National leader
Organization and competence were chief among the talents that peers appreciated about Noll. Time and again, he was called on in positions of leadership at the national level. Noll was a key figure in organizing the National Catholic Welfare Conference — the precursor organization to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — and for many years held the position of its secretary.
As the challenges faced by the Church changed according to the times, Noll’s brother bishops called upon his courage. He was instrumental in forming the national Legion of Decency in 1933, a watchdog and lobbying arm of the American bishops which had the objective of forcing Hollywood filmmakers to produce more wholesome and decent productions. Catholics would have faced pain of mortal sin if they viewed certain films which the Legion screened and found morally objectionable. The Legion offerred their own ratings system. The idea was that filmmakers would want to avoid alienating nearly 20 million potential Catholic viewers.
With the backing of Our Sunday Visitor, Noll was instrumental in the construction of two landmarks in Washington, D.C. The first was the statue of “Christ, Light of the World,” which was initially at the headquarters of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. The idea began with a letter Noll received from a Kansas woman who lamented Christ’s absence amid all the statues and monuments in the nation’s capital. Noll threw his support behind the idea and attracted assistance and funding from the readers of Our Sunday Visitor. The statue’s title is shared with one of the hallmark documents of the Second Vatican Council. Although he died six years before it began, Noll embodied in advance so much of the Council’s work throughout his ministry, particularly in the areas of building up the laity and ecumenism.
Also, although he did not live to see its completion, Noll was a tireless advocate for completion of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, now a minor basilica. Started in 1920, the shrine’s construction came to a halt during the Depression and World War II. It stands today as the largest Catholic church in North America, in no small part thanks to Noll’s interest, support, and vision. Noll is remembered as the “apostle of the National Shrine,” and a bust memorializes him in the shrine’s crypt level.
On behalf of a grateful Church, Pope Pius XII honored Noll in 1953 by granting him the personal title of “archbishop.” Three years later, about one-third of America’s bishops attended his funeral, including two cardinals and then-Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, a Catholic media pioneer who used radio and television as much as Noll used the written word. Bishop Michael Ready, then chairman of the press department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, summed up Noll’s mission “to serve the Church” aptly when he wrote in memoriam: “The whole Church in the United States is greatly indebted to him. The fruits of his great works and zeal greatly enriched our country.”
Introduction
By Scott P. Richert
A few hundred feet from our house, and on the opposite side of North Jefferson Street, stands Saint Mary Catholic Church of Huntington, Indiana. An imposing red brick and stone structure whose congregation has been declining for years, Saint Mary’s might, in any other city and diocese, have been closed some time ago. The second Catholic church in a town of 17,000 souls, Saint Mary’s is only a block away from the first, Saints Peter and Paul, which marked its 175th anniversary in 2018.
Despite its struggles, Saint Mary’s remains open, and the Catholic community of Huntington — including those who belong to Saints Peter and Paul — will never let it close. For Saint Mary’s was the church where, on May 5, 1912, Father John Francis Noll first published the weekly newspaper Our Sunday Visitor, and founded the company of the same name.
Father Noll — later bishop of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, and later still an honorary archbishop in acknowledgment of his contributions to the Catholic Church in the United States and beyond — was, when he first came to Huntington, an unassuming pastor with a zeal for souls. Saint Mary’s was the largest parish he had ever served; his other assignments had been at parishes in the small towns and countryside of Northern Indiana. In those earlier assignments, he had experienced the vicious anti-Catholicism that was rampant in the Midwest (and other parts of the country) in the closing years of the 19th century and the opening decades of the 20th.
Father Noll had also recognized that the Catholic laity of Northern Indiana (and other parts of the country) were hardly prepared to defend the truths of the Catholic Faith, much less to evangelize those non-Catholic Christians who were falling prey to the lies being spread about the Catholic Church. A pastor has responsibility not only for the spiritual well-being of the Catholics within his parish boundaries but for the souls of all who live therein. That means he must combat, to the extent he is able, the spread of untruth and prevent those for whom he has responsibility from being led away from the fullness of truth found in the Catholic Church.
And thus the mission of Our Sunday Visitor — both the company and all of its publications — was, from the beginning, to draw all people to Christ in the fullness of the truth preserved and proclaimed by the Catholic Church. Like good pastors before and after him, Father Noll met everyone — not just in his writing, but in person — where he or she was, spiritually and intellectually. And that meant understanding all of the common objections to the Church’s teaching and responding to them in plain and simple language, so that Catholics could better understand and explain their Faith, and non-Catholics could grapple with the reality of the Catholic Faith, and not with the distortions, caricatures, and outright lies spread by others.
Father Noll’s earliest public defenses of the Catholic Church had taken place at Protestant revivals where he would challenge anti-Catholic speakers, point out their errors and falsehoods, and respond to their questions in return. So it is not surprising that he would choose a dialogue format when he began to offer written explanations of the Catholic Faith. The very first issue of Our Sunday Visitor featured such a dialogue on the front page, and as Catholics across the country, hungry for good Catholic publications, very quickly drove the circulation of Our Sunday Visitor from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands (it would peak in 1961 at one million copies each week), readers demanded more.
Father Smith Instructs Jackson was the result. Each of the Instructions found in the first three parts of the book was published in Our Sunday Visitor as a separate column. The relatively short length of each installment was a function of the medium, but the directness of the approach is pure Archbishop Noll.
Each Instruction takes the form of a dialogue between Father Smith, the pastor of a parish much like Father Noll’s own Saint Mary’s, and a Mr. Jackson, whose religious background is never specified, but who, through his remarks, we can tell is a Christian, though not a Catholic. Mr. Jackson has come to seek instruction from Father Smith in the Catholic Faith, and along the way, Father Smith builds up in Jackson the intellectual edifice of Catholicism, starting from the foundations. Much of the dialogue follows the basic structure of the venerable Baltimore Catechism, though Archbishop Noll rearranges the order of some of the lessons so that Jackson’s instruction culminates in the seven sacraments, the summit of the life of the Christian here on earth.
I keep mentioning Mr. Jackson as the target of Father Smith’s instruction, but both Jackson and Father Smith are, of course, fictional characters. To understand Archbishop Noll’s pastoral genius, we need to recall both the original audience and the original purpose of these dialogues. Our Sunday Visitor undoubtedly had some non-Catholic subscribers in the early years when then-Father Noll was publishing these pieces, but they were in a decided minority. Father Noll was writing, not to potential converts, but to a Catholic audience whose own understanding of the Faith was lacking. By using the person of Mr. Jackson, a non-Catholic whose knowledge of the Church was quite limited, Father Noll could engage and instruct his Catholic audience without making them feel foolish for their own lack of knowledge and understanding.