─ because the Church of England wasn’t built, it was printed.

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Despite counting Salisbury Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and King’s College Chapel amongst its riches, the greatest treasures of the Church of England aren’t found on a map. Bricks played their part, but the Church of England was made out of words.

Anglicans have always had faith in the potency of words. Letters and creeds and confessions; homilies, sermons and hymns; liturgies and prayers; articles and tracts; statements and declarations and blessings: billions of words have served to form and reform the church’s faith. The pen is mightier than the spade.

But some words weigh more than others. The English Reformation sought to reground the Church of England in the very weightiest words. As its canons state:

“The doctrine of the Church of England is grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures.”

In 1538, Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch were commissioned to print The Great Bible. Published in 1539, it was the first authorised English Bible: the Word of God for the people of God. The original plan was to have it printed in Paris; but when the project was kicked out of France, Grafton and Whitchurch took printing into their own hands. Their work was more than business: it was driven by an evangelical commitment to publishing the gospel in all its fullness.

Their story tracks with the convulsions of the English Reformation. They were arrested with other evangelicals in 1540 for failing to attend confession, but they were given the exclusive patent to print church prayer books in 1541. They were imprisoned for most of April 1543 for printing heretical books, but their patent for printing prayer books was renewed in the same year.

Grafton and Whitchurch found the fresh support they needed with the accession of Edward VI. They printed Cranmer’s first Book of Homilies in 1547 and the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549; books that have shaped the Church of England’s common life and faith for 500 years. In 1553, Grafton printed The Forty-Two Articles of Religion ─ precursor to The Thirty-Nine Articles that definitively articulate the Church of England’s reformed-catholicity.

Whitchurch and his colleagues printed the English Reformation. With its emphasis on the power of the Word to establish the life of the Church and preserve it in every generation, their publications retain their potency. You only dig a church’s foundations once, but you mustn’t ever stop publishing them.

In 1836, Edward Pusey envisioned The Library of the Fathers. The first work was published in 1838, a new translation of St Augustine’s Confessions. In the preface, Pusey sought to allay any fears amongst its evangelical readers:

“The Fathers, then, are not, as some mistakenly suppose, equalled, much less preferred, to Holy Scripture, but only to ourselves, i.e. the ancient to the modern, the waters near the fountain to the troubled æstuary rolled backward and forward by the varying tide of human opinion, and rendered brackish by the continued contact with the bitter waters of this world, unity to disunion, the knowledge of the near successors of the Apostles to that of these latter times.

…The object then of recalling men’s attention to the Fathers, so far as relates to the establishment of doctrine or practice, is, subordinately to Scripture, to bring out the meaning of Holy Scripture, and, with respectful deference to our Church, to lead people to see the Catholic and Primitive character and meaning of the treasures which she possesses. To those who doubt whether there be any such thing as Catholic agreement… it can only be said, as of old time, “Come and see;” and we doubt not that they who have the candour of Nathanael, will, under the guise of flesh, see Him Whom they seek,─will, in His Church, see Him, Who promised to be with His Church, “even to the end of the world,” pervading by His Spirit men of different temperaments, intellectual powers, learning, speech, discipline or depth or acuteness of mind, but fitting them alike, by docility and holiness, to carry on His message to the Church, and keep and transmit to us that one good thing committed unto them.”

1840 saw the founding of The Parker Society. The society was named for Matthew Parker, whose biographer was quoted at the top of the society’s first annual report:

“He (Archbishop Parker) was a great collector of ancient and modern writings , and took especial care of the safe preservation of them for all succeeding times: that, by having recourse to such originals and precedents, the true knowledge of things might the better appear.”

“As he was a great patron and promoter of good learning, so he took care of giving encouragement to printing ─ a great instrument thereof.”

At the conclusion of the project in 1855, the society’s council described what its designs had been:

“It was not merely to cull out two or three celebrated productions: it was not to give the writings of a single author, or to select portions from a number: it had a wider range: it proposed to re-publish the entire mass of the printed works of the leading divines of our reformed church, who flourished in the age when the Roman yoke, which pressed so grievously upon our forefathers, was broken, and to add the pieces from their pens, if any such could be found, that were still lying in manuscript unpublished.”

In response, Edward Pusey, John Henry Newman and other members of the Oxford Movement were founding The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. The Rules of the Library state:

“That the Library consist of scarce and valuable Works, such as those of the Authors in the annexed List, maintaining and inculcating the Doctrines and Discipline of the Anglican branch of the Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

But despite sitting on the library’s committee, both Pusey and Newman confessed concerns about the project in their private correspondence.

Pusey, writing to Newman on January 8th 1841:

“I said, that I had been of the same mind once about limiting the works, having only certain definite authors, but that I had given it up, thinking it unadvisable and unpractical. For I doubt whether any of us, are sufficiently acquainted with our divines to be able to fix definitively upon the list of what it would be advisable to publish; for simply to say that the works of certain authors only would be published, would be nothing; since one might have Catholic and unCatholic works from the same writer…I should hardly be sorry, if the whole thing came to nothing; I never had any great affection for it, except as far as it would give the opportunity of bringing out two or 3 sets of works”

Newman replied four days later:

“As to the Anglo-Catholic Library, with you I never have been for it─under the circumstances, the Parker Society urging, the subscriptions being collected, and the first volume coming out, I suppose it must go on.”

Having written to Frederic Rogers in between, on January 10th:

“The ‘Anglo-Catholic Library’ is in a tottering condition. Copeland has given up the editorship because our divines do not go far enough for him… Meanwhile Parker has been diligently collecting the subscriptions, and the Protestants of London have started an Opposition Society which is to bring out cheaply Reformation works…I do not see my way at all. It is no plan of mine, and neither Pusey nor I was warm about it, but the question is, What is to be done under the circumstances?”

On the 14th January, Newman wrote to Charles Crawley:

“I suppose it is impossible to drop our plan altogether─first because subscriptions are paid─next because books are printed and printing─and lastly because the Parker Society will else inundate us with Protestantism pure and undiluted.”

The struggle was less in producing an Anglo-Catholic library as it was in producing a library that was at once authentically Catholic, Anglican, and anti-Reformation. As The Parker Society said at the conclusion of their final report:

“It is a curious fact, that the Parker Society publications alarmed the Roman Catholics of this country, and induced them─so it was stated in a prospectus─to establish a counter-society for re-printing the works of Romish writers against whom the Reformers had contended.”

The New Whitchurch Press continues in the particular tradition of the Library of the Fathers and The Parker Society: publishing and printing books that retrieve the reformed-catholic heritage of the Church of England.

(PS ─ prefer your Anglican retrieval devoid of context and selected at random? We do that too.)