About The Catholic Telegraph

The Catholic Telegraph

The Catholic Telegraph is a Catholic publication based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and published by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati. It is widely described as the first diocesan newspaper in the United States and as the second oldest Catholic newspaper in the country. Its first issue appeared on October 22, 1831, and it has been published continuously since then, apart from a brief interruption in 1832. That long continuity, through changes in format, frequency, and technology, is the central fact of its history.

Founding in Cincinnati in 1831

The Telegraph was established at the direction of Bishop Edward Fenwick, a Dominican and the first bishop of Cincinnati. When the paper began, the diocese was only about ten years old and covered a vast territory that at different points reached from Kentucky toward northern Michigan. Fenwick saw a newspaper as a practical way to communicate with Catholics scattered across that region and to answer the anti-Catholic attacks that were common in American public life in the early nineteenth century. His letters, sermons, and reports were prominent in the early paper, reflecting its role as an official diocesan voice as well as a news publication.

The name itself is a reminder of the paper's age. Its use of the word telegraph predated the practical electric telegraph by more than a decade. In 1831 the word suggested rapid communication in a general sense, not the later device. The first editor soon had to suspend publication briefly in the following fall while caring for victims of a cholera outbreak, an episode the archdiocese's own history records as part of the paper's earliest years.

Early Reach Beyond Cincinnati

Although rooted in Cincinnati, the Telegraph was not only a local paper in its early decades. As one of the first Catholic newspapers in the United States, it was sold in cities across the middle of the country and beyond, including Louisville, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. That distribution reflected both the size of the Cincinnati diocese in its early form and the scarcity of Catholic publications at the time. Readers in places without a Catholic paper of their own could look to Cincinnati for news, instruction, and apologetics.

From 1849 to 1861 the paper, then appearing as The Catholic Telegraph and Advocate, also served as the official newspaper of the Diocese of Louisville. That arrangement illustrates how diocesan boundaries and publishing arrangements were still fluid in the mid-nineteenth century, and how a stronger paper could serve a neighboring diocese for more than a decade.

Financial Crisis and Reader Rescue

Early in the episcopate of John Baptist Purcell, who succeeded Fenwick and led Cincinnati for many decades, the Telegraph fell into serious financial difficulty and its closure appeared likely. In response, large numbers of ordinary Catholics formed the Roman Catholic Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, whose primary purpose was to rescue the paper. The effort succeeded.

The episode became well known in the American Catholic Church. A similar organization patterned on the Cincinnati society was later established in Baltimore. For historians of the Catholic press, the rescue matters because it showed an early model of lay support for a diocesan newspaper, at a time when such papers depended heavily on subscriptions and on the willingness of readers to treat the publication as a shared institution rather than a purely commercial product.

A German-Language Sister Paper

From 1837 to 1907 the Telegraph had a German-language sister publication, Der Wahrheitsfreund. It was the first Catholic periodical published in German in the United States. Its long run reflected the large German-speaking Catholic population in Cincinnati and in the Ohio Valley during the nineteenth century, for whom an English-only paper would not have been sufficient.

The existence of a German sister paper for seventy years also places the Telegraph within the immigrant history of American Catholicism. Cincinnati's Catholic community included many German families, and the archdiocese served them in their own language in print as well as in parishes and schools. When Der Wahrheitsfreund ended in 1907, that era of bilingual diocesan publishing in Cincinnati had largely passed.

The Civil War Era

During the American Civil War the Telegraph took a position on slavery and union that historians have described as difficult and, at times, contested. Under Archbishop Purcell, the paper opposed slavery in principle while also opposing secession and, initially, immediate abolition, citing what Purcell called prudential reasons against abolition. Its antislavery stance contrasted with that of some other Catholic newspapers, notably the New York Freeman's Journal.

The paper condemned a New Orleans Catholic newspaper, Le Propagateur Catholique, for carrying an advertisement offering an enslaved person for rent or sale, arguing that one did not need to be an abolitionist to condemn such a practice. At the same time, in April 1861, as the war began, its calls for accommodation with the slave states were strong enough that a Unionist, abolitionist bishop criticized its editorial line as aiding treason. By 1863, however, the Telegraph had become the first prominent Catholic newspaper to advocate emancipation. That sequence — opposition to slavery, caution about abolition, criticism from both directions, and then support for emancipation — makes its Civil War record a frequent subject in studies of Catholic opinion during the war.

Twentieth-Century Changes and the Register Years

In 1937 the paper renamed itself The Catholic Telegraph Register and joined the Denver-based Register System of Newspapers, the network that later became associated with the National Catholic Register. That affiliation lasted until the Archdiocese of Cincinnati assumed direct control of the Telegraph in 1961.

The return to archdiocesan control reasserted the paper's identity as the official publication of the Cincinnati archdiocese rather than part of a national chain. Throughout the twentieth century it remained a weekly newspaper, covering parish life, archdiocesan ministries, schools, national and world Church news, and public affairs from a Catholic perspective. The archdiocese's digital collections description notes that its mission expanded from its original task of explaining and defending Catholic teaching to reporting on the growth and activities of the archdiocese, parish life, ministries, church councils, and American and worldwide politics, along with apologetics and literary contributions.

From Weekly Newspaper to Monthly Magazine

The most visible modern changes have been to format and frequency. The paper moved from broadsheet to tabloid format in the 2000s. It launched a new website and a Twitter account in March 2009. In September 2011 it switched from weekly to monthly publication. Beginning with its October 2013 issue it moved toward a less news-centered mode, with more feature and formation content.

In June 2020, after 188 years as a newspaper, the Telegraph began publishing in magazine format, with each issue focused on a different theme. It is now described as a monthly magazine, published for the archdiocese's congregants across 19 counties in Ohio, including the Cincinnati and Dayton metropolitan areas. Circulation reported for 2020 was about 145,000, and later archdiocesan appeals describe the magazine as reaching about 145,000 households and being kept free for them. Its publisher is listed as the Archbishop of Cincinnati, and its editor in recent mastheads has been Jessica Rinaudo, with digital staff supporting its online operation.

Digital Presence and Archives

The Telegraph's website, thecatholictelegraph.com, publishes news daily even though the print edition is monthly, and the archdiocese reports that it reaches roughly 30,000 readers per month. In 2019 the paper added online offerings named The Daily Divina and the Weekly Ember, extending its devotional and news content beyond the monthly issue.

For researchers, the paper's archive is unusually accessible. The Catholic News Archive provides free full-text access to thousands of issues from the first issue in 1831 through the end of 1885, digitized by the Catholic Research Resources Alliance with support from the State Library of Ohio and the Hamilton County Genealogy Society. The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County also holds early issues, and the archdiocese notes that the first hundred years have been digitized through the Catholic News Archive and other newspaper archive services. Scholars and historians use the run regularly for local, national, and Church history.

Place in American Catholic Journalism

The Telegraph's significance rests on three connected claims, each well documented: it was the first diocesan newspaper in the United States, it has survived with only a brief early interruption since 1831, and it served for long periods as a paper of record not only for Cincinnati but for Catholics well beyond Ohio. Early Catholic papers such as the United States Catholic Miscellany, founded in Charleston in 1822, and Boston's Jesuit, or Catholic Sentinel, founded in 1829 and continuing as The Pilot, are older in origin, which is why the Telegraph is carefully described as the oldest diocesan paper and the second oldest Catholic paper overall rather than simply the oldest Catholic paper.

Two scholarly studies devoted entirely to its editorial opinion — covering 1831 to 1871 and 1871 to 1921, both completed at the Catholic University of America in the 1940s — testify to its value as a source for how American Catholics responded to politics and public affairs over nearly a century.

Official Website

The official website is thecatholictelegraph.com. Readers there can find daily news from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, current and past magazine content, parish and schools coverage, and information about subscribing to or supporting the monthly magazine. The site serves the same 19-county archdiocese as the print edition, covering southwestern and west-central Ohio including Cincinnati and Dayton.