Authority, Dogma, and History: The Role of Oxford Movement Converts in the Papal Infallibility Debates of the Nineteenth Century, 1835–1875 (review)

The Oxford Movement (OM) started with John Keble's Assize Sermon in July 1833, protesting control of the Church of England by a parliament that included members of other faiths and none. The OM quickly became an attempt to recall Anglicans to an awareness of their Catholic roots—never completely severed, OM's members contended, despite the repudiation of papal authority in the sixteenth century. The OM in its original form ended some twelve years after it had begun, when its leading spokesman, John Henry Newman, departed for what was, in the England of that day, a social and ecclesial Siberia, by entering the Roman Catholic Church.

Keble's broken-hearted but deeply affectionate letter to Newman said that his beloved friend's departure had produced in Keble "a feeling as if the spring had been taken out of my year."¹ In his concise and accurate chapter on the OM in this book, Benjamin O'Connor cites other less temperate reactions, ranging "from surprise to complete devastation." "The sensation to us was as of a sudden end of all things and without a new beginning," wrote one. Another expressed anger: "We felt we that had been betrayed, and we resented the wrong which had been done to us" (p. 36).

Although only two of the seven contributors to this book have experienced Anglicanism from the inside, all manifest remarkable understanding of a form of Christianity seldom accessible to outsiders. The authors share three assumptions: that the OM converts brought into their Catholic experience preoccupations rooted in their efforts to reform Anglicanism; that their shared concerns produced very different reasons for their conversions; and that, despite their small numbers, they transformed and refashioned Catholic theological discourse, particularly regarding papal authority.

The best known of Newman's works, next to his Apologia pro vita sua, is his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), which was his attempt to persuade himself that it was right, indeed imperative, to accept the faith of the Catholic Church. Like his fellow OM members, Newman had taken his stand on antiquity: "The early Church and its teachings were the paradigm given by Christ himself, and it was the standard against which later forms of Christianity should be judged" (p. 3).

In 1845 Newman's contention that the faith once given to the apostles could change, through development, rang alarm bells in both England and Rome. Two decades later, Newman was surprised to find his Essay invoked to justify Pope Pius IX's definition, first, of Mary's Immaculate Conception, in 1854, and then of papal infallibility in 1870."Now at the end of twenty years," Newman wrote to a friend in 1871, "I am told from Rome that I am guilty of the late Definition by my work on Development, so orthodox has it been found in principle" (p. 77). Charles Michael Shea's chapter in this book on Newman's development theory and the definition of papal infallibility is a model of clarity, supported by Shea's citation of sources in four languages.

Newman's privately expressed distress at the methods used to force the infallibility definition through the First Vatican Council is well known. After the Council, however, he wrote a correspondent, "Pius [IX] has been overruled—I believe he wanted a much more stringent dogma than he has got" (p. 210). Several contributors to this book make it clear that other Oxford converts also desired a more sweeping definition. Cardinal Henry Manning was one. After the Council, he wrote a pastoral letter claiming that the Council had gone farther than it had. Newman's fellow Oratorian Frederick W. Faber went so far as to say in a published sermon that since Jesus and Mary were...