The Catholic Miscellany
| Type | biweekly |
|---|---|
| Owner(s) | Bishop of Charleston |
| Publisher | Bishop Robert E. Guglielmone |
| Editor | Deirdre C. Mays |
| Founded |
United States Catholic Miscellany – 1822 The Catholic Miscellany – 1997 |
| Language | English |
| Headquarters | 119 Broad Street Charleston, SC 29402 USA |
| Circulation | 28,000 |
| Website | www |
The Catholic Miscellany, successor to the U.S. Catholic Miscellany, the first Catholic newspaper in the United States, is the official newspaper of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston. It was founded by Bishop John England, the first bishop of Charleston in 1822. He had been assigned to the area the previous year.
Bishop England wrote in defense of his faith and about Irish immigrants since he had been assigned to the Diocese of Charleston in 1821. He had to buy advertisement space in either the Charleston Mercury or the Charleston Courier to answer nativist attacks. Nativism was a movement prominent in those days that sought to restrict political rights of foreign-born citizens.
Irish Catholics were a prime target in the south. The need England perceived for a Catholic communications forum in the New World prompted the activist prelate to start up the United States Catholic Miscellany on June 5, 1822. To market the premiere issue, England laid out a prospectus which was often repeated over the years and which was mailed to friends and potential investors: “Amongst the various wants of the Catholics of these states I do not know of a greater temporal (one) than a weekly paper, the principal scope of which will fair and simple statements of Catholic doctrine from authentic documents, plain and inoffensively exhibited, refutation of calumnies, examination and illustration of misrepresented facts of history, biographies of eminent ecclesiastics and others connected with the Church, reviews of books for and against Catholicity, events connected with religion in all parts of the world, etc.”
The new Catholic paper was originally in a magazine format, 6×9 inches, that evolved into an eight-page tabloid-sized paper similar to the current one. No photographs were published in the U.S. Catholic Miscellany. The original circulation was 600 and peaked at 1,030; less than half of the subscribers actually paid the $4 annual subscription rate, according to an article published by the American Catholic Historical Society (the document housed in the diocesan archives bears no citation as to date or authorship). Finances were a continual problem for the newspaper.
Bishop England wrote most of the articles, signing them either “+John, Bishop of Charleston” or using a nom de plume such as “Curiosity” when the piece was not official church teaching. The bishop's work was editorialized throughout the paper. Some of his explanatory articles ran for as many as 20 installments. Towards the end of England's episcopate, editors and writers had assumed many of the writing duties. When the bishop died in 1842, The Miscellany reported under the headline "Death of the Bishop": “Our beloved Bishop is no more! After a long and distressing illness, he expired last Monday morning at ten minutes past 5 o’clock, in the 56th year of his age, and 22nd of his Episcopate.
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