A THEOLOGICAL MEDITATION · THE FLOWER OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
The Anglican Religious Life
Cowley · Mirfield · Wantage · The Recovery of the Monastic Vocation in the Church of England
SSJE — Society of St John the Evangelist, Cowley, 1866 · CR — Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield, 1892 · CSMV — Community of St Mary the Virgin, Wantage, 1848 · Benson — BEN-sun · Gore — GOR · Butler — BUT-ler
O God, who didst call men and women in the age of the Oxford revival to embrace the counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience in the service of thy Church; Grant that the witness of those who have renounced the world for thy sake may remind us that the Kingdom of God is not built by those who have kept everything for themselves; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Oxford Movement recovered the Catholic inheritance of the Church of England in doctrine and in worship. Its final and most permanent gift to the Church was the recovery of the religious life itself: the establishment, for the first time since the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, of communities of men and women bound by the three evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, living the ordered life of prayer and service that Benedict had codified in the sixth century. Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding had pointed the way in 1625; but Ferrar’s community was a household, not a religious order. What the Oxford Movement created was something more demanding and more durable: full monastic communities with habits and rules and perpetual vows, embedded in the Anglican Church and accountable to its bishops, carrying the full weight of the contemplative tradition into the life of a Church that had been without it for three hundred years.
The Society of St John the Evangelist (SSJE) was founded at Cowley near Oxford in 1866 by Richard Meux Benson (BEN-sun), a parish priest who had intended to go to India as a missionary but was asked to remain in England. His community — the Cowley Fathers, as they came to be called, the first permanent religious community of men in the post-Reformation Church of England — combined strict personal asceticism with active pastoral work: missions, retreats, spiritual direction, university ministry at Oxford. The Cowley Fathers produced some of the most significant Anglican spiritual directors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their influence on the interior tradition of the Church — through their publications, their retreat work, and their guidance of individual souls — was profound and largely invisible, which is the way of the contemplative tradition. They still exist, in Cambridge Massachusetts and elsewhere, the oldest continuing Anglican religious community of men.
The Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in Yorkshire was founded in 1892 by Charles Gore (GOR), the theologian whose editorship of Lux Mundi (1889) had brought Anglican theology into productive engagement with biblical criticism while insisting on the full Catholic faith. The CR combined the monastic office with theological education — Mirfield College trained priests for the Anglican ministry — and with an explicit commitment to social engagement: the community’s mission in the slums of industrial Yorkshire was as important to its founders as its liturgical life. The CR produced Trevor Huddleston, whose witness against apartheid in South Africa embodied exactly the combination of contemplative rootedness and prophetic activism that Gore had intended. Mirfield remains one of the most significant centres of Anglican theological formation in England.
The Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage in Berkshire, founded in 1848 by William John Butler (BUT-ler), was among the earliest of the women’s communities and became one of the largest — at its peak numbering over two hundred sisters, running schools, hospitals, and orphanages across England and overseas. Together with the Sisters of the Love of God at Fairacres, the Community of St John Baptist at Clewer, and the Society of the Sacred Mission, the women’s communities of the Anglican Church constituted a vast network of prayer, service, and education that shaped English social and religious life through the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. They too stand in the cloud of witnesses — the women who took vows of poverty and chastity and obedience in the Church of England and gave their lives to the sick and the poor and the children, following the same impulse that had moved Hild of Whitby and the women of the double monasteries twelve centuries before them.
O Almighty God, who by the movement of thy Spirit in the nineteenth century didst raise up in thy Church communities of prayer and service to fill the gap left by the Dissolution; Grant that the witness of the Cowley Fathers and the sisters of Mirfield and Wantage and all who have taken vows in thy service may remind thy whole Church that the Kingdom is built on prayer, and that what begins in the silence of the cell goes out to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.