OXENHAM, HENRY NUTCOMBE. – Catholic writer, born on 15 November 1829 at Harrow, died on 23 March 1888 at Kensington. The son of Anglicans, he studied at Oxford, took Holy Orders in the Church of England, and served as pastor at Worminghall. He embraced Catholicism in 1857 and was baptized by the future Cardinal Manning.
To account for his recantation, the following year he published a letter to an Anglican friend entitled The Tractarian Party and the Catholic Revival. He taught at St. Edmund's College, Ware; he then studied in Germany under Döllinger and in 1866 translated his work on primitive Christianity and the Church. An advocate 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 (Londra 1866). In 1870 he published in the Saturday Review his reflections on the First Vatican Council, in a vein rather opposed to the definition of papal infallibility. He subsequently drew close to Döllinger’s Old Catholics and attended the synod held by them at Bonn in September 1874, but later separated from them. In 1879 he brought to light an anonymous unionist work, Essay towards a Proposal for Catholic Communion, which had appeared in 1701 and was attributed to Joshua Basset. He also carried out extensive journalistic activity, as attested by the articles published 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). He also translated into English the second volume of Hefele’s Storia dei Concili.