About Us

Pusey House was opened in 1884 as a memorial to Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), Regius Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church, who was for forty years a figurehead of the Oxford Movement and its de facto leader after Newman's conversion in 1845. According to its founding documents, the House exists to promote theological study and holiness of life, and to provide spiritual counsel and comfort to members of the University.

Today, the community of Pusey House embraces not only members of the University, but all who avail themselves of the work and ministry of the House within the Church of England and beyond. In working to renew the Church of England’s Catholic life and witness, Pusey and his colleagues also sought to understand and respond to the most profound needs of society in their day. One of the basic principles of the Oxford Movement was that the life of the mind and the life of prayer belong together, and that holiness of life overflows in ministries of love and service. In different ways and in a different context, Pusey House today seeks to embody these founding principles.

Oxford marmalade
And a thin volume of Lowes Dickinson
But half-engaged my thoughts till Sunday calm
Led me by crumbling walls and echoing lanes,
Past college chapels with their organ-groan
And churches stacked with bicycles outside,
To worship at High Mass in Pusey House.
Those were the days when that divine baroque
Transformed our English altars and our ways.
Fiddle-back chasuble in mid-Lent pink
Scandalized Rome and Protestants alike:
"Why do you try to ape the Holy See?"
"Why do you sojourn in a halfway house?"
And if these doubts had ever troubled me
(Praise God, they don't) I would have made the move.
What seemed to me a greater question then
Tugged and still tugs: Is Christ the son of God?
Despite my frequent lapses into lust,
Despite hypocrisy, revenge and hate,
I learned at Pusey House the Catholic faith.
Friends of those days, now patient parish priests,
By worldly standards you have not 'got on'
Who knelt with me as Oxford sunlight streamed
On some colonial bishop's broidery cope.
Some know for all their lives that Christ is God,
Some start upon that arduous love affair
In clouds of doubt and argument; and some
(My closest friends) seem not to want his love-
And why this is I wish to God I knew.

An excerpt from 'Summoned by Bells', John Betjeman.