What is the purpose of the Oxford Movement?

The Oxford Movement originally started out as a campaign to resist church reform. The Church of England, the established Church, was generally regarded as being a department of state. As such, politicians had the power to decide how it was run. In 1832 the Whigs came to power. Among other things, they were sympathetic to Dissenters, that is those Protestants such as Methodists and Presbyterians who weren't part of the Church of England. They were also strong believers in Church reform, and to this end set about the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland. To many this seemed like a perfectly reasonable measure to apply to a country as overwhelmingly Catholic as Ireland.
To the Whigs' opponents, however, this was the thin end of the wedge. They strongly believed that disestablishment in Ireland would soon be followed by disestablishment of the Church of England, undermining its ancient rights and privileges. In Oxford, the bastion of Anglican Toryism, a group of clerics under the redoubtable leadership of John Henry Newman, set about organizing a formal opposition to the general drift of the Whigs' church reforms.
However, the main focus of the Oxford Movement soon became more overtly theological in nature. The Tractarians, as the the leading lights of the Movement became known, began to examine more closely the status of the Church of England as a state church from a theological standpoint. To that end, they saw the Church of England no longer as simply a department of state which could be meddled and interfered with by politicians, but as the genuine inheritor of the Apostolic tradition, a direct descendent of the early Christian Church. The Tractarians no longer simply wished to defend the Church from Whig reforms; they wanted to reform it from within, transforming the Church's liturgy, administration and, most importantly of all, its spiritual life.
These ideas were expressed in a series of publications called "Tracts for the Times," (Hence the name "Tractarian" to describe a supporter of the Oxford Movement) which proved enormously controversial. Many of the theological ideas contained in the tracts, particularly in relation to personal piety and ecclesiastical reform, were regarded by their opponents as being dangerously close to Roman Catholicism. At that time, Catholicism was still widely feared and distrusted in England, so the taint of "Romanism" was potentially fatal to the Tractarian cause.
The final straw for the Oxford Movement's opponents came with the publication of "Tract 90," written by Newman, and which stated that the foundational Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England were compatible with the Catholic faith. This expressed one of the most fundamental convictions of the Oxford Movement: that the Church of England was basically a Catholic, rather than a Protestant church.
To many people, and not just its die-hard opponents, the Tractarians had gone too far. Newman was ordered by his bishop to cease publication of the Tracts, and this was the beginning of the end for the Oxford Movement. Newman, along with a number of other leading lights of the Movement, subsequently converted to Catholicism, thereby tacitly admitting the truth of the anti-Tractarians' position: that the Church of England as it stood was most emphatically not a Catholic church.
 
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