Anglo-Catholicism has always been associated in its early days with its great work with the poor...
"As the Anglo-Catholic slum priests brought the slum dwellers and the working class a taste of the beauty and the holiness of the kingdom of God in the midst of their squalor, and brought it out into the streets, liturgically and practically, they were posing a sacramental challenge to the ugliest expressions of industrialisation and capitalism. And in this, they restored a social conscience to Anglicanism."
"The worship of God in which they joined was, by the violent contrast to all else in their lives, at once a vindication of the other-worldliness of their faith and an implicit condemnation of the filthy environment amid which the social sin of an acquisitive and complacent ruling class had condemned them to live. So regarded, the ritual, which mainly centered round the Presence of our Lord amid surroundings more hostile than those of his very Nativity itself, was not 'empty' but full of a profound significance; not 'meaningless' but clamouring for an interpretation even more far-reaching than most of those who practised it knew how to provide."
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