Commontide
Proper 19
Liturgical Color: White/Gold
The 15th Sunday after Trinity
O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Priest and Teacher of the Faith
Anglican Commemoration
Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford for fifty-four years and the leader who held the Oxford Movement together after Newman left it for Rome. Pusey gave his name to a whole party of the church, the "Puseyites," by insisting that baptism and the Eucharist were not bare signs but true channels of grace. Silenced for two years for preaching it, bereaved in his own house, he stayed an Anglican to the end, and the Anglo-Catholic revival was built on his refusal to leave.
Edward Bouverie Pusey was born in 1800 into an English gentry family and educated at Christchurch, Oxford, where he developed profound patristic scholarship through study of the Church Fathers. He was appointed Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford in 1828, a position he held for fifty-four years until his death. His scholarly reputation rested on genuine mastery of Hebrew, Old Testament criticism, and patristic theology.
Pusey was a central intellectual force of the Oxford Movement (begun by Keble and Newman, formally initiated 1833). The Movement sought to recover High Church principles, patristic theology, and sacramental understanding after the perceived theological laxity of the Georgian Church of England. Pusey authored Tract 67 on baptismal regeneration (1836), which became one of the most theologically substantial of the Tracts for the Times. The tract's careful articulation of baptism as sacramental rebirth became the target of Protestant opposition, and the controversy around it inadvertently gave the Movement's adherents their enduring name: Tractarians.
When John Henry Newman converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845—a spiritual earthquake for the Movement—Pusey became its natural leader. Rather than follow Newman into the Roman Church, Pusey chose to remain Anglican and devoted his remaining decades to articulating an authentically Catholic theology within Anglicanism. His major theological works include The Doctrine of the Real Presence (1855), a sophisticated defense of eucharistic realism; An Eirenicon (1865), an extended meditation on unity with the Roman Church; and numerous sermon collections reflecting patristic theology and devotional depth.
Pusey's scholarly and devotional legacy remained inseparable. He founded Pusey House at Oxford (opened 1884, shortly after his death) as a residence college and center for theological study, embedding his scholarly and spiritual commitments into institutional form. His correspondence with Newman, though the men diverged ecclesiastically, reflects deep mutual respect and shared patristic learning. Pusey's influence on Anglo-Catholic prayer, liturgical practice, and sacramental theology persisted well into the twentieth century.
In the Anglo-Catholic tradition, Pusey is remembered as the guardian of the Oxford Movement's liturgical and sacramental insights after Newman's defection. Anglo-Catholic parishes and seminaries shaped by Pusey House and his influence maintained high eucharistic theology, elaborate liturgical music, and patristic study. His refusal to follow Newman into Rome, combined with his intellectual rigor and pastoral care, established him as a model of the faithful theologian remaining within a broader church. In modern Anglicanism, Pusey represents the possibility of Catholic theology without Roman communion.