Our Sunday Visitor Institute

The leaders of Our Sunday Visitor Institute continue to draw inspiration from the simple four-word mandate given to us by our founder, Archbishop John Francis Noll: To serve the Church.

Priest, bishop, writer, editor, publisher, educator, speaker:  John Noll (1875-1956) was a man of boundless energy who made it his personal mission to educate American Catholics and non-Catholics alike about the Church and its teachings at a time when Catholicism was much maligned in the largely Protestant culture of the United States.

As ordinary of the Diocese of Fort Wayne (now the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend), Archbishop Noll became a major philanthropist, supporting Catholic causes all over the country, while continuing to speak on behalf of the Church whenever it was attacked. Few American Catholics have matched Archbishop Noll's loyalty to and love for the Church, or his spirited efforts to communicate what the Church stands for.

Archbishop Noll's vision gave rise to Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., one of the biggest and most diversified Catholic publishing houses in the country. The company publishes the weekly Our Sunday Visitor, which has long been the most widely circulated national Catholic newspaper in the United States. (Noll founded the paper in 1912, when he was the pastor of a small parish in Huntington, Indiana.) Our Sunday Visitor is also the nation's largest supplier of parish offering envelopes and other stewardship materials.

Through Our Sunday Visitor Institute, we ensure that monies generated by Our Sunday Visitor's activities are given back to the Church. The Institute's mission is to serve: to help bishops and pastors minister to the faithful, and to help ordinary Catholics live the true faith of the Church in their hearts and homes, in neighborhoods and workplaces, and in their lives as citizens.

Projects we help fund are a reflection of the Institute's singular and ongoing commitment to serve the Church through Archbishop Noll's legacy of faith and philanthropy.