Our Sunday Visitor has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Like many of you, I first picked this publication up in the back of church — or rather, in my case, off of the literature table inside the west side door of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Spring Lake, Michigan. I was reading every issue cover to cover before I made my first Communion at St. Mary’s in May 1976.
My maternal grandmother, Monica Janasik, was born less than eight months before Father John Francis Noll published the first issue of Our Sunday Visitor on May 5, 1912. Grandma Monica told me stories of sending donations — a child’s equivalent of the widow’s mite — to help fund the building of the present-day Basilica of Sainte Anne de Beaupré outside Quebec City, after the previous basilica was destroyed by fire in 1922. She and her classmates had read about the fire and the fundraising in Our Sunday Visitor. Years later, Our Sunday Visitor would play a leading role in raising the money to complete the construction of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.
When I left home to study at Michigan State University in 1986, my parents sent me a gift subscription to Our Sunday Visitor, and that subscription followed me to graduate school at The Catholic University of America in 1990, where I walked past the bust of Archbishop Noll in the lower level of the basilica every day. If anyone had told me then that, three decades later, I would be the publisher of Our Sunday Visitor, I wouldn’t have believed him. But in 2024, looking back over the role that Our Sunday Visitor has played in my life, it sometimes seems as if all the roads I have traveled were leading me to our editorial offices in Huntington, Indiana.
Likewise, if someone had told me on June 12, 2017 — my first day at OSV — that I would eventually make the decision to transition Our Sunday Visitor to a monthly magazine, I would have told him that would never happen. But looking back over these last seven years, it seems clear to me that the path that led to the final issue (next week) of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper and the first regular issue (October 2024) of Our Sunday Visitor magazine is the only one we could have taken if we were to remain true to the vision that led Father Noll to found Our Sunday Visitor.
How we made this decision
Shortly after I arrived at OSV, and about a year before I became publisher, we conducted a survey of current readers and potential readers of OSV Newsweekly (as it was called then, and had been called for a couple of decades). The results were clear: Very few people were getting their news — even Catholic news — primarily from a weekly print publication, and that reality was reflected in years of declining subscriptions. Instead, you told us what you wanted: more inspirational columns; more stories on the saints, and on saintly men and women today; more articles on the beauty and truth of the Catholic faith that you could clip and give to your children and grandchildren, and especially to those for whom you pray every day because they are no longer practicing the Faith.
We began making those changes in 2019 and, later that year, returned the publication to its original name to reflect the shift in content away from news. We continued to push forward through 2020 and 2021, as COVID-related church closures — both temporary and, alas, some permanent — gutted our bulk sales to parishes. We confirmed everything that you had told us in 2018 with extensive research in 2022 and 2023 into the Catholic market, and we also found through that research that there was a great desire among younger Catholics for a Catholic magazine that would meet them where they are — struggling to hold on to their faith in a culture that is increasingly hostile to Christianity — and would draw them further up and further into the beauty and truth of Catholicism. We brought on a new editor — Father Patrick Mary Briscoe, OP — who had experience creating such a publication (in digital form) at Aleteia.org.
At the same time, we founded OSV News to continue to provide faithful Catholic coverage of current events, both in the Church and outside of it, through our diocesan clients and through 24/7 updates on the news service’s website, OSVNews.com.
Once my colleagues and I made the decision (and the OSV board of directors approved it) to change the format of Our Sunday Visitor to a monthly magazine, we spent months considering every detail, with an eye especially toward building up the Faith of younger Catholics so that they will remain in the Church that Christ founded, as well as helping those who are struggling with their faith — and even those who have already left the Church — to discover the answers they are seeking. The result is a publication very much inspired by the spirit of Archbishop Noll, because it continues the core mission that he established for Our Sunday Visitor: to bring Catholics closer to Christ by countering the destruction wrought by an anti-Christian culture with the goodness, truth and beauty of the Catholic Church.
Our hope for the future
When you receive the October issue of Our Sunday Visitor magazine in the next few weeks, I hope that you will be as proud as we are of what we have created, because we couldn’t have done it without your input and your ongoing support. And if you are proud of the new incarnation of this publication, I hope that you will consider giving gift subscriptions to Our Sunday Visitor this Christmas to those you love, and to those you pray for.
And please encourage your pastor to start a bulk subscription if your parish doesn’t have one already, or to increase the number of copies your parish receives. We need to put Our Sunday Visitor into the hands of every child preparing to make his first Communion and every teenager who is beginning to have doubts about his faith and every college student who is feeling pressure to leave the Church and every newlywed couple who want to love the Lord as much as they love each other but don’t quite know how. We need to reach every Catholic who doesn’t come to Mass as often as he or she should and help her to understand why the Faith that her parents and grandparents handed on to her is the answer that her heart is seeking. And we need every person who is in the pews every Sunday to become more engaged with the Catholic faith, to experience the depth of joy and wonder that only a relationship with Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life, can bring.
Most of all, we need to help turn the tide of secularism, to bring people back to the Church, to fill the pews of every parish, to reconnect people to the sacraments, to help the Church in the United States to rise up once again. For over a century, that has been the mission of Our Sunday Visitor. With your help and God’s grace, may it be Our Sunday Visitor’s mission for another century — and beyond.
