Church, Richard William (1815-1890)

English cleric. He was a friend of the Roman Catholic theologian John Newman and allied to the Tractarian party. In 1844, as junior proctor, he vetoed a proposal to censure publicly Tract 90 of Newman's Tracts for the Times. He founded the Guardian in 1846, and contributed to the Saturday Review.

Church became rector of Whatley, Somerset, in 1852 and was nominated by the prime minister William Gladstone to the deanery of St Paul's in 1871. An ardent high churchman, he deprecated extremes both of ritualism and of anti-ritualism and urged toleration. Among his many works, in addition to several volumes of sermons, are Civilization and Religion (1860), Spenser (1879), and Bacon (1884) for the English Men of Letters series; The Beginning of the Middle Ages (1877); and The Oxford Movement (1871).