On the demise of Our Sunday Visitor

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 17, 2025

There was a time when this would have been a big deal. Because OSV used to be a big deal. The reports of its demise in the NCR, and in OSV itself, barely touches on it. The closest you get is that passing reference to how OSV had a circulation of nearly one million in the 1950s. And how it has a couple other periodicals, in addition to its flagship publication, that will also cease to exist.

But even in the early 1990s—the point at which I started reading every Catholic periodical under the sun—OSV’s circulation was around 125,000. By comparison, the National Catholic Reporter—treated at the time as the Catholic paper of record by the New York Times and others—was about 50,000. The National Catholic Register—this is pre-EWTN ownership, even pre-Legion of Christ, we’re talking the Joop Koopman era—was something like 10 or 15,000.

And OSV had a lot more than just two other periodicals. As a publishing empire, Our Sunday Visitor was essentially the Catholic equivalent of Christianity Today. They had a whole family of magazines under one umbrella. Remember New Covenant, the magazine that catered specifically to the Catholic Charismatic Movement? That was OSV. The Pope Speaks? Don’t tell today’s critics of hyperpapalism, but that was the publication where you could almost-literally hang on every word the Pope wrote or spoke. Another OSV publication, if memory serves.

I subscribed to OSV for a few years in the 1990s. That was where I first read Mark Shea, Amy Welborn, Russell Shaw and others. I dropped it as the National Catholic Register under Tom Hoopes began to pick up steam. Compared to the Register, OSV was kind of boring.

The Register’s momentum continued under EWTN and Tom Wehner. OSV, meanwhile, remained relatively dull. I don’t mean to insult the writers, many of whom overlapped with the Register. It’s just that the overall package didn’t seem to work. OSV struck me as a Democrat-leaning-but-orthodox Catholic periodical. That’s a difficult combination to maintain, particularly as the Democratic Party in this country goes ever more mad. And there’s not much audience for it.

The National Catholic Reporter, by contrast, is a leftist dissident rag that, if authority in the Church was functioning one-tenth as well as it should, would have been put out of its misery years ago. But it has an audience.

Perhaps the takeaway here is that there appears to be no longer an audience for rational un-hyperbolic Catholic commentary that leans Democrat. If so, we are poorer for it. And for losing the OSV.