Oxford Movement - Early Movement

Early Movement

The immediate impetus for the movement was a perceived attack by the reforming Whig administration on the structure and revenues of the established church in Ireland, with the Irish Church Temporalities Bill (1833). This bill not only legislated administrative changes in the hierarchy of the church (for example, with a reduction of both bishoprics and archbishoprics) but also made changes to the leasing of church lands, which some (including a number of Whigs) feared would lead to a secular appropriation of ecclesiastical property. Keble attacked these proposals as "national apostasy" in his Assize Sermon in Oxford in 1833. The movement's leaders attacked liberalism in theology. Their interest in Christian origins led them to reconsider the relationship of the Church of England with the Roman Catholic Church.

The movement postulated the Branch Theory, which states that Anglicanism along with Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism form three "branches" of the one "Catholic Church". Men in the movement argued for the inclusion of traditional aspects of liturgy from medieval religious practice, as they believed the church had become too "plain". In the final Tract XC, 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 16th century Church of England. Newman's abandonment of Anglicanism by conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, followed by the conversion of Henry Edward Manning in 1851, had a profound effect upon the movement.