About Our Sunday Visitor

Our Sunday Visitor

Our Sunday Visitor was a national Catholic weekly newspaper published in Huntington, Indiana, by the publishing company of the same name, usually shortened to OSV. Its first issue was dated May 5, 1912, and for much of the twentieth century it was described as the most popular Catholic newsweekly in the United States, with circulation that rose from an initial print run of 35,000 copies to about half a million after the First World War and to more than one million in the early 1960s. The weekly newspaper ended in 2024, when it was replaced by a monthly magazine of the same name. That magazine was then discontinued in 2025, with its final issue announced for October. The OSV company itself continues in Huntington as a Catholic publisher and as the operator of OSV News, the news service launched at the start of 2023, so the history of the newspaper and the history of the company that grew from it are related but no longer the same story.

Founding by John Francis Noll in Huntington

The founder was John Francis Noll, a priest of the Diocese of Fort Wayne who had been ordained in 1898 and who became pastor of St. Mary's parish in Huntington in 1910. Noll had spent his early priesthood answering anti-Catholic speakers and literature in northern Indiana, and he had already written catechetical work, including the book that became widely known as Father Smith Instructs Jackson. In Huntington he acquired printing equipment — accounts of OSV's history recall that a local print shop and press became available at a nominal price — and used it first for parish pamphlets and bulletins responding to the demand for clear Catholic teaching in print.

That local work led directly to the newspaper. On May 5, 1912, Noll launched Our Sunday Visitor as a national weekly, priced at a penny a copy in its earliest years, with the stated purpose of serving the Church. He helped to found the Catholic Press Association in 1911, the year before the paper appeared, and he edited the Visitor for roughly the next four decades, becoming known to his staff by a familiar nickname drawn from his later rank. The paper's rapid growth — from 35,000 copies at launch to about 160,000 within a year — showed that a national Catholic weekly distributed through parishes filled a need that diocesan papers alone did not meet.

An Answer to Anti-Catholicism

The founding purpose was apologetic as much as journalistic. Noll was reacting in particular to widely circulated anti-Catholic publications of the period, including the paper called The Menace, and to a broader climate in which immigration had made Catholics a large and often distrusted minority. The early Visitor set out to explain Catholic teaching, help Catholic readers hold onto their identity, and answer charges made against the Church. In March 1913 the paper famously offered a large cash reward to anyone who could prove a set of anti-Catholic charges it listed; according to OSV's own history, the reward was never claimed.

Noll's long-running instructional column, in which a priest instructs a non-Catholic interlocutor, began in the paper in 1912 and was later collected as a book that sold in the millions. That pattern — material first tested in the weekly, then kept in print as pamphlets and books — became characteristic of the whole enterprise. The newspaper was never only a newspaper; from the start it was the front door to a pamphlet, book and parish-printing operation aimed at ordinary parishioners rather than clergy or scholars alone.

Growth into a National Catholic Institution

During the 1920s and 1930s the Visitor became a fixture of American parish life. It was distributed in many parishes as a supplement to, or in coordination with, a local diocesan paper, which helped explain how a paper edited in a small Indiana city could reach a national audience. Noll was given the title of monsignor in 1921, and in 1924 Pope Pius XI named him Bishop of Fort Wayne; he was ordained a bishop that June. Even as a bishop he remained closely identified with the paper he had founded, and OSV's Huntington plant was used to print newspapers for other dioceses that adopted his model of diocesan communication.

In January 1926 Noll introduced a diocesan edition for Fort Wayne, a local version of the Visitor that is the ancestor of the diocese's later paper, Today's Catholic, although that diocesan paper is no longer part of OSV. Noll directed the profits of the enterprise to religious, educational and charitable causes rather than treating it as a private business, a fact repeatedly stressed in accounts of his life. In 1953 Pope Pius XII raised him to the rank of archbishop ad personam, an honour given to a bishop personally rather than attached to an archdiocese. A stroke in 1954 ended his ability to edit the paper, and he died on July 31, 1956.

Editorial Concerns Across the Decades

The paper's editorial concerns followed the concerns of American Catholic life. Its earliest decades stressed defence of the faith and Catholic identity in a secularising society. In the 1940s it campaigned editorially against birth control, divorce and what it regarded as indecent literature and films. During the Cold War it warned strongly against communism and against Catholic membership in communist organisations; its fortieth-anniversary issue in May 1952 carried a prominent warning about secular trends in public education. Readers who study the run today therefore use it both as a news record and as evidence of how a mass-circulation Catholic weekly framed moral and political questions for its audience.

That breadth was also a commercial strength. Because the Visitor combined news, instruction, devotion and editorial comment in a form suitable to be handed out or sold in parishes on Sunday — as its name implied — it reached readers who might never have subscribed to a daily newspaper or a theological journal. Its editors after Noll kept that parish-centred identity even as the company around the paper grew much larger.

The Publishing Company Built Around the Paper

OSV expanded well beyond the weekly. In 1919 it added an offertory envelope service, which grew into a major part of the business; the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum, in profiling the company as a newspaper publisher, noted that OSV came to manufacture hundreds of millions of offertory envelopes a year for millions of households. The company published books, pamphlets, catechetical materials, bulletin inserts and periodicals for priests and parishes, including a magazine for priests that began under the title The Acolyte and continued as The Priest. Noll himself embraced successive communications technologies, moving from print into radio and then television work during his lifetime.

In 2009 OSV acquired Harcourt Religion from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, strengthening its position in Catholic school and religious-education publishing. By the 2010s the firm described itself not simply as a newspaper publisher but as a provider of parish resources, curriculum products, online giving systems and parish websites. The weekly, by then known for a period as OSV Newsweekly, remained the flagship public title, with Gretchen R. Crowe serving as editorial director for periodicals and, from August 2022, Dominican Father Patrick Mary Briscoe announced as editor of Our Sunday Visitor.

The Vatican Newspaper and the Launch of OSV News

Two developments in the paper's last dozen years point in different directions. In July 2012 OSV was chosen by the Vatican as the exclusive distributor of the North American English edition of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's own newspaper, and OSV continued to publish that English edition even after its own periodicals were discontinued. A decade later, when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops closed the domestic operation of Catholic News Service at the end of 2022, OSV announced that it would acquire the CNS operation's assets and launch a successor service.

OSV News began on January 1, 2023, with Crowe as editor-in-chief, publishing in English and Spanish online and taking over consultation access to the CNS digital archives for subscribers. In effect, the news-gathering function that the weekly had once performed for parish readers was separated from the printed weekly and rebuilt as a wire service for other Catholic outlets. That separation set the stage for what happened to the print title itself.

From Weekly Newspaper to Monthly Magazine, and Closure

In July 2024 OSV announced that the weekly newspaper would move to a monthly lifestyle magazine format, and from October 2024 readers received Our Sunday Visitor magazine instead of the newspaper they had known for more than a century. Editors presented the change as the result of research into what Catholic readers wanted from a print publication in a period when daily news had moved online and was now supplied by OSV News.

The magazine lasted about a year. In an August 14 announcement reported by OSV News, the company said it would end almost all of its periodical operations by December 2025 as part of a strategic shift in response to changing readership and the media landscape. Our Sunday Visitor magazine was listed among the discontinued titles, with its final issue in October 2025; OSV Kids, The Priest and The Deacon were also discontinued on schedules running from September to December. Chief executive Kyle Hamilton was quoted as saying that Archbishop Noll's founding vision would continue through OSV News, book publishing, curriculum and parish resources. For clarity, then, the newspaper founded in 1912 should not be described as still being published as a weekly: its print succession ended in 2025, while its publisher and its news service continue.

Place in American Catholic Journalism

Our Sunday Visitor's importance is a matter of scale, longevity and model. Few American religious papers reached a weekly circulation of about one million, and fewer still did so from a small city far from the major publishing centres, by relying on parish distribution. Its history also illustrates a distinctively Catholic institution-building pattern of the period: a diocesan priest creates a publication to answer hostile propaganda, the publication becomes a national business, and the proceeds and plant are then used to support diocesan papers, charitable causes and other Church media, including, in OSV's case, helping numerous dioceses establish newspapers of their own in the mid-twentieth century.

Historians of the Catholic press, of immigration and of twentieth-century American religion therefore treat the Visitor as a primary source in its own right. Its pages record how national Catholic opinion was presented to parish readers on education, family life, communism, war and public morality, and its business history records how religious publishing adapted, first to mass print, then to parish services and curriculum, and finally to a digital news wire.

Official Website

The official website of the publisher is osv.com. Through that site readers can reach OSV News, information about OSV books, curriculum and parish resources, and the company's account of its history since 1912. The news service itself publishes at osvnews.com and at the former Catholic News Service address, continuing in digital form the news mission that began with the Huntington weekly.