About The Catholic Standard and Times

The Catholic Standard and Times

The Catholic Standard and Times was the official newspaper of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia for 117 years, from its first issue on 7 December 1895 until it ceased publication in July 2012. It was formed by the merger of two earlier Philadelphia Catholic papers, the Catholic Standard, published from 1866, and the Catholic Times, published from 1892, and it is often rendered, as on its own later masthead, The Catholic Standard and Times with an ampersand — The Catholic Standard & Times. For most of its life it was a weekly, published fifty times a year, delivered at its mid-twentieth-century peak to more than 100,000 homes, and recognised with numerous awards from the Philadelphia Press Association and the Catholic Press Association, of which it was a member. Its ending — reduced to a monthly in 2011 and discontinued the following summer amid an archdiocesan financial crisis — closed one of the longest runs of any diocesan newspaper in the United States. Its digital successor, CatholicPhilly.com, continues as the archdiocese's official news website.

Two Papers Become One: The Standard, the Times and 1895

The newspaper's lineage reaches back to the years just after the Civil War. The Catholic Standard, the official organ of the Diocese of Philadelphia, was published by Wm. Pepper and Co. from 6 January 1866 to 30 November 1895. A second paper, the Catholic Times, ran from 3 December 1892 to 23 November 1895. The two were united, and The Catholic Standard and Times published its first issue on 7 December 1895, volume one, number one in the numbering preserved by library catalogues, which record the paper as a weekly formed by the union of the Catholic Standard and the Catholic Times, both of Philadelphia. A 1910 Catholic dictionary entry summarised the young paper in a line: the official weekly newspaper of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, founded as the Catholic Standard in 1866, combined with the Catholic Times under its present name in 1895, with a circulation then of 45,525. That 1866 root matters to the paper's own memory of itself: when it was closed in 2012, commentators dated its service to Philadelphia Catholics from 1866, and its modern successor still traces the paper's origins to that year, even though the combined title itself dates from 1895.

The Official Voice of a Growing Archdiocese

Philadelphia's Catholic population grew enormously across the paper's lifetime, through immigration, parish building and the expansion of Catholic schools, and the Standard and Times was the connective tissue of that world. As the archdiocese's official newspaper it carried the archbishop's voice, diocesan announcements, parish and school news, and — crucial to its texture — global reporting supplied by wire: its pages were heavily supplemented, as the archivists who later digitised it note, by dispatches from the National Catholic Welfare Conference News Service, the predecessor of the United States bishops' Catholic News Service. The result was a paper that placed a Philadelphia parish picnic and a Vatican development in the same weekly bundle, and taught its readers to see their local church as part of a worldwide one. It published fifty times a year until its last few years, pausing only for the week of the Fourth of July and the last week of the year. Notably, it did so without a subsidy: the newspaper received no funding from the archdiocese across its 117 years, and enjoyed no mandated circulation through parishes. Its revenues came from advertising and from parish and home subscriptions, voluntarily taken — a financial model that sustained it handsomely in the fat years and exposed it completely in the lean ones.

The Foley Years: A Journalist-Priest in the Editor's Chair

The paper's most distinguished editor was John Patrick Foley, who served as its editor from 1970 to 1984 and went on to become a cardinal. Foley was a Philadelphia priest, ordained in 1962, who had served in the 1960s as the paper's assistant editor and Vatican correspondent while studying in Rome, and who held a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University alongside his Roman doctorate in philosophy. His fourteen years in the editor's chair covered some of the most important events in the modern history of the Philadelphia church: the Forty-first International Eucharistic Congress held in Philadelphia in 1976, the canonisation of St John Neumann in 1977 and the visit of Pope John Paul II to Philadelphia in 1979 — the archdiocesan record gives the visit under Foley's tenure, during the years when he was also co-producer and co-host of the Philadelphia Catholic Hour on radio station WFIL, from 1966 to 1974, and a faculty member at St Charles Borromeo Seminary. In 1984 Pope John Paul II named Foley an archbishop and president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, the Vatican's media office, a post he held for twenty-three years; for twenty-five years American television viewers heard his commentary on the Christmas Midnight Mass from St Peter's Basilica. His formation had happened, in large part, at the Standard and Times, and later commentary remembered the paper under his era as considered one of the best Catholic newspapers in the country.

A Succession of Trained Editors

Foley's pattern — a priest-editor trained in Rome and then in American journalism — was deliberately repeated. His successor from 1984, Father David W. Givey, had graduated in philosophy from the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas in 1977 and taken a journalism degree at Temple University in 1983. The next editor, Father Paul S. Quinter, appointed at thirty-five, had earned a doctorate in theology at the Gregorian University in Rome in 1987 and a master's in journalism at Columbia in 1988. A contemporary profile of the paper's editors explained the system behind the pattern: Cardinal John Krol, Philadelphia's archbishop, believed in having trained people in the wings to fill important posts, and sent promising priests first to Rome for doctoral studies and then to journalism school. The result was a diocesan weekly edited, across successive generations, by men holding doctorates and journalism master's degrees — a level of professional formation unusual in the diocesan press, and one reason the Standard and Times collected the press awards it did from both the Catholic Press Association and the secular Philadelphia Press Association.

The Paper as a Record of Catholic Philadelphia

Historians and archivists now treat the paper's run as one of the richest surviving records of American Catholic life, which is why its preservation has attracted sustained funding. The Catholic News Archive, maintained by the Catholic Research Resources Alliance, has made fully searchable scans of the paper freely available, imaged from microfilm. The American Catholic Historical Society, the nation's oldest Catholic historical association, allocated 10,000 dollars to digitise issues from 1944 to 1962 — the post-war years when Catholic life surged in the Philadelphia area, with rapid growth in parishes and schools — adding to Vatican II-era issues, from during and just after the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965, that had been included when the archive launched in 2016. A later grant added fourteen more years, 1916 to 1930. The archive's own description of what those pages contain reads like a syllabus of early twentieth-century Catholic America: Catholic involvement in the First World War and responses to the 1919 influenza epidemic; brick-and-mortar institutional growth; Catholic reactions to women's suffrage, prohibition and other political questions; responses to renewed nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment; and the everyday community and social life of diverse Catholic communities. Cait Kokolus of St Charles Borromeo Seminary called the digitisation a huge leap forward for the entire Philadelphia community and for anyone interested in the history of the United States and the Church.

Decline: Circulation, Revenue and the Cuts from 2007

The paper's final decade followed the trajectory of the American newspaper industry, sharpened by its voluntary-subscription model. It had been delivered to more than 100,000 homes in the mid-twentieth century; by the end, paid circulation had fallen to about 31,000. Its last editor, Matthew Gambino, put the problem plainly when the endgame began: at 31,000, the paper was reaching just seven percent of households in the archdiocese. Advertising followed circulation down. The paper received no archdiocesan subsidy and depended on parishes that voluntarily subscribed their parishioners and on individual home subscribers, both of which dwindled year by year; as circulation and advertising fell, costs were cut by every means available from 2007 onward, and the newspaper came to rely on its investment reserves. Those reserves were, by its successor's account, the only thing standing between the paper and closure in its final years — and they were finite.

Monthly Publication and Phaith Magazine, 2011

In March 2011 the archdiocese announced the paper's last reorganisation: after 116 years as a weekly, the Catholic Standard and Times would convert to a monthly publication, and a new glossy magazine, Phaith, would be launched alongside it. The changes took effect in September 2011. The reasoning, set out for readers at the time, split the old weekly's mission in two: Phaith would carry feature stories of local Catholics living their faith, together with material on family life and culture, distributed free to a projected 350,000 homes — most of the archdiocese's roughly 400,000 parish-registered households — as an instrument of evangelisation aimed at active and inactive Catholics alike; while the Standard and Times, in a larger, bolder typeface its readers had requested, would continue the news and commentary its subscribers relied on, once a month instead of weekly. Subscription mechanics were adjusted to honour what readers had paid for: a thirty-dollar subscription had bought forty-six issues, and subscribers were promised their full count of issues at the new frequency, with a new price of fifteen dollars for twelve issues thereafter. Fiscal realities — the high cost of postage and the dearth of advertising revenue due to low circulation — were stated frankly as the reason a weekly schedule could no longer be sustained.

Closure in July 2012

The reprieve lasted less than a year. On 21 June 2012 Archbishop Charles J. Chaput announced a sweeping reorganisation of the archdiocesan administration, driven primarily by economics: planning for the 2013 budget, administrators faced a shortfall of seventeen million dollars between expected revenue and expenses, a figure that did not include more than eleven million dollars in legal fees over the previous year. Consolidations and eliminations across the administration cost more than forty employees their jobs. Included in the changes was the discontinuation of The Catholic Standard and Times: after 117 years, the June 2012 issue was the last. Phaith magazine, which had published ten issues since the previous September, suspended publication at the same time. The paper's own post-mortem, published by its successor, is unsparing about the arithmetic: with circulation and advertising revenue unable to offset costs that had been dramatically reduced by every means available since 2007, the newspaper had exhausted its investment reserves in June 2012; the financial condition of the archdiocese precluded a permanent subsidy, and the parishes could not support a subscription mandate. The only prudent, immediate course, it concluded, was to cease publishing. A reduced staff would continue publishing Catholic news on the paper's website, CatholicPhilly.com, with an email newsletter planned — and an archdiocesan editorial marking the closure noted the timing's wider context, a church whose Philadelphia Mass attendance Archbishop Chaput put at eighteen percent, and a readership angry, as he conceded, about the clergy abuse scandals and a lack of financial transparency.

CatholicPhilly.com: The Digital Successor

The paper died; its newsroom's function did not. CatholicPhilly.com, which had been the Standard and Times' website, remains active as the official news website of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and describes itself as the digital successor to the newspaper, publishing daily in English and Spanish for the Philadelphia media market. Archbishop Nelson J. Pérez is listed as its publisher, and it continues to invite news tips, run the local, national and world Catholic coverage the weekly once carried, and distribute a free weekly email newsletter. The transition the paper had resisted in print — from a paid weekly bundle to a free digital service — was completed by its closure: the successor reaches readers the print paper, at seven percent of households, no longer could, without the printing and postage costs that had exhausted the weekly's reserves. Phaith, too, continued briefly in digital form at PhaithMagazine.com under editor Matthew Gambino, carrying the print magazine's columnists and faith features online after its June 2012 suspension.

Legacy

The Catholic Standard and Times leaves two legacies. The first is archival: 117 years of weekly issues, from the combined paper of December 1895 through the Vatican II era to the monthly of 2012, preserved on microfilm, held by libraries including the University of Notre Dame's Catholic newspaper collection, and increasingly digitised and searchable through the Catholic News Archive — a primary source for the history of one of America's largest archdioceses and, through its wire copy, of world Catholicism as Philadelphia read it. The second is institutional. For over a century the paper showed what a diocesan newspaper could be at its best: officially the archbishop's organ, yet edited by professionally trained journalist-priests, decorated by secular as well as church press associations, and financially independent of the institution it served — a combination that gave it both its distinction and, when circulation collapsed, its vulnerability. Its closure in 2012, alongside the simultaneous suspension of the magazine meant to succeed it, marked the end of print as the Philadelphia church's medium of record, and the beginning of the digital succession that CatholicPhilly.com still carries on.