, wrote some of the most important theological works of the nineteenth century, and was eventually made a cardinal. Pope Benedict XVI canonized him in 2019. The Oxford Movement reshaped both Anglicanism, which became more liturgically Catholic as a result, and English Catholicism, which gained some of its finest minds.

Why it matters

Revitalized Catholic intellectual life in England, produced one of the greatest theologians of the modern era, and demonstrated that honest historical scholarship could lead to Rome rather than away from it.