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Throughout the war years, Bishop Noll's newspaper focused on fighting the war of moral armament on the home front. Evils such as birth control, divorce, indecent literature and movies were the target of editorials and features.

But the war in Europe was ever present, too. Many issues featured letters from soldiers. One, signed "Grateful Soldier," praised the work of Catholic nurses in preserving the faith in battlefront hospitals. Priests wrote columns of Tips for Soldiers. Many issues contained letters from chaplains at the front, filled with details of Catholic heroism. Editorials urged readers to "send your copy to a boy in the service."

At home, Catholics read about how Americans were backing the war effort. An Illinois bishop donated the bumpers from his car to the nation's scrap drive, painting their wooden replacements with aluminum. Bishop Noll praised such efforts. But the paper found fault with the general drift of the times: "Society adrift from God: If the world doesn't return to Him in spirit of repentance, it is doomed," read a banner headline in early 1942.

As the year came to an end, the bishop wrote: "The year that is coming to a close has probably been the saddest year in the history of our nation. Nearly 5,000,000 of the flower of our manhood . . . are either scattered over the globe to fight or . . . are in training."

With the Nazi war machine pressing forward relentlessly, Our Sunday Visitor editorialized: "Religious liberty is the most important of all freedoms, and it is important to keep this thought before the minds of all Americans during the period of the war."

Partial front-page of the newspaper during the war years

As the years passed, the Allies turned the tide overseas. But Our Sunday Visitor and its writers worried about the United States. We were losing the war at home, proclaimed one columnist. Birth control, divorce and godless communism were deliberately undermining the strength of the nation, our families.

When victory was achieved in 1945, the paper - which had remained remarkably free of the jingoism of the period - celebrated with the rest of the country, but feared that the final victory only laid the groundwork for a communist advance.

With the war behind us, Bishop Noll kept his eye on the situation around the globe. Editorials had denounced Franklin D. Roosevelt (and later his successor, Harry Truman) for selling out to the Russians, which in the paper's view doomed Eastern Europe to communist oppression. The development of the atom bomb, first used against Japan by the United States in 1945, opened a new and terrifying chapter in the history of humanity.

By 1947, the minds of post-war readers were on lighter topics. Popular Notre Dame quarterback Johnny Lujack answered the mail personally, the paper reported. But coverage of serious world problems remained. Pope Pius XII, for example, urged active participation in politics, saying Christians could not be passive in the midst of the ruins of war.

The cold war between Russia and the United States grew more intense. The paper stepped up attacks against communism. As early as November 1947, editorials warned Catholics to be wary of joining communist organizations that appealed to Americans' sense of love of country under the name patriotic - a theme to be repeated often during the next decade.

As the 1950s arrived, Catholicism entered what many considered at the time to be its golden age in the U.S., and Bishop Noll (named Archbishop Noll in 1953 by Pope Pius XII) entered his final years as editor. The 40th anniversary issue, published May 4, 1952, carried a banner headline showing that the paper had not stopped dealing with the topics of the day. It read, "They Do Not Want God in Our Schools: Secular Trend is Certain to Bring Disaster."

Partial front-page of the newspaper during the 1950s

Reflecting the growing interest in social justice in the Church in the 1940s and 1950s, that issue carried a flag advertising the paper as the popular National Action Catholic Weekly.

Our Sunday Visitor called for a day of national prayer as America began the Eisenhower years on Jan. 18, 1953. Headlines of the day warned readers that "There is a Hell," despite wishful thinking and the paper, in those pre-ecumenical times, noted that the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II would take place in Anglican Westminster Abbey, a church built by Catholics.

Reflecting its interest in family life and problems, a 1953 headline asked, "In your moviegoing, do you encourage stars who do not live morally?"

After four decades as editor, Archbishop Noll's health began to decline. A 1954 stroke finally led to his death on July 31, 1956. He died knowing a Church still revered for its steadfastness of devotion, ever-increasing vocations and rock-solid optimism, all reflected in the pages of his newspaper.

As America expanded, so did its fear of communism. The war against communism at home and abroad became a benchmark of Our Sunday Visitor in the 1950s. The paper never officially supported the anti-Communist crusade of Wisconsin's Catholic senator, Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy, but many of the paper's columnists lauded his actions.

Our Sunday Visitor and the decade of change.

Beneath the serenity and optimism of the Eisenhower era, major changes were afoot. The years 1958 through 1963 would change the face and the direction of the Church worldwide. Following the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958, Catholics rejoiced at the election of the jovial, easygoing Pope John XXIII, who soon surprised everyone with a call for the first ecumenical council since 1870. In 1960 a Catholic named John F. Kennedy became president. Optimism among Catholics ran high, as the Pope was expected to renew the Church, and Kennedy the United States. The pages of Our Sunday Visitor fairly shouted with exuberance of a new era that Catholics were expected to lead.

OSV's new office, 1962

The Jan. 31, 1961 issue of Our Sunday Visitor was the first to reach more than a million readers. Such unprecedented growth created the need for a new facility: A new 250,000-square-foot building was dedicated in 1960 and occupied in 1961. Three employees who had been original members of Father Noel's staff in 1912 were still working with Our Sunday Visitor when the firm celebrated the newspaper's golden anniversary in May 1962. Like the nation and the Church it covered, Our Sunday Visitor of the mid-to-late 1960s was a newspaper in transition.While America could celebrate landing a man on the moon by mid-1969, it had little else to celebrate back on earth. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 abruptly shattered the peace of the 1950s. What had begun as a small intervention in Vietnam cost Lyndon B. Johnson his presidency. What had begun as civil-rights progress for America's racial minorities - staunchly supported by the paper - ended with the burning of American cities in 1967 and the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. Robert Kennedy's death that same year increased the sense of national tragedy. American students began wholesale revolts against the American presence in Vietnam. Demonstrations, marches and tear-gas became commonplace. It was a grim time for America, reflected in grim commentary in the pages of Our Sunday Visitor.

The Church, too, was going through one of its most divisive decades. Early on, the Second Vatican Council convoked by Pope John XXIII had been the source of high hopes, as reported in numerous articles in Our Sunday Visitor. A reader poll found that 60 percent of the paper's readers favored having the Mass in English. Hopes ran high with an upbeat mood as each new Council decree was reported.

Pope John XXIII

Even the death of the Pope on June 3, 1963, had been the occasion for rejoicing about his accomplishments. Wrote Joseph Breig: "John XXIII made Catholics feel completely at home with their fellow man of other faiths. He made the laity realize that they had a voice and status in the Church that was their right. He relaxed tensions among Catholics themselves, making Catholics aware that they were not alone in possessing truth."

But what had begun in high hopes soon disintegrated into an atmosphere of factionalism and discontent. One writer asked, "Is this the Church of joy or of anger?" Catholics used to a lifetime of unchanging security suddenly faced numerous changes: Mass was no longer in Latin, the priest now faced the people, old hymns were abandoned in favor of folk Masses. Our Sunday Visitor wavered from whole-hearted endorsement of the renewal in the Church to questioning the direction such renewal was taking. It initially endorsed the anticommunist crusade against Vietnam, then turned against that ugly little war. It experienced a decline in readership as it alternately alienated the traditional and liberal Catholic reader.

On July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI issued an encyclical forbidding artificial contraception. Overnight, birth control became the hottest issue of debate among Catholics. OOur Sunday Visitor supported the Pope's decision; columnists asked why dissenting theologians should still be teaching at Catholic universities and seminaries.

The late 1960s witnessed the low-point for the Church in the United States: priests and sisters by the thousands left their ministry; the number of converts plummeted; vocations began to decline at an alarming rate; disagreement was widespread over whether priests and Religious should be involved in politics. Catechetical materials seemed to abandon much of the traditional faith, a development Our Sunday Visitor decried openly in print.

Pope Paul VI

The 1970s were the years when the newspaper that Father Noll founded regained its direction and stability. This was also the era in which the company that evolved around that newspaper grew so large it became necessary to split it into two separate entities: the not-for-profit Our Sunday Visitor's, Inc. and Noll Printing, formed in 1978 as a wholly-owned subsidiary.

The decade began with the editors determined to do battle with those who appeared to be attacking the Church. No longer was the enemy nativist anti-Catholics. The paper focused on what it saw as on those fomenting trouble within the Church structure: dissenting theologians, laissez-faire catechists, clergy and Religious who taught that doctrine was whatever you wanted it to be.

The Vietnam War would shut down in early 1973, but a new battle began. The U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion-on-demand on Jan. 22 of that year, marking the beginning of an endless crusade on the part of Our Sunday Visitor's to overturn a court decision that has led to the deaths of millions of unborn children.

As the decade progressed, the battles within the Church grew less strident. None had been truly concluded, but there was a growing consensus that the true enemy was outside the door - the forces engineering the attack on unborn (and born) human life, the escalating threat of worldwide nuclear catastrophe, the secularization of American society, political oppression of the Third World, and the poverty at home.

The paper became concerned with these issues, particularly with the growing secularization and indifference to religion in America. The death of Pope Paul VI in August of 1978 ended an era, but the newly elected pontiff, Pope John Paul I, survived only 34 days before the College of Cardinals was forced back into session to elect his successor. They chose Karol Wojtyla, the first Polish-born Pope, who immediately became a media superstar and the most-beloved Pope in centuries.

He also became the most-traveled pope ever. Our Sunday Visitor's documented the papal trips to Poland, Latin America and the U.S., with first-person reports from correspondents and photographers.

Our Sunday Visitor today

Today, Our Sunday Visitor's publishing and offering-envelope divisions employee more than 150 people. The publishing division has three main product lines: Religious periodicals, religious books and religious-education materials.

Our Sunday Visitor newspaper

In addition to the weekly Our Sunday Visitor, the periodical division puts together several other publications:

• - The Priest Magazine is a monthly magazine edited expressly for priests, seminarians and permanent deacons;
• - My Daily Visitor, begun in 1957, is a handy, pocket-sized bimonthly publication that provides daily meditations, prayers and reflections;
• - The Pope Speaks, founded in 1955, is a bimonthly publication which provides texts of important papal speeches;
• - The Catholic Answer, founded in 1987 and edited by Father Peter Stravinskas, is a popular bimonthly apologetics publication that answers readers questions about their faith;
• - Catholic Parent, founded in 1993, is Our Sunday Visitor's newest bimonthly publication. With its colorful format and short articles, it strengthens parents' knowledge of their faith while encouraging them to pass on that faith to their children;
• - Grace In Action, our newest publication, was founded in 2002. It is a stewardship resource intended to provide a stewardship message to parishioners every month, and it is distributed primarily as a weekly bulletin insert distributed by the parish.

Long known for its periodicals, within the past decade Our Sunday Visitor has also become one of the leading publishers of Catholic books. We offer more than 500 titles on a wide range of subjects: apologetics and catechetics reference, prayer, heritage and saints, family and parish materials. Since 1995, it has also been publishing digitalized materials on diskettes and CD-Rom disks, and have begun producing audiobooks.

The company's religious education line includes the first, and still the most popular, preschool religious education program in the country. It also includes sacramental-preparation programs for baptism, confirmation, first Communion, and first confession. A popular new product line is Parent Letters, a program that helps parishes to keep in touch with new parents for three years after their child has been baptized.

The first Catholic Vacation Bible School Program

Our Sunday Visitor also publishes adult religious-education materials and has recently produced a successful series of pamphlets called What the CHURCH Teaches on current issues such as cloning, stem cell research and terrorism. In 2000, Our Sunday Visitor was chosen by the U.S. bishops to be the primary distributor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Along with our publishing efforts, the Our Sunday Visitor Offering Envelope Division serves more than 6,000 parishes in this country and in Canada.

Samples from the Offering Envelope Division

Both divisions belong to a nonprofit corporation. Its earnings are disbursed to a variety of Catholic projects in the United States by the Our Sunday Visitor Institute. The institute is dedicated to combating religious illiteracy by working with those U.S. Catholic organizations listed in the Official Catholic Directory. The Our Sunday Visitor Institute is just one more way that the company lives up to Archbishop Noll's founding mandate "to serve the Church."

We are proud of our past, but the past is history. Committed to two goals: serving the Church today, and anticipating and meeting the needs of the Church of tomorrow ... we are busy developing new products - publications, religious education materials, religious books - to meet the evolving needs of a demanding Catholic market.

Our Sunday Visitor has grown beyond the wildest dreams of the young Father Noll. But some things have not changed.

We are still committed to communicating the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the teachings of the Church. Our Sunday Visitor is still working to encourage development of spirituality in the lives of our readers. Through our publications, our books and our religious-education materials, the company continues striving to bring about a greater understanding of the Church and its role in modern society.

We think Father Noll would be proud.