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Hello, Cardinal John Henry Newman is the most significant Christian Theologian of the 19th century

He began as an evangelical became a high Anglican before converting to Roman Catholicism in 1845

His is the story of a diversity of Victorian religious life

But his path also marks the waning of the ideas of Protestant nationhood at the close of the 18th century and the reaffirmation of the Catholic tradition and

The new non-conformist traditions at the turn of the 20th century

For over a decade between 1833 and 1845

Newman and the Oxford movement argued that the Church of England was a holy Catholic and apostolic church

They sought to assert the Catholic nature of their church just a secularism liberalism non-conformism and even Roman Catholicism

Seemed to threaten it. They published tracts preached and brought their social mission to some of the poorest urban parishes

Poetic apostolic thinking and lowly parish churchwork were the twin prongs of their attack

Why between 1833 and 1845 was the voice of reaction such a loud one?

What was the Oxford movement and what motivated it?

How did they present their ideas to the Anglican clergy at large and what did the clergy make of them?

And how did they leave such a powerful legacy for the Church of England?

It's character and its churches with me to discuss the Oxford movement a Sheridan Gilly

Emeritus reader in theology at the University of Durham Francis Knight senior lecturer in church history at the University of Wales

Lampeter and Simon Skinner fellow in tutoring history at Baleal College, Oxford

Sheridan Gilly the Church of England was both was both a Protestant and a Catholic church

But can you describe what kind of church it was at the beginning of the 19th century?

Well, if you'd asked a member of the Church of England in 1800 what he was

...