It is hard to imagine today how profoundly shocking the Oxford Movement was when it arrived in parishes across England. In 1844, a churchwarden from a small Cornish town complained to Bishop Phillpotts that the Tractarian vicar’s ritual innovations had deterred many parishioners from coming to church altogether, as they were “not able to rid themselves of the fear that some strongly exciting event is about to take place.” He knew of many “ladies who have been incapacitated from performing their religious and other duties for the remainder of the day, in consequence of the excitement they have been subjected to at church.” The reaction in larger urban parishes was even stronger, and more violent.

The arrival of the first Tractarian vicar at the Church of St George-in-the-East led to riots. Guest preachers had to contend with “shouting, stamping of feet, slamming of doors, whistling, and striking of lucifer matches.” One clergyman reported that “walnut shells, orange peels, and small detonating crackers—some of which were let off during the service—were thrown at me; and a row of boys . . . shot peas at my face through pea-shooters.” Another recalled that the sight of the red edge on his hymnbook could produce “a deep inarticulate growl from all parts of the building. . . . When I lifted it up, apropos to nothing in the service, the growl came as surely as sound follows the laying of the hand on the keys of an organ.” And another observer reported that “when the choir turned to the east at the Creed, most of the congregation turned to the west.”

These are but some of the moments from the colorful story of the Oxford Movement’s history that has been retold in After Newman: A Eulogy for Anglo-Catholics, 1845–1965, the latest work by Aidan Nichols, O.P., and the fifty-fourth book in his oeuvre. For those who followed in Newman’s steps, the Oxford Movement seems to end in 1845, at the moment when Newman knelt to make his confession to Dominic Barberi, who sat, still dripping wet from his journey on top of a carriage, in front of the fireplace at Littlemore. Roman Catholics have tended not to show much curiosity about what happened to those who remained in the Anglican fold and eventually came to call themselves Anglo-Catholics. Nichols, a former Anglican himself, is “painfully conscious of the lack of comprehension, and indeed of basic historical knowledge, that typified many Roman Catholics, including priests and bishops” when the Ordinariates were created by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009. These were meant to meet the pastoral needs of those who wanted to be in full communion with the Holy See while preserving the riches of the Anglican liturgical and spiritual patrimony. Ignorance may explain the lack of support given to the Ordinariate by the Catholic bishops of England and Wales. Another explanation might be that many of them belong to the generation for whom the idea of encouraging another Christian to become Roman Catholic sounds gauche and offensive.

I have been working for more than a year now in the fortress of English Anglo-Catholicism, Pusey House. I am only too painfully aware of what a great opportunity was fumbled by the bishops. To be clear: I’m not undercover at Pusey House. My colleagues know I am an “R.C.” and will happily tell visitors that I am the first (known) papist on their payroll. (How someone with a Turkish name became Catholic is a story for another day.) The house was founded in 1884 to be the beachhead of the Oxford Movement in the city in which it began, and to preserve the legacy of Edward Pusey, the retiring don who became the figurehead of the movement after Newman’s secession. It still flourishes today as a chaplaincy, a center for theological study, and a “rallying point of the Christian faith” for all who belong to the lowercase-c catholic tradition. The history of the Priest Librarians, as they are known, who have served in its chapel and library over the years is itself an important vein in the history of the Anglo-Catholic movement. It includes renowned scholars such as Darwell Stone and F. E. Brightman, pastors and confessors to countless students such as Stuckey Coles, and others who were loved for their sheer eccentricity.

The principal of the house from 1951 to 1971, Hugh Maycock, was one of that last group. He had a hobby of collecting antique pawnbroker’s balls and played with a collection of mechanical toys in his room. He drove an old car, according to one reminiscence, with “the reckless abandon of Toad of Toad Hall—both hands off the steering wheel at seventy miles an hour to light a cigarette.” An insect bite suffered while he was a missionary in Borneo meant that he had an inordinate need to nap, sometimes up to eighteen hours a day. He once said, “I can always tell what time of day it is. When I awake in my pajamas I know it is time for Mass and when I awake in my trousers I know it is time for tea.”

My work managing the library and archive at Pusey House as well as organizing its program of public lectures and theological conferences means that I am daily surrounded by what Nichols describes as the “achievements, so eminently worthy of respect” of Anglo-Catholicism. The shelves in the reading rooms and archives are lined with evidence of the labors of “ritualists, and liturgists, founders of Sisterhoods and monasteries, social thinkers, creators of Church societies, guilds, schools and newspapers, organizers of Congresses, theologians, architects and artists, poets and novelists, hymnographers and musicians, ecumenists and missionaries” who together made it a formidable force. The first Anglo-Catholic Congress in 1920 was so wildly popular that only the Royal Albert Hall could accommodate the number of attendees. The 1933 congress to celebrate the centenary of the Oxford Movement, perhaps the high-water mark of Anglo-Catholicism, drew fifty thousand people to its closing Mass in a stadium.

Anyone viewing Anglo-Catholics with an attitude of churlish disdain would do well to consider their trials and achievements. How many of their Roman brethren know about the prosecution and imprisonment of five tenacious priests by the Church of England’s ecclesiastical courts for their use of incense and vestments in the 1870s? How many know that Anglo-Catholic parishes were (and are) often in the poorest areas? Several parishes were founded by the second generation of the Oxford Movement to serve the unchurched masses in the dockyards and factory slums that were ill served by the existing parochial network. Several of these slum parishes were aided later on by Anglican religious sisters; the B.B.C. series Call the Midwife is based on the memoirs of a nurse who served alongside one such order of nursing nuns, the Community of St John the Divine, in the East End. As Waugh once wrote, “In the drab working-class areas of the industrial cities, the Anglo-Catholic parishes formed bright little islands of pageantry. . . . Rags were briefly changed for cassocks and cottas.” Attached to the parish of St Peter’s, London Docks, founded by Charles Lowder, were “a school for six hundred children, a hostel for the elderly, ‘St Peter’s Club and Dining Room’ providing meals for working men and their families at a ‘moderate cost,’ a ‘Friend of Labour Society’ making loans to working men, a Penny Bank, a convalescent home at Reigate, Benefit and Burial Clubs, three Mothers’ Meeting Clubs, Clothing and Boot Clubs, and a ‘Society for the employment of poor needlewomen.’”

The new religious orders that blossomed from the enthusiasm for all things pre-Reformation tended to be founded by the more unusual Anglo-Catholics. Among them were the neo-Druid Father Ignatius and Aelred Carlyle, abbot of the first Anglican Benedictine community, residing in an extravagant abbey, furnished with towers and turrets, peacocks, and “gem-encrusted abbatial mitres.”

Anglo-Catholics were also, however, eager missionaries in British colonies, where they had greater freedom than in comfortable country vicarages, and their spiritual progeny are the Caribbean grandmothers who can now be found in the Anglo-Catholic parishes of London. The Oxford Movement even found its way to the Kingdom of Hawaii. A taste for ritual in the Hawaiian royal family created an almighty ruckus with the American Protestant missionaries when the king and the queen consort requested, and received, an Anglo-Catholic bishop from England to be the head of the established Anglican Church of Hawaii in 1862.

The name of that bishop, Thomas Nettleship Staley, leads me to mention, as an aside, that Anglo-Catholic clergymen had some truly splendid names. The fictional priest in Rose Macaulay’s Towers of Trebizond, Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, seems dull by comparison to Mayow Wynell Mayow, Wilmot Lushington Vyvyan, or Gonville Aubie ffrench-Beytagh.

More could be said about the invaluable social and political thought of Anglo-Catholics in the 1930s, a critical period for the crystallization of many ideas that prefigured the post-liberalism of today, when figures such as Vigo Auguste Demant, Maurice Reckitt, and T. S. Eliot, influencing and being influenced by their Roman contemporaries Christopher Dawson and Jacques Maritain, continued the Oxford Movement’s concern for the “Condition of England.” And the Anglo-Catholic scholar priests, those from the new religious communities (Hebert and Dix), from the universities (Farrer and Mascall), and from the bishops’ bench (Kirk and Ramsey), wrote tomes of liturgical, sacramental, doctrinal, and moral theology that are read less often than they deserve. Nichols devotes several chapters to the riches that remain to be recovered in their work.

But I see you drumming your fingers impatiently on the Catechism. You may be thinking, “That is all very well to celebrate the past, but when will they give it up and become Catholic? What are they waiting for?”

And you would be right to ask that question. The official Anglican–Roman Catholic “dialogue” has been going on for sixty years. Meetings have been held. Documents released. Further meetings held. Yet the optimism of the Anglo-Catholics of the early twentieth century to reunite the entire Church of England with Rome seems foolhardy today. Far from unity drawing closer, the obstacles to reunion seem to pile ever further up. Nothing can be done until we admit that official ecumenism, all the attempts to paper over divisions by committees and compromises and all that, has achieved precious little.

Let’s pass over the liberal Anglo-Catholics, those who have intractable disagreements with Rome’s teachings about morals, and focus instead on the traditional Anglo-Catholics, those for whom Pusey House is a home. The ordination of women is not “received” there, meaning that women may not administer the sacraments, a position that some say is becoming harder to hold in the Church of England. Why then have they not crossed the Tiber?

If we want to understand why—and I mean really try to understand, with sympathy, not merely with cross-armed condescension—then we need to picture the chapel of Pusey House, the smaller chapel containing the tabernacle. Much of it would seem familiar to any R.C. who happens to wander in while waiting for Mass to begin next door at the Dominican Priory of Blackfriars: a fine baldacchino with gilded pillars above the tabernacle, a red screen behind and stained glass above, designed by Ninian Comper, with a Tree of Jesse motif of New and Old Testament saints, along with Pusey, surrounding Christ in Glory and the Virgin with Child. Worth seeing, certainly, and yet familiar.

But on the desks in front of the choir stalls, the small red covers of the Book of Common Prayer stand out from the wood. Picking one up, you might notice that the lettering on the cover has been worn away from use, and the spine has probably fallen off. Opening it you would find inside a very unfamiliar collection of rites and rituals, covering every situation from “Thanksgiving of Women After Childbirth” to burial, ceremonies to celebrate baptism and “the Lord’s Supper,” prayers to denounce God’s anger on sinners and curse those who “removeth his neighbour’s land-mark,” and much else. At the very end is a “Table of Kindred and Affinity” defining who is forbidden from marrying whom.

Put off by the strangeness, not to mention the Elizabethan language, you might quickly put the book down. But between those small covers is contained an entire program of devotion to God and neighbor, through daily morning and evening prayer and regular Communion, which is meant to draw those who follow it ever closer to the Father through Christlike charity. Every day, “from the rising up of the sun unto the going down of the same,” the regular services in the chapel are determined by the Prayer Book. Clinging to the B.C.P. is not mere stubbornness. Anglo-Catholics have found in it what is distinctive about their particular patch of the Lord’s vineyard. They will not easily part with what has given shape to the cycle of every day, week, and year of their lives, and given them the words to baptize and to bury, to marry and to die.

Within North American Anglicanism, in particular, a certain “Prayer-Book Catholic” sensibility has provided intellectual and apologetic force to those who decide to remain committed to a life nourished by this text. The name Robert Crouse will not be familiar to many, but this Canadian Anglican priest, who was a scholar of patristic and medieval thought, has influenced at least a generation of Anglicans by being the prime mover of this sensibility. There are still plenty of disagreements (which are not at all unimportant) about how Prayer-Book Catholics ought to tread the infamous Anglican via media between the Reformed and Roman traditions, and what it means to be Catholic without being Roman. But the shared allegiance to a way of worship holds Prayer-Book Catholics together.

Far from being just a worship text, then, the Prayer Book is an ascetical system embracing the whole of human life through cycles of prayer, and moving through those circles into communion with God. For Crouse, the heart of the Prayer Book was the annual cycle of readings given for Holy Communion on Sundays, feasts, and saints’ days. The cycle of readings in the B.C.P. is almost unchanged from that used in the pre-Reformation missals. This means that comparing the B.C.P. with the extraordinary form of the Mass would create the surprising impression that the two share more in common than either does with the Novus Ordo in certain respects. Open a Sarum Missal, a B.C.P., and a Roman Missal from before Vatican II and you will find that the readings for the Annunciation are identical in all three. (After Vatican II, this was replaced by the creation of an unwieldy three-year cycle.) This cycle of prayers and readings in the B.C.P. goes back to the time of Pope Gregory the Great, when (to quote from those prayers) “the sundry and manifold changes of the world,” not to mention “the unruly wills and affections of sinful men,” were plain to see, in a world where what was ancient and cherished became uprooted, wars and rumors of wars were spreading, and an empire crumbling.

During those Dark Ages, the cycle of readings began to take shape, not haphazardly, but with a discernible plan. “In the first half of the year from Advent to Trinity Sunday, the cycle of Lessons sets before us in due succession those great works wherein the mind and heart of God are manifest in Jesus Christ,” according to Crouse, from Christ’s conception to his Ascension and sending of the Spirit. Then, in the second half of the year, from Pentecost and Trinity down to the last Sunday before Advent, the readings set forth how we can and must live now in the Spirit by presenting Christ’s most important teachings and miracles in the Gospels, along with the principal passages about the nature of Christian virtue from the Epistles. Or, put differently, in the first half of the year, we learn what to believe; in the second half, we learn what we are now empowered to do. Love reveals itself, and then we learn how to respond to that love.

All the arguments of all the internet apologists about the Reformation, or about this or that area of contention, could not break down the defenses created by the Prayer Book. Are we just missing the right arguments? Will it just take one more podcast, one more YouTube debate about the invalidity of Anglican orders? No. We cannot understand the Anglo-Catholics or inch closer to reunion with them until we come to grips with this sensibility.

Is the fault, then, with us? Frankly, I do not think the last pontificate caused my colleagues to have any qualms of conscience about their opinion of Rome. At the very nadir, when the Roman curia was meddling with what kinds of Mass could be advertised on parish bulletins in every corner of the world, Rome created an example of papal overreach that seemed almost too perfect to be true.

And yet, Rome is my home. Why? In the history of Anglo-Catholicism’s manifold signs of vitality, as Nichols puts it, the “tell-tale signs of the agency of grace were there for all to see” but “the content of the Anglo-Catholic revival had to contend with an inherited ecclesial form which was not a good fit.” From the very beginning of the Oxford Movement, the high views about the role of the episcopacy among its leading figures sat awkwardly with the reality of facing opposition from current bishops, and from Queen Victoria herself. In 1873, the archbishops jointly condemned the revival of sacramental confession by the Oxford Movement.

In 1852, Pusey wrote in a letter to W. E. Gladstone, “I look with terror on any admission of laity into Synods. It at once invests them with an ecclesiastical office, which will develop itself sooner or later, I believe, to the destruction of the Faith.” But, Nichols writes, “Pusey’s worst fears would become a reality” with the creation of the General Synod in the 1970s, with three chambers of bishops, clergy, and laity, each possessing a veto over the measures by which the Church of England is governed. The contemporary church has changed in the past century to an extent that would make it in certain respects unrecognizable to the Oxford Movement’s followers, or even to the Anglo-Catholics of the early twentieth century.

Nichols quotes the judgement of one Anglo-Catholic, William Davage, about the “misplaced” optimism of the Anglo-Catholics in the 1930s: “By accepting a tolerated place within a comprehensive economy, falling into an establishment embrace, the Anglo-Catholic missionary edge to recover the whole of the Church of England to its right mind was blunted; its aims were watered down, practices and disciplines became increasingly compromised.” Davage’s words were poignant for me to read because he once held my current position at Pusey House, a place that is still thriving, and indeed growing. But Anglo-Catholic ambitions to take over the Church of England are long past, and the dream of punching a hole through the wall separating Pusey House and Blackfriars next door is still just a dream. Meantime, those who want that wall to be thinner might, and ought to, see the impasse as a chance to learn from what is on the other side. Get a copy of the Ordinariate’s prayer book, or even just the B.C.P. Make it a part of your daily routine. Find a bunch of people to pray evensong together. See what happens. As Nichols writes, “Roman Catholics, who, historically, were not their friends, must now, out of justice as well as by generosity of spirit, become their admirers. And more than admirers, their allies.”