The Young Catholic Messenger, 1885-1970, was the premier publication of George Pflaum of Dayton, Ohio, who also produced the more famous though not so long-lived Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, 1946-1972, subject of several other blog posts from The Archivist’s Nook. We thought highlighting the YCM would be a great way to start off the New Year, and also make an appeal for donations of missing issues, either print or digital copies, from the first forty years we need to complete our collection, especially the digital collection we are building online.

In the nineteenth century largely Protestant America was wary of the millions of Catholic immigrants coming to the United States. Parochial schools were not trusted to teach young Catholics to be proper Americans and many states passed constitutional amendments forbidding the use of tax money for their funding. Nevertheless, by the 1880s the American Catholic Church had a wide network of parishes and parochial schools to safeguard the religion and culture of Catholic ethnic groups. Most of the teachers were religious sisters and priorities in the classrooms beyond knowledge included piety and discipline. The growth of Catholic schooling naturally generated a Catholic educational publishing industry. The YCM was the inaugural publication of the Pflaum Publishing Company, which created religious and civic reading materials distributed to students in the Catholic parochial schools that later included the Junior Catholic Messenger, Our Little Messenger, and the aforementioned Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact.

In the YCM’s early years the issues tended to be shorter and more literary in focus, while later on the number of pages per issue increased as more news and current events were included.  The YCM was published during the calendar year, January to December, through 1925, going from twenty-four issues a year to thirty-two. In 1926 they published a shortened volume, number 42, January – June, with twenty-four issues (again). This was followed by volume 43 with forty issues and aligned to the academic school year, September 1926 – June 1927. This was cut back to May in 1934-1935 and the issues numbers steadily declined until publication ceased in 1970, going down to thirty-eight issues in 1931-1932, thirty-seven in 1934-1935, thirty-six in 1940-1941, thirty-five in 1943-1944, thirty-four in 1944-1945, thirty-three in 1957-1958, thirty-two in 1961-1962, and only twenty-eight in the last year of 1969-1970.

The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives of The Catholic University of America currently needs access to Young Catholic Messenger volumes 1-6, 1885-1890; volumes 8-24, 1892-1908; volumes 26-28, 1910-1912; and volumes 32-40, 1915-1925. We are open to receiving individual issues as well as full volumes for donation, loan for scanning, or links to copies scanned elsewhere. We are also willing to negotiate any reasonable fees required. For more information, please contact us via email at lib-archives@cua.edu.