Perhaps the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, is the most interesting parish in all of the Anglican Communion? You ask how is it more important than St. Paul's and the Abbey down in London? Ponder these facts and reconsider its place in the annals of Christian history.
1. Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer were all tried here before Mary Tudor had them burned at the stake.
2. John Wesley, in his early days as a priest, preached some of his most stirring sermons here. 'Almost Christian' was so stirring that he was never invited back!
3. John Henry Newman was vicar here in 1828.
4. From its present pulpit, John Keble preached his famous 'Assize Sermon,' which is now regarded as the official beginning of the Oxford Movement. Thank God for Keble and his witness to the Church. It is the zeal of the likes of Keble and Newman that Anglo-Catholicism must reclaim and propagate in an increasingly skeptical post-modern world.
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