HUNTINGTON, Ind. (CNS) — The Vatican has chosen Our Sunday Visitor to be the exclusive distributor of the North American English edition of L'Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper.
Our Sunday Visitor will begin distributing L'Osservatore Romano in August and also will provide order fulfillment, customer service, and marketing support for the newspaper. The focus will be promotion to individual Catholics, parishes, dioceses and other Catholic organizations.
“This is a partnership that works well for both entities,” said a July 16 statement from Greg Erlandson, president and publisher of Our Sunday Visitor. “Our Sunday Visitor is able to expand on our mission to serve the church in a very direct way and assist the Vatican in its mission at the same time.”
L'Osservatore Romano (Italian for “The Roman Observer”), founded in 1861, publishes papal discourses, texts and documents, reports on the events of the church and the pope, and provides news of cultural debates and international life from the perspective of the Catholic Church.
Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, Our Sunday Visitor publishes several periodicals, including the largest national Catholic newspaper, OSV Newsweekly, plus The Catholic Answer, The Priest, My Daily Visitor, Grace in Action and Take Out: Family Faith on the Go.
Our Sunday Visitor also has more than 1,700 Catholic book, pamphlet and textbook titles in print. In partnership with the Vatican publishing house Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Our Sunday Visitor has published more than 18 books by Pope Benedict XVI.
Established in 1912 by then-Father John F. Noll, a parish priest who later was named an archbishop, the Huntington not-for-profit organization noted that has grown to become the nation's largest supplier of offering envelopes, online giving, websites, parish and diocesan mailings, books, periodicals, curriculum, address management and stewardship services.
“What we are about these days is the same as what Archbishop Noll was about,” Erlandson said. “We are about responding to people's needs. We are about helping them to bring their Catholic faith to life. We are about helping them to see what is real and important in this life, and how it will connect them to the next.”
