I was looking at those Young Catholic Messenger magazines from the 50s that I found a couple of weeks ago. I found the cover art to be pretty beautiful, so I wanted to share them with you.
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These four are my favorites. The amount of detail in these drawings by Graham Hunter is pretty awesome.
The articles inside were actually fairly decent, if still obviously slanted. The article on the right is pure Cold War paranoia, inciting fear of the “Reds.”
I found a number of similar things for sale on eBay, see http://www.ebay.ca/sch/i.html?_nkw=catholic+messenger
From: http://archives.lib.cua.edu/findingaid/treasurechest.cfm
“George Pflaum was a well known Catholic publisher. As head of the company founded by his father in 1885, he was in charge of such titles as The Young Catholic Messenger, The Junior Catholic Messenger, and Our Little Messenger, each addressed to different age groups in the Catholic school system. Pflaum, who died in 1963, was active in the Catholic Press Association and was a founder of the Catholic Civics Clubs of America, a joint project with the Commission on American Citizenship of The Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, DC.”
When did the Young Catholic Messenger and Junior Catholic Messenger stop publishing or stop being distributed throughout the Catholic Schools system?
I have no idea, I couldn’t find much information on them online! I sold them at my yard sale last year for a few bucks.
We have a run of these archived at Catholic U. in D.C., and so far we don’t have any dated after 1970. It started in 1885 but 1909 is the earliest we have.
I learned English reading “Our Little messenger” at my school in Cuba ( French Dominican’s Our Lady of the Rosary). I remember Edgar Allan Poe’s “The God Scarab” in one of the issues!
At St. Gregory the Great in Bellerose, we would read these Young Catholic Messengers every week. I loved them!
Joe
From 1948 to 1970, The Young Catholic Messenger was edited by my father, James T. Feely.