July 18, 2024 // National

Our Sunday Visitor Launches New Monthly Magazine

Our Sunday Visitor

Local Publisher Switches Format to ‘Help Catholics Connect More Fully to Christ’By Katie Yoder

(OSV News) – Beginning in October, Our Sunday Visitor newspaper readers can expect to see something new in their mailbox: the Our Sunday Visitor magazine.

“We really think that this magazine is one of a kind, that there’s no other Catholic publication like it that helps someone integrate the whole of their Catholic life,” said Dominican Father Patrick Briscoe, Editor of Our Sunday Visitor. (OSV, a Catholic publishing company based in Huntington, Indiana, is the parent company of the Our Sunday Visitor publication and the OSV News wire service. Bishop Rhoades serves as Chairman of OSV’s Board of Directors.)

The new Our Sunday Visitor magazine is pictured in this undated photo. After years of extensive research by the OSV publishing company into what Catholic readers are looking for and the most effective ways to help them deepen their relationship with God and grow in faith, and OSV’s launch of the OSV News wire service Dec. 31, 2022, the Our Sunday Visitor publication is transitioning into a monthly lifestyle following more than 100 years as a newspaper in October 2024. (OSV News photo/Our Sunday Visitor newspaper)

After more than a century of publishing a weekly newspaper, Our Sunday Visitor is transitioning to a monthly lifestyle magazine. The decision comes after OSV’s years of extensive research into what Catholic readers are looking for and the most effective ways to help them deepen their relationship with God and grow in faith. It also follows in the wake of OSV launching the OSV News wire service on December 31, 2022, as part of its institutional commitment to provide excellent Catholic news content to newspapers, magazines, and other print and digital media outlets in the United States and around the world.

“Everything that we are doing is undergirded by mission,” said Gretchen R. Crowe, Editor-in-Chief of OSV News, who also serves as OSV’s Editorial Director of OSV periodicals. “It’s all coming from us trying to help Catholics connect more fully to Christ, help them connect more fully with their parishes, help them connect more fully with their faith.”

The new magazine format for Our Sunday Visitor will focus on inspiring Catholics to live out their faith every day. Bursting with sacred art and colorful imagery, the magazine promises to engage readers and accompany them in their faith journey with more than 60 pages of articles from Catholic voices such as acclaimed speaker, author, and podcaster Katie Prejean McGrady and Msgr. James Shea, author of “From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age,” conversations with Catholic celebrities such as Jonathan Roumie, spiritual encouragement, Scripture reflections, practical guidance, and inspiring stories from ordinary Catholics.

The inaugural issue, for example, centers on the National Eucharistic Revival – the U.S. bishops’ initiative to renew the Catholic Church by enkindling a living relationship with Jesus Christ in the holy Eucharist – and features Catholics transformed by the Eucharist, from a woman who had an abortion to a married couple.

New subscribers can get a one-year subscription (12 issues) at the introductory rate of $49.95, 53% off the cover price.

Father Briscoe, Crowe, and Scott P. Richert, Publisher of OSV, described the new magazine as a “monthly retreat” for spiritual renewal and sustenance.

“It’s a way for people to disconnect, to be able to put away their laptops and their phones – all their devices – and just sit down and spend time with God,” Crowe said.

The magazine continues the legacy of the newspaper, founded in 1912 by then-Father John Francis Noll, who later became the Bishop of Fort Wayne and then archbishop in 1953. The newspaper sought to serve Catholics amid a rising tide of anti-Catholic sentiment in the country – and to encourage them to live joyful, hopeful lives of faith.

By 1962, 50 years later, OSV was printing 1 million copies per week, Richert said. He called the magazine “firmly in the center of the mission that Archbishop Noll established when he founded Our Sunday Visitor.”

“Publishing a newspaper was the way in which he put his mission into action,” Richert said. “What we’ve done now is to bring that mission forward and to fulfill it more completely by providing people with the content they need in the format that they will actually use in 2024 and beyond.”

With the magazine, Our Sunday Visitor hopes to serve longtime readers and attract new ones, including millennials, the generation that describes adults born approximately between 1981-96. Among other things, the magazine will expand travel coverage, provide more interaction with beauty and sacred art, and develop editorial sections.

“Every Catholic wants an authentic presentation of the faith, something that grounds them in a lasting tradition, that helps us feel and think and look beyond the passing trends of our own day and helps us to connect with the Lord and to better love our Church,” Father Briscoe said.

The final issue of the newspaper will be for the last week in September, with the first issue of the magazine printed for the month of October. Readers can subscribe at oursundayvisitor.com/subscribe to receive the premiere issue.

Katie Yoder is a Contributing Editor for Our Sunday Visitor.