A legacy from Newman to Lambeth?

http://www.churchnewspaper.com/Editorial.aspx

[Church of England Newspaper] 28 Jul 2008--Evelyn Waugh, waspish convert to Rome and satirical novelist, once said that he could believe that the church was defined by communion with the Pontiff, or that the classical Protestant position could be right in that the church had gone off course and needed radical reform in the light of the Bible at the Reformation. What he could not believe as a theory was the Anglo Catholic view, that the true church was revealed as a small group of homosexual curates in 19th Century Oxford! That of course is a wicked remark, but it has a haunting resonance for this Lambeth Conference and its obsession with homosexuality and to a lesser extent women bishops.

The Oxford Movement was certainly coloured by the closest male friendships. Newman himself is buried next to his life-long priest friend Ambrose St John, and the Pope has, interestingly, ordered that he be exhumed as part of his canonisation. The poetry of Hopkins, another convert from the Oxford Movement, is pregnant with homosexual imagery, repressed or not. The Oxford Movement zealots would meet late at night, strip to the waist, and lash each other with whips - as penance for their sins, a custom that modern psychologists of sex would find most interesting. The Oxford Movement prospered and coloured the Anglican church with ‘catholic’ styles of worship and priesthood; the evangelicals gradually lost influence as the 19th Century wore on.