Anglo-Catholicism and the Oxford Movement

1. What Anglo-Catholicism Is

Anglo-Catholicism is the party within Anglicanism that reads the Church of England and her daughter churches as a branch of the ancient Catholic Church rather than as a Protestant denomination. Anglo-Catholics hold that their bishops stand in apostolic succession, that the Eucharist is the true Body and Blood of Christ, that baptism regenerates, that confession to a priest is a sacrament and a gift, and that the doctrine of the undivided Church of the first centuries binds Anglicans now. The name for the movement in its first decade is Tractarianism, after the ninety Tracts for the Times published from Oxford between 1833 and 1841.

Two words in the label carry the whole argument. Catholic claims continuity with the Church of the Fathers, the creeds, the councils and the sacramental system. Anglo claims that this continuity ran through the English Reformation without breaking, so that the Church of England of the nineteenth century was the same Church that Augustine of Canterbury planted in 597. Everything Anglo-Catholics did, argued and suffered follows from holding those two claims together.

Anglo-Catholic, high church, evangelical, broad church

Anglicanism has long described itself as containing three streams, and the labels are worth getting right. The evangelical or low-church tradition emphasises Scripture, preaching, conversion and justification by faith, and it treats the Thirty-Nine Articles as a Protestant confession. The broad-church or liberal tradition emphasises reason, historical criticism and comprehensiveness. The high-church tradition emphasises episcopacy, the Prayer Book, the sacraments and continuity with antiquity. Anglo-Catholicism grew out of the third stream and pressed it much further than the old high churchmen had, adding ceremonial, devotional and doctrinal elements drawn openly from Rome. For the wider picture of the tradition these parties belong to, see our guide to Anglican beliefs and the Anglican Communion.

2. The Church of England Before 1833

The Church of England in the 1820s was an established church under severe political pressure, and the pressure is what produced the movement. Parliament governed the Church's temporal affairs, appointed her bishops through the Crown, and had just been opened to men who were not Anglicans at all. The Test and Corporation Acts were repealed in 1828, admitting Protestant Dissenters to public office. Catholic Emancipation followed in 1829, admitting Catholics to Parliament. The Reform Act of 1832 remade the electorate. A body of clergy who believed the Church of England was a divine society found her being legislated for by an assembly that no longer even pretended to be Anglican.

The old high churchmen

High churchmanship existed long before 1833 and the Tractarians inherited a great deal from it. The Caroline divines of the seventeenth century, Lancelot Andrewes, John Cosin, Jeremy Taylor, Thomas Ken and William Laud, had defended episcopacy by divine right, a high doctrine of the Eucharist, and the appeal to the Fathers and the first four councils as the standard of Anglican teaching. The Non-Jurors who refused the oath to William and Mary after 1688 carried that tradition on outside the establishment. The Hutchinsonians and the so-called Hackney Phalanx kept it alive into the nineteenth century. What the older high churchmen generally did not do was press their principles against the state that had made them comfortable.

The Irish Church Temporalities Act

The immediate provocation was a bill to reorganise the Church of Ireland. The Irish Church Temporalities Act of 1833 suppressed ten of the twenty-two Irish bishoprics and redistributed their revenues, in a country where the established Anglican church served a small minority of the population. As a piece of administration the measure was defensible and many Anglicans supported it. As a matter of principle it meant that a lay parliament had abolished bishoprics, and a group of Oxford men concluded that the Church had to state what she was before the state finished deciding for her.

3. Keble's Assize Sermon and the Spark

The Oxford Movement is conventionally dated from 14 July 1833, when John Keble preached the Assize Sermon before the judges in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on the text "God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you" (1 Samuel 12:23). He published it under the title National Apostasy. Newman later wrote that he had ever considered and kept that day as the start of the religious movement of 1833.

What the sermon actually argued

Keble's argument was that a nation which strips the Church of what belongs to her while claiming to act as a Christian state has apostatised from her own profession, and that the Church's clergy owe her a loyalty that is prior to their loyalty to Parliament. He drew the parallel from Israel demanding a king in place of the direct government of God, and he warned that the clergy's duty when the nation goes wrong is intercession and plain teaching rather than acquiescence. The sermon is calmer in tone than its reputation, and its force lay in stating that the Church of England is a supernatural society with an authority the state did not confer and cannot withdraw.

The Hadleigh conference

Later that month a small group met at the rectory of Hugh James Rose at Hadleigh in Suffolk, with Hurrell Froude, William Palmer and Arthur Perceval among them, to decide what to do. They agreed to defend the apostolic succession and the integrity of the Book of Common Prayer, and they disagreed about method. Rose and Palmer wanted committees, associations and petitions. Newman, who was not at Hadleigh, wanted tracts written by individuals and circulated fast. Newman's method won, and the movement took its early name from it.

4. The Tracts for the Times

The Tracts for the Times were ninety short pamphlets published between September 1833 and February 1841, written mostly anonymously by Newman, Keble, Pusey, Froude and their circle, and distributed to clergy across England, often by hand. They gave the movement its working name, Tractarianism, and they gave a generation of parish priests an argument they had never been taught in that form.

Tract 1 and the apostolic succession

Newman wrote Tract 1 himself and addressed it to the clergy. He asked them on what their authority rested now that the state had shown it would not defend them, answered that it rested on their ordination by bishops who stood in unbroken succession from the apostles, and told them to magnify their office. The tract is four pages long and it is deliberately blunt. Its claim is that a priest of the Church of England holds a commission handed down from Christ through the apostles, and that every other ground of ministry, popularity, respectability or parliamentary establishment, is a substitute for the real thing.

What the tracts covered

Across the series the writers worked through fasting, the daily offices, baptismal regeneration, the eucharistic sacrifice, the authority of the Fathers, the Roman controversy, the meaning of the Prayer Book rubrics, and the doctrine of reserve in communicating religious knowledge. Pusey's long tracts on baptism and on fasting were signed with his initials, which put a Regius Professor's name behind the movement and gave opponents a target. Alongside the tracts the group launched the Library of the Fathers, a translation series that put Athanasius, Augustine, Cyril, Chrysostom and Gregory into English for parish clergy, and the British Critic became the movement's review.

The via media

The governing idea of the early tracts is the via media, the middle way. Newman set it out in The Prophetical Office of the Church in 1837: Rome had added to the ancient faith, Protestantism had subtracted from it, and Anglicanism held the ground of antiquity between them. The via media was a real theological position with a long English pedigree, and Newman argued it with great power for several years. He also came to believe, by his own later account, that it existed on paper and had never existed anywhere else.

5. Keble, Pusey, Froude and Newman

Four men carried the Oxford Movement in its first decade, and they were unalike enough that the movement pulled in several directions from the beginning. Keble supplied the poetry and the moral authority, Pusey the learning and the respectability, Froude the provocation, and Newman the argument and the prose.

John Keble

John Keble (1792 to 1866) was a fellow of Oriel College, Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1831 to 1841, and from 1836 vicar of Hursley in Hampshire, where he stayed for thirty years. His book of poems for the Church year, The Christian Year, published in 1827, went through scores of editions and shaped Anglican devotion far beyond the party. Keble's contribution to the movement was a temper rather than a system: reverence, reticence, obedience to the Prayer Book, and a settled refusal to leave the Church of England whatever happened. He edited Hooker, translated with the others, and pastored a country parish until he died. Keble College, Oxford, founded in 1870, is his memorial.

Edward Bouverie Pusey

Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800 to 1882) was Regius Professor of Hebrew and a Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, from 1828, and after Newman's departure he was the movement's public face for nearly forty years. His name attached itself to the whole party, whose members were called Puseyites by their opponents. In 1843 he preached a university sermon on the Holy Eucharist as the comfort of the penitent, and the Vice-Chancellor, acting on the report of six doctors of divinity, suspended him from preaching before the University for two years without allowing him to answer the charge. He kept preaching everywhere else. Pusey promoted sacramental confession among Anglicans, supported the revival of religious sisterhoods, and spent his later life arguing that Anglicans should stay and work for reunion. His Eirenicon of 1865, addressed to Keble and answered by Newman, tried to identify what actually separated Canterbury from Rome and concluded that Marian devotion and papal authority were the obstacles.

Richard Hurrell Froude

Richard Hurrell Froude (1803 to 1836) was the movement's provocateur and the closest of Newman's friends. He detested the English Reformation, said so in language that shocked even his allies, admired the medieval papacy and the Breviary, and pushed Newman further toward Rome than Newman then wished to go. He died of tuberculosis in February 1836, a month short of his thirty-third birthday. Keble and Newman then published his private papers as Remains in 1838 and 1839, including his contempt for the Reformers and his practice of ascetic self-examination, and the effect on English opinion was catastrophic for the movement's reputation. The Martyrs' Memorial to Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley was begun in Oxford in 1841 partly as a public rebuke.

John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman (1801 to 1890) was vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin and the movement's principal writer, and his reception into the Catholic Church in 1845 was the crisis from which Anglo-Catholicism had to recover. This page treats him as one leader among four because the movement outlived him in Anglicanism by a century and a half. For his life, his conversion, his cardinalate and his canonisation, see our biography of St John Henry Newman, the Anglican who became a cardinal.

6. Tract 90 and the Crisis of 1841

Tract 90, published in February 1841, argued that the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion can be read in a sense compatible with Catholic doctrine, and it ended the Tracts. Newman wrote it to answer a practical question that was troubling younger Tractarians: how could a man who believed what the tracts taught subscribe honestly to articles drawn up in the Protestant settlement of Elizabeth I? His answer was that the Articles condemn specific late-medieval corruptions and popular abuses rather than the defined doctrine of the Catholic Church, so a Catholic-minded Anglican may sign them in their literal and grammatical sense.

The argument in detail

Newman took the Articles that Protestants regarded as decisive and drew a distinction in each. Article 22 condemns "the Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also Invocation of Saints", and Newman argued that the word Romish points at a particular corrupt system of popular teaching rather than at the doctrine of purgatory as such or the practice of asking the saints to pray for us. Article 25 says five of the seven sacraments are not to be counted sacraments of the Gospel, and Newman argued that the Article denies them the standing of baptism and the Eucharist while leaving them genuinely sacramental. Article 31 condemns "the sacrifices of Masses" in which the priest was commonly said to offer Christ for the living and the dead to have remission of pain or guilt, and Newman argued that this touches a mercenary abuse rather than the doctrine of the eucharistic sacrifice. He handled the article on general councils and the article on the authority of Scripture the same way.

The reaction

The reaction was immediate and overwhelming. Four senior Oxford tutors, including Archibald Campbell Tait, later Archbishop of Canterbury, published a protest within days. The Heads of Houses of the University censured the tract in March 1841 as evading rather than explaining the sense of the Articles. Bishop Richard Bagot of Oxford asked Newman to stop the series, and Newman obeyed; Tract 90 was the last. Over the following two years a majority of the English bishops delivered charges to their clergy condemning the tract, which Newman experienced as his own episcopate ruling against him on the very principle of episcopal authority the movement had taught.

Why it mattered so much

Tract 90 posed the movement's central question in a form that could not be evaded. If the Church of England is Catholic, her formularies must be capable of a Catholic sense. If her bishops then declare that they are not capable of it, the appeal to the living authority of the Church has been answered, and the answer is no. Newman retired to Littlemore, resigned the living of St Mary's in 1843, and was received into the Catholic Church on 9 October 1845 by the Passionist Blessed Dominic Barberi. Keble and Pusey took the same evidence and drew the opposite conclusion, holding that a wrong judgment by contemporary bishops does not unchurch a Church whose orders and formularies remain Catholic.

7. The Secessions and the Gorham Judgment

Newman's conversion in 1845 was the first of a long series, and each later wave had its own trigger. William George Ward, whose The Ideal of a Christian Church of 1844 argued that the Church of England should hold the whole Roman system, was stripped of his degrees by the University of Oxford in February 1845 and became a Catholic that year. Frederick William Faber followed, and later founded the London Oratory. Anglican clergy went over to Rome in a steady stream across the middle decades of the century, with lay converts in far greater numbers, and the flow continued at a lower level for the rest of it.

The Gorham judgment, 1850

The second great trigger was a legal case about baptism. George Cornelius Gorham, an evangelical clergyman, was refused institution to a Devon living by Bishop Henry Phillpotts of Exeter because he denied that baptism unfailingly conveys regeneration. The Court of Arches upheld the bishop. In March 1850 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a civil court, reversed that decision and ruled that Gorham's view was not contrary to the doctrine of the Church of England. The doctrinal point mattered to the Tractarians, and the constitutional point mattered more: the final word on what the Church of England teaches had been given by a committee of the Crown.

Henry Edward Manning, then Archdeacon of Chichester, was received into the Catholic Church in 1851, became Archbishop of Westminster in 1865 and a cardinal in 1875. Robert Isaac Wilberforce followed in 1854, and a considerable group of clergy went for the same reason. Anglo-Catholicism after 1850 therefore carried a permanent internal argument: whether the Church of England's submission to civil jurisdiction in doctrine was a scandal to be endured or a disproof of the whole Tractarian claim.

What the men who stayed said

Pusey and Keble answered that the Church is not constituted by her law courts. Their position was that Anglican orders, sacraments, creeds and Prayer Book remain what they are whatever a civil tribunal says, that the erastian settlement is an injury inflicted on the Church rather than a feature of her nature, and that the duty of Catholic-minded Anglicans is to stay, teach, suffer and work for corporate reunion rather than to secede one by one. That answer was held with real integrity, and it is the reason Anglo-Catholicism continued as a party rather than dissolving into the Catholic Church in 1845.

8. Ritualism and the Slum Priests

The second generation of Anglo-Catholics took the doctrine of the tracts into the parish and made it visible, and the movement's centre of gravity moved from Oxford common rooms to the poorest streets in England. Ritualism is the name for the recovery of ceremonial: eucharistic vestments, altar lights, incense, the mixed chalice, wafer bread, the eastward position, auricular confession, daily Mass, reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, and the restoration of the Eucharist as the principal Sunday service in place of Morning Prayer.

The slum parishes

The ritualist clergy went deliberately to the worst districts of London, Brighton, Bristol, Leeds and the northern industrial towns. Charles Lowder founded the mission that became St Peter's, London Docks, in the East End, and stayed through the cholera outbreak of 1866. Alexander Heriot Mackonochie served St Alban the Martyr, Holborn. Their argument was that the poor deserved beauty, that the sacraments were for everyone, and that a parish church should be open, lit and full of the Blessed Sacrament in districts where nothing else was. They ran schools, guilds, missions, nursing sisterhoods and burial clubs. Anglo-Catholicism earned much of its moral standing in England in those parishes.

The prosecutions

Ritualism was fought in the courts for thirty years. The Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, promoted by Archbishop Archibald Campbell Tait and supported by Queen Victoria and Benjamin Disraeli, created a fast procedure for suppressing illegal ceremonial. Several ritualist priests were imprisoned for contempt of court after refusing to recognise the jurisdiction of a secular judge over the worship of the Church, among them Arthur Tooth of St James's, Hatcham, imprisoned in 1877, and Sidney Faithorn Green of Miles Platting, held for well over a year in the early 1880s. The prosecutions produced sympathy for the accused, made martyrs of obscure clergy, and were quietly abandoned. In 1888 Bishop Edward King of Lincoln was prosecuted over ceremonial and the Archbishop of Canterbury's judgment of 1890 permitted most of the practices at issue, which effectively ended the campaign.

Sisterhoods, orders and the Congresses

The movement also restored the religious life to Anglicanism after three centuries. The first Anglican sisterhood since the Reformation was established in London in 1845 under Pusey's guidance, and communities of women multiplied quickly in nursing, teaching and mission work. The Society of St John the Evangelist, the Cowley Fathers, was founded by Richard Meux Benson in 1866 as the first stable Anglican community for men. Charles Gore founded the Community of the Resurrection in 1892, and it settled at Mirfield in Yorkshire in 1898. Gore also edited Lux Mundi in 1889, a volume of essays that accepted biblical criticism and evolutionary science within a Catholic framework, and which older Tractarians including Pusey's circle regarded as a betrayal. The Anglo-Catholic Congresses, beginning in London in 1920, filled the Royal Albert Hall and marked the movement's high-water mark of confidence.

9. What Anglo-Catholics Believe

Anglo-Catholic belief is best stated as the Catholic faith held on Anglican terms, with the Prayer Book read through the Fathers and the undivided Church of the first millennium taken as the standard. The list below states the positions as Anglo-Catholics themselves state them, followed by where Catholic teaching agrees and where it does not.

The core positions

Anglo-Catholics hold the apostolic succession of bishops as necessary to the Church, and priesthood as a sacramental order rather than a functional appointment. They hold that the Eucharist is the true Body and Blood of Christ, offered as a sacrifice in union with Calvary, and many use the language of the Real Presence while declining to require the scholastic term transubstantiation. They hold baptismal regeneration. They practise sacramental confession and absolution, using the Prayer Book's own provision for it. They keep the seven sacraments, honour the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints, pray for the dead, use the rosary, the Angelus and Benediction in many parishes, and observe the traditional fasts and the liturgical year. They appeal to Scripture read within Tradition, and to the Vincentian canon of what has been believed everywhere, always and by all.

Where they differ among themselves

The party has always contained wide variation. Prayer Book Catholics use the Book of Common Prayer, in the 1662 or a later revision, interpreted in a Catholic sense. Anglo-Papalists adopted the Roman Missal outright, kept Roman devotions and Roman calendars, prayed for the Pope by name, and regarded the separation from Rome as an accident of history to be repaired as soon as possible. Liberal Catholics in the line of Lux Mundi combine Catholic sacramental practice with an openness to modern biblical and scientific scholarship. Affirming Catholicism, founded in the 1990s, holds Catholic order together with the ordination of women. These are genuinely different positions and no single description covers them all.

A Catholic assessment

The Anglo-Catholic column describes positions common in the tradition and binds no province, parish or society, since Anglicanism has no magisterium that could impose them. Individual Anglo-Catholics hold views across this whole range and some hold the Catholic position in every row.

10. The Branch Theory and the Catholic Answer

The branch theory is the ecclesiology most Anglo-Catholics relied on, and it is the load-bearing wall of the whole position. On this account the one Catholic Church of the creed subsists in three great branches that have kept valid orders, valid sacraments and the ancient faith: the Roman, the Eastern Orthodox and the Anglican. The branches are out of communion with one another through historical accident, sin and political catastrophe, and none of them has ceased to be part of the one Church. William Palmer of Worcester College gave the theory its most careful statement in his Treatise on the Church of Christ in 1838.

What the theory does for Anglicanism

The theory explains how a man may hold Catholic doctrine, venerate the saints, offer the Eucharist as a sacrifice and hear confessions while refusing submission to the Pope, without regarding himself as a schismatic. It makes the English Reformation a reform of a national Church rather than the founding of a new one. It gives corporate reunion, rather than individual conversion, as the right goal, which is exactly the programme Pusey and Keble pursued after 1845.

Why Rome does not accept it

The Catholic Church holds that the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church governed by the successor of Peter and the bishops in communion with him, a formulation from Lumen Gentium 8 which the Catechism of the Catholic Church repeats at 816. On that teaching the Church does not divide into branches, because visible communion with the Roman pontiff belongs to her constitution rather than to her circumstances. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stated the point again in the declaration Dominus Iesus in 2000 and in its 2007 responses on the doctrine of the Church.

The Catholic Church says a great deal that is positive alongside this. Baptised Christians outside her visible communion are joined to her in a real, though imperfect, communion (CCC 838). The Second Vatican Council's decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio 13, singles out the Anglican Communion by name among the communities separated in the sixteenth century as one in which Catholic traditions and structures partly continue to exist. The Council also teaches that the ecclesial communities of the Reformation have not preserved the proper reality of the eucharistic mystery in its fullness because they lack the sacrament of Orders (CCC 1400). Those two statements together are the exact shape of Rome's judgment on Anglo-Catholicism: much of the substance is genuinely there, and the thing that would make it whole is not.

11. Anglican Orders and Apostolicae Curae

The validity of Anglican ordinations is the question on which the Anglo-Catholic claim finally turns, because everything sacramental in the movement depends on the answer. Pope Leo XIII gave Rome's answer in the apostolic letter Apostolicae Curae on 13 September 1896, declaring ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite to have been and to be absolutely null and utterly void.

The reasoning

Leo XIII rested the judgment on two grounds, defect of form and defect of intention. On form, he argued that the Edwardine Ordinal of 1550 and 1552 had stripped from the rite of ordination the words that signified the order of priesthood as the Church understands it, namely the power to consecrate and offer the Body and Blood of Christ, and that the rite of consecrating a bishop was altered in the same direction. On intention, he argued that those who framed and used the new rite deliberately intended to produce a ministry other than the sacrificing priesthood of Catholic tradition, and that a rite framed with such an intention does not confer what it does not intend. He held further that a defect at the root ran through the whole subsequent line, so that later restorations of language could not repair it.

The Anglican reply

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Frederick Temple and William Maclagan, replied in 1897 in the encyclical letter Saepius Officio. They argued that the Anglican ordinal contains the essentials of ordination as the ancient rites of both East and West define them, that the imperative form "Receive the Holy Ghost" with the laying on of hands by a bishop is sufficient, and that if the shortening of a rite invalidates orders then several early Roman and Eastern rites would fail the same test. They also argued that the eucharistic sacrifice is offered in the Anglican liturgy in a real sense, and they observed pointedly that Rome's own doctrine of the sacraments requires only the intention to do what the Church does.

What has happened since

Two developments are worth naming without overstating either. From the twentieth century onward, a number of Anglican bishops in the Old Catholic succession took part in Anglican consecrations after the Bonn Agreement of 1931 established intercommunion between the Anglican Communion and the Union of Utrecht, and some Anglicans argue that this introduced lines of succession Rome recognises as valid. The Catholic Church has never revised Apostolicae Curae on that basis, and the practice of the Church remains that a former Anglican clergyman received into full communion and called to the priesthood is ordained absolutely, without conditional form. Separately, the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission produced agreed statements on the Eucharist in 1971 and on ministry and ordination in 1973, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded in 1991 that the agreements did not yet amount to substantial identity on several points, orders among them.

Sources for this section: Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae (1896); the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Saepius Officio (1897); the Bonn Agreement (1931); ARCIC, The Final Report (1981) with the CDF response of 1991. The characterisation of each position follows the documents themselves.

12. Where the Recovery Met Its Own Limits

The Oxford Movement recovered Catholic doctrine, devotion and ceremonial inside Anglicanism with extraordinary success, and it never recovered a Catholic authority to hold them in place. That is the honest summary of the movement's history, and Anglo-Catholic writers have said it themselves at every stage. The tracts appealed to the Church's living voice against the state; when the Church's living voice, in the persons of the English bishops, condemned Tract 90, the movement had to decide whether that voice was authoritative after all.

The structural problem

Anglicanism disperses authority by design, among Scripture, the Prayer Book, the Articles, the bishops, the synods and the Crown in Parliament, and it has no organ that can settle a disputed doctrine for the whole body. Anglo-Catholics repeatedly appealed to the undivided Church of the first millennium as the standard, which is a coherent principle and leaves open the further question of who decides what that Church taught when Anglicans disagree. Each generation's answer was a party's answer, held against other parties in the same Church, enforceable on nobody.

The twentieth-century tests

The result was that questions the movement regarded as settled by the ancient Church were reopened and decided against it by Anglican bodies. The Lambeth Conference of 1930 permitted contraception in limited circumstances, reversing the Conference of 1920 and opening a distance from Catholic and Orthodox teaching that has widened since. From the 1970s Anglican provinces began ordaining women to the priesthood, Hong Kong in 1971 and Canada and the United States later in that decade, the Church of England in 1994, and to the episcopate afterwards, with the Church of England admitting women bishops from 2014. Pope John Paul II wrote to Archbishop Robert Runcie in the 1980s warning that the step created a new and serious obstacle to reconciliation, and set out the Catholic position in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994. Provinces have since divided over the blessing of same-sex unions. In each case Anglo-Catholics who held the ancient discipline found themselves a minority inside their own province with no court of appeal.

How Anglo-Catholics answer this

The answer given by those who stay deserves to be stated properly. They hold that the Catholic Church of the first millennium lived with prolonged doctrinal disorder, that Arianism at one point held most of the episcopate, and that the presence of error in a Church does not prove the absence of grace or of valid sacraments. They hold that God has placed them where they are, among people they serve, and that abandoning a flock for a cleaner ecclesiology is a failure of charity. They hold that corporate reunion remains the goal and that individual conversions delay it. They point to the Malines Conversations of 1921 to 1926, where Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier of Malines and Lord Halifax explored reunion, and to the celebrated phrase from those talks that the Church of England might be united to Rome and not absorbed by her. That hope is serious and it is held by serious people.

13. The Ordinariates and Anglicanorum Coetibus

Pope Benedict XVI published the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus on 4 November 2009, creating personal ordinariates in which groups of former Anglicans enter full communion with the Catholic Church while keeping elements of Anglican liturgy, spirituality and pastoral practice. The structure answered the request that Anglo-Catholics had made since Malines: entry as a body, with their patrimony intact, rather than one by one.

How an ordinariate works

A personal ordinariate is a jurisdiction comparable to a diocese, covering a territory but gathering members by their Anglican background rather than by where they live. It is headed by an ordinary, who may be a former Anglican bishop ordained as a Catholic priest, and it has its own clergy, parishes, formation and finances. Three were erected: the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in England and Wales in January 2011, the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter for the United States and Canada in January 2012, and the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross in Australia in June 2012. The Vatican approved a liturgical use for them, Divine Worship: The Missal, which came into use in 2015 and draws on the Book of Common Prayer tradition within the Roman rite.

Married clergy and the terms of entry

Married former Anglican clergy may be ordained as Catholic priests in the ordinariates by dispensation from the discipline of celibacy, which follows a practice Rome had already allowed in the United States under the Pastoral Provision of 1980. A married man may not become a bishop, since the ancient discipline of both East and West reserves the episcopate to the unmarried, and a former Anglican bishop who is married is ordained a priest and may serve as ordinary with insignia proper to his office. Every candidate is ordained absolutely, because of Apostolicae Curae, and every member professes the Catholic faith in full, including the Marian dogmas and the authority of the Roman pontiff. The ordinariates keep an Anglican liturgical and pastoral inheritance inside the Catholic Church rather than a set of Anglican doctrinal reservations.

What the ordinariates settle and what they do not

For those who join, the ordinariates end the authority problem: they receive the Catholic faith on Catholic terms and keep the English devotional tradition they were formed in. For Anglo-Catholicism as a movement, the ordinariates are a standing question. Many Anglo-Catholics regard them as the vindication of everything the Tractarians taught. Many others regard them as a temptation to abandon the corporate reunion the movement exists to pursue, and continue to hold that their vocation is inside Anglicanism. Both groups remain, and the split runs through parishes and friendships. Rome for its part continues the formal dialogue with the Anglican Communion and treats the ordinariates as a pastoral provision alongside it rather than as a replacement for it.

14. Anglo-Catholicism Today

Anglo-Catholicism today is smaller and more divided than it was at the Congresses of the 1920s, and its liturgical influence on Anglicanism as a whole is very wide. Eucharistic vestments, weekly or daily Communion as the main service, the Christian year with its colours, candles on altars, the Peace, the offering of prayers for the departed and the revived religious communities were all controversial ritualist novelties in 1860, and they are ordinary Anglican practice in most provinces now. The party won the argument about worship and lost the argument about authority.

Where it survives institutionally

In the Church of England, traditionalist Anglo-Catholics who do not accept the ordination of women are served under the Five Guiding Principles agreed in 2014, which provide alternative episcopal oversight through provincial episcopal visitors, the bishops widely known as flying bishops. The sees attached to that role have been reorganised more than once. The Society of Saint Wilfrid and Saint Hilda gathers the parishes, clergy and laity under those bishops. Forward in Faith represents that constituency. Affirming Catholicism represents the Catholic-minded Anglicans who accept the ordination of women. Outside the Church of England, the Anglican Catholic Church and other Continuing Anglican bodies formed after the Congress of St Louis in 1977 hold Anglo-Catholic doctrine independently. In the United States, Anglo-Catholic parishes exist in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Church in North America, and our guides to the Episcopal Church and to the Church of England cover those bodies in detail. Anglo-Catholic influence is also strong in several African and Pacific provinces, notably in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, Melanesia and Papua New Guinea, where the Melanesian Brotherhood and other communities carry the tradition.

Anglo-Catholicism and the Old Catholic and independent bodies

Anglo-Catholicism should not be confused with two neighbouring things it is often mixed up with. The Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht are a separate body that broke with Rome over the First Vatican Council in 1870, and although they entered intercommunion with Anglicans in 1931 they have their own history and their own orders; see our guide to the Old Catholic Church. The many small independent bodies using the word Catholic in their names, with orders traced through wandering bishops, are a different phenomenon again, treated in our guide to independent Catholic churches.

15. What Catholics Should Take From It

Catholics owe the Oxford Movement a debt and should say so. The Tractarians recovered patristic theology for the English-speaking world at a time when Catholic scholarship in England was thin, and their translations are still read. They restored the religious life, sacramental confession, frequent Communion and the dignity of the liturgy in a Church that had largely lost all four. They sent priests into slums that respectable religion had abandoned. They produced Newman, whose Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and Grammar of Assent are Catholic property now, and whose canonisation in 2019 the whole Church celebrates.

What the story teaches

The lesson a Catholic should draw is about the relation between doctrine and authority. Belief needs a bearer that can hold it across generations and settle disputes when honest people read the same sources differently. The Oxford Movement recovered the content of Catholic faith with great learning and great sanctity, and it inherited no organ capable of defending that content once the fashion turned. Catholics who take the magisterium for granted, or resent it, are looking at the alternative when they look at this history.

How to speak to an Anglo-Catholic

Speak accurately and without condescension. Anglo-Catholics hold a considered position with a long intellectual pedigree, and many of them live it at real cost. Do not tell them their sacraments are meaningless, because that is not what the Catholic Church says: it says their baptism is valid and is the bond that already joins them to the Church (CCC 1271), and that the Eucharist they revere lacks the sacrament of Orders that would make it the sacrifice they intend (CCC 1400). Ask what they make of the authority question rather than announcing it at them. Pray for reunion, which Christ asked for himself.

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