OXENHAM, HENRY NUTCOMBE. - Catholic writer, b. 15 Nov. 1829 at Harrow, d. 23 March 1888 at Kensington. The son of Anglicans, he studied at Oxford, took Holy Orders in the Church of England and was a pastor at Worminghall. He embraced Catholicism in 1857 and was baptized by the future Cardinal Manning.
To give an account of his abjuration, he published the following year a letter to an Anglican friend entitled The Tractarian Party and the Catholic Revival. He taught at St. Edmund's College in Ware; he then studied in Germany with Döllinger and in 1866 translated his work on early Christianity and the Church. A supporter of union between the Catholic and Anglican Churches, on the occasion of the appearance of Pusey's Eirenicon he published a letter, Dr. Pusey's Eirenicon considered in relation to Catholic Unity (London 1866). In 1870 he published in the Saturday Review his considerations on the Vatican Council, in a sense rather opposed to the definition of papal infallibility. He then drew close to Döllinger's Old Catholics and attended in Sept. 1874 the Synod they held at Bonn, but subsequently broke away from them. In 1879 he revived an anonymous unionist writing, Essay towards a Proposal for Catholic Communion, which had appeared in 1701 and was attributed to Joshua Basset. He also carried on a vast journalistic activity, of which the articles that appeared in the Contemporary Review and the Saturday Review, collected in volume in 1876 (Catholic Eschatology and Universalism) and in 1884 and 1885 (Short Studies in Ecclesiastical History and Biography; Short Studies, Ethical and Religious), bear witness. He also translated into English the second volume of Hefele's History of the Councils.
Bibliography
Silvio Furlani