The Oxford legacy

...The Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century was a movement in the Church of England to restore Catholic teach- ings and practice --though, avowedly, not Roman Catholic ones...

...GORDON C. ZAHN...

...The evening news telecasts featured clips and interviews from several of the more emotion-filled celebrations...

...ofProtestant"dissenters" and Roman Catholics in Parliament (most notably, Daniel O'Connell in 1829), where they might have a hand in crucial decisions, perhaps even doctrinal ones, for the established church...

...Where the Oxford Apostles had been concerned to assert the jurisdiction and authority of bishops, that point hardly needed laboring in a Tridentine context...

...A century later, at Vatican II, the climate was quite different, and Newman's work in these areas made crucial contributions to the ideas of collegiality and co-responsibility in the church that developed during and after that council...

...And in the same period, political spillover from the ongoing Irish "question" led to the seating DAVID B. NOBLE/$ a free-lance witer in Boston who terms himself "a Newman convert born out of season...

...But meanwhile the Oxford Apostles (as they also have been called) pressed on in their discovery and recovery of the Catholic world...

...But gradually, as the government's church reform proved moderate and Parliament failed to impose liberal doctrine on the church, the activity of the movement dwindled to the publishing of tracts at Oxford under Newman's direction...

...It derived equally from his reading of church history out of primary sources...

...They revived customs of fasting, and essayed other, more individual, mortifications...

...At most we numbered a dozen (not counting the patient dog) stand- ing in the rain across the street from Boston's downtown recruiting offices...

...In the ten years after Newman's submission, it has been esti- mated ten thousand adherents followed him to Rome...

...To the extent that he linked both the honor and the unknown's sacrifice, by none too subtle implication, to his administration's increasingly unpopular foreign and military policies, his speech demeaned both...

...It is a scandal that the war's unpopularity carried over to the men returning from hellish tours of duty, making them the objects of scorn and resentment...

...Newman's insistence on relationship and dialogue in the church was not merely a product of his class background, or Oxford's or even his own personal sensitivity...

...Of course, since tax monies and other coercive forms of support were involved, the issue is far less clear from our distance...

...The restoration of Catholic ritual in many Anglican churches was another such fruit, as is the widespread sacramental consciousness in that communion which far outreaches the boundary of the "'High Church...

...When feeling particularly thwarted, Newman said that it was Oxford that had made him a Catholic, not a series of scholastic arguments...

...God's truth is liberally distributed in the world for those who want to find it, he seemed to mean, and is the same truth within or without official church channels...

...I I k VIETNAM--A MEMORIAL DAY POSTSCRIPT Easing the conscience GORDON C. ZAHN A S CEREMONIES GO, it was modest in scale...

...Surely where 100,O00 had rallied against their being sent off in the first place, a few hundred could have gathered for the solemn reading of names of the two thousand or so Massachusetts men killed in action in Vietnam...

...His "Sermons Plain and Parochial," preached mostly in the 1830s, are a high point of the movement's luminous spirituality, and still are read...

...Growing public sophistication and skepticism about the religious establishment threatened to send government reform commissions probing into country churchyards, more specifically into personnel and salary practices where reform was in fact badly needed...

...l l The crowning event --one which gave the president full opportunity to display the professional actor's power to ma- nipulate audience emotions --was his awarding of the na- tion's highest tribute, the Congressional Medal of Honor, to the forever anonymous remains...

...It was in this edifying context that John Keble preached his Assize Sermon of July 14,1833, for the opening of a court term in Oxford...

...But whatever the limits this small group of clergymen at Oxford University set themselves, they achieved the first major, creative encounter between Catholic culture and British civilization in two hundred years...

...And, of course, hiding from the intellectual life of the West would negate the church's missionary thrust in large, crucial areas of human life...

...Together with the many books, articles, pamphlets, lectures, and sermons issued by the movement in the next twelve years, Keble's sermon envisioned a visible church founded by Christ and the Apostles, holding its identity and authority through the historic succession of bishops under the mandate of the early councils and fathers of the church...

...By the end of the 1830s, alarm at these developments was widespread, and after 1840 the Anglican bishops, whose au-thority the movement venerated, began to turn against it...

...His fundamental, original work as philosopher, historian, and theologian, and his gift as one of the great prose stylists of English letters, made an impact on his chosen church which was not visible until a century later...

...But he believed that isolation could not work indefinitely as a way of dealing with such widespread and fundamental cultural change, and that even in the short run such policies would alienate and drive away educated Catholics --a group, in Newman's view, which played a crucial role in maintaining the vitality of the church...

...The movement's legacy to the Anglican communion is perhaps most obvious, but its long-term influence upon Roman Catholicism, chiefly through the work of John Henry Newman, has been of such central importance that it deserves particular emphasis...

...By now he is reprinted and invoked more by the Catholic right than by the post-conciliar mainstream...

...And they published histories and translations that made the early church centuries present and available to a culture well-read in Scripture but largely ignorant about its immediate aftermath...

...The impressive procession, the ritual gun salutes, and the usual assemblage of dignitaries provided President Reagan with the setting for his almost classic oration filled with hyper-patriotic platitudes such as school children of his (and my) generation were called upon to recite in more innocent days when it was still possible to believe in the glamour and glories of war...

...Displaced by power looms and steam-powered threshers, they blame~l the whole Establishment for their plight, and burned clergy residences, including that of the Bishop of Bristol, in their travels...

...Besides, it might have been too depressing...

...The movement at Oxford fell apart, but Keble, Pusey, and many others soldiered on in the Church of England...

...When Edward B. Pusey, another Oxford clergyman, signed one of the (usually anonymous) Tracts with 13 July 1984:399 his initials, he became the first publicly visible leader of the movement, which then was termed "Puseyite" by some for whom the odd sound of that word expressed their misgivings about the project...

...Even those who had a dim feeling of how richly the ten bishoprics deserved suppression felt that such an action by the government, rather than the bishops, constituted state encroachment on the church's proper sphere...

...We paltry few could not match the others in color, number, or enthusiasm...

...But despite deceptions and delations Newman persisted in his vision of real communion in the Catholic church...

...HEWMAH'S REGENERATIVE VISIOH The Oxford legacy DAVID B. NOBLE T HE 150TH ANNIVERSARY of the Oxford Movement, which occasioned a flurry of articles and conferences last summer and fall, has now all but passed...

...They restored forgotten decoration and ceremonial to the liturgy (quite sparingly by later Anglican standards) and began to say various forms of the daily office, in church and privately...

...During his lifetime it often seemed that he was working in an environment even more hostile to his insights than had been the Church of England...

...Told that Catholic schools which offered inferior education in secular subjects Commonweal: 400 Newman's deeper insights in ecclesioiogy and epistemology, his writings and reputation seem to be on the wane...

...Politicians and clergymen vied with each other in impassioned patriotic eulogies...

...For a year, there was much riding to far-flung towns and parishes for meetings and the signing of petitions...

...Set into the Roman church of Pius IX, the Tractarian spiritu- ality took on different meaning...

...but the station whose crew had covered our similar gathering made no mention of it...

...The president's attempt at revisionist history is not likely to gain wide acceptance...

...a long-time peace activist, is national director of Pax Christi USA Center on Conscience and War...

...As a pacifist, I did my best to oppose their, and the nation's, involvement in that thoroughly discredited conflict...

...just being there and obey- ing orders was enough to merit uncritical approval and praise...

...Monuments were unveiled...

...Its occurrence was always a perversion and diminish- ment of Catholic communion...

...Roman Cathol- icism had so far been partly successful in sheltering its faithful from the winds of infidelity, he conceded...

...A justifi- able editorial judgment, no doubt...

...There was much of this kind of diminishment in the Roman church of the mid-nineteenth century, where some of the highest authorities seemed to pride themselves on an absolutist manner...

...hence the name "Tractarian" was attached to the group...

...It is difficult not to think that the right misunderstands him in important ways...

...Newman was (conditionally) ordained a Roman Catholic priest of the Oratorian order, and established a secondary school for boys in a poor district of Birmingham, where he spent the rest of his life...

...Ideas and projects submitted by New- man were repeatedly, and often crudely, crushed by prelates and administrators at Westminster and Rome, many of whom had hardly any idea of what was involved...

...The historical and theologi- cal restoration they produced from the records of the early church has had a profound influence all across the Western Christian spectrum...

...His books include War, Conscience, and Dissent and Another Part of the War (Univer-sity of Massachusetts...

...A government proposal to abolish, through merger, ten unloved dioceses of the colonially imposed Church of Ireland was a last straw for many conservative clergymen who had begun to fear not only for their perquisites but for the doctrinal faithfulness and perhaps even the continued existence of the Church of England...

...Keble at that point actually favored disestablishing the church --severing its ties with the state --but later he joined the movement's other leaders in a wary antidisestablishmen- tarianism...

...This high, avowedly Catholic view of the church raised eyebrows in the religious establishment, but many churchmen, high and low alike, took a positive line toward the movement because it gave an answer to government encroachment...

...Elsewhere in Boston the turnouts were more impressive...

...Bands and uniformed veterans paraded...

...The Oxford Movement arose from a peculiar crisis in the Church of England, a crisis not separable from a constitutional crisis in the British nation at that time...

...When Newman published a journal article titled "On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Christian Doctrine" less than ten years before the opening of Vatican I, he put his priestly career under a cloud --as far as the official church was concerned --until he was quite elderly...

...But the event is still worthy of notice, especially in these pages...

...He came into the Roman church already equipped with a clear knowledge that peremptory, one-way communica- tion from superior to inferior was not the basis of the ancient church...

...If one adds, as I must, that there are even greater unmet responsibilities toward the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange and our other indis- criminate weapons and strategies, this does not lessen the concern for veterans" rights...

...The bitter controversy over the con- tinuing effects of Agent Orange (and its less than satisfactory settlement) testifies to the government's reluctance to accept and meet its responsibilities to them...

...All who fought and certainly all who died in Vietnam deserve to be remembered and, yes, honored by the nation responsible for their being sent there...

...In following decades the movement bore widespread fruit in the Anglican communion, inspiring the founding of religious orders and missions to the outcast...

...Let this not be misinterpreted...

...Commonweal: 402...

...Some of those interviewed on television made the point that it makes no difference what kind of war it was...

...In 1845 this culminated in the reception as a Roman Catholic of Newman, who by that time was the best-selling author of sermons in the history of England...

...Frustration arose from the tepid devotional climate of much of the English church, and from its doctrinal compromises, and a movement toward Rome set in among a significant segment of the movement...

...Organizers, remembering the heady days of mass demonstrations on the Common, had hoped for more...

...Within a warm, celebrative spirituality that was peculiarly sensitive to the individual's relationship to God, they wrote about the real effects of the sacraments --the regenerative effects of baptism and the real presence in the eucharist --and began to hear individual confessions...

...The Oxford Movement, a Catholic revival in a Protestant culture which arose outside Roman control and later engaged in criti- cal dialogue with the magisterium from within and without the Roman communion, may be the greatest single example of that kind of Providence...

...The same logic, it is well to note, was used to justify honoring those who served in Hitler's armed forces in World War II...

...At the same time, ongoing research into the patristic era uncov- ered some striking examples of the early church behaving -- in the Donatist and Monophysite controversies --as if it was not only Catholic but Roman Catholic...

...But what lifted this sermon, and the movement it inaugurated, above the level of the Tory reaction they started from, was the positive ideal they pro- claimed...

...Much of this was epitomized in a celebrated conversation Newman had with his diocesan bishop...

...Despite their efforts, Newman's emphasis on caring for each individual's needs and matching administrative concerns with pastoral ones became a major source of the pastoral direction taken by the Second Vatican Council...

...So crucial were the questions raised for the church, and so em- bracing the answers, that the Oxford Movement cannot be allowed to recede into historical neglect...

...Now that it is over (at least in its active phase) it is a failure in national integrity not to do everything possible to adequately compen- sate its veterans for the physical and psychological trauma they suffered and in many cases must still endure...

...Economic deflation following the end of the Napoleonic wars plus introduction of steam machinery into industry had sent angry mobs of the unemployed raging across Jane Austen's England...

...Anglicanism also seemed to be losing its grip on the ruling classes...

...And it is sad to think that many who invoked him twenty years ago have relinquished their hold on him at a time when he is needed more than ever...

...From the nation's capital came the coverage of the super- extravaganza surrounding the internment at Arlington of the Vietnam War's Unknown Soldier...

...His greatest battle with forces of repression in the church came in the area of education, where he was unwilling simply to ignore the waves of skepticism and religious relativism which swept all areas of Western thought outside the schools and publica- tions narrowly controlled by church authorities...

...What does seem to be catching on, however, is an attitude of retroactive indifference...

...It was chiefly through him that the Oxford Movement's riches were communicated to, the Roman Catholic body...

...Rather, depth of relationship and delicacy of mean- ing, which had been taken for granted at Oxford if only because everyone involved was a British gentleman, became crucial points at issue...

...That sermon, later remembered as the beginning of the Oxford Movement, characterized the situation the church faced as "national apostasy...