Pop the Cork! Drop the Confetti! Stop the Presses!

Liguori Publications Turns 75 in 2022!

This is the first in a series of articles highlighting the history of Liguori Publications through the decades.

By Fr. Byron Miller, CSsR; President and Publisher of Liguori Publications

The 1940s: Born from Growing Pains

In the 1940s, the Redemptorists were challenged by their own success with Liguorian. The magazine, published since 1913 at the order’s seminary in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, helped spawn other products, including monthly bulletins to Our Mother of Perpetual Help and the League of Saint Gerard, plus a growing array of pamphlets. 

The pressing production demands were managed every month by Fr. Donald Miller, editor of Liguorian and rector of the seminary, along with other Redemptorist writers and business managers. The seminarians regularly used their recreation period to stuff thousands of Liguorian magazines into envelopes and help the Redemptorists maintain the growing subscription files. This intense activity presented a dilemma: Was the seminarians’ education being compromised by their business and clerical work? 

By August 1947, the Redemptorists decided to separate their publishing arm from the seminary to no longer interfere with student formation and to advance without limitation the “Apostolate of the Pen” of St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696–1787), founder of the Redemptorists.

On October 23, 1947, Fr. Miller (no relation to this writer) and seven other Redemptorists took possession of a few old frame houses on 120 acres in the foothills of the Ozarks, twenty-five miles south of St. Louis. Hauling 30,000 pounds of equipment with them, they opened Liguori Publications. 

“The only heat in the big frame house was a fireplace in one room,” Fr. Miller recalled years later. Oil stoves heated other rooms. “We spent most of that first winter cutting wood and cleaning stoves. My bedroom was also my office, and we worked most of the time in our overcoats.” But prosperity loomed.

Company products kept fulfilling the Redemptorists’ mission, answering Catholics’ “anxious questions.” The little house even grew large enough to be granted a post office by summer 1948. The Redemptorists named it Liguori. 

The Year 1947

Apostolate of the Pen:

Liguori Publications opens. Liguorian circulation: 20,000. In six years: nearly 100,000.

Employees distribute more than 100,000 pamphlets. In six years: two million. 

Catholic Church:

“Use of the mother tongue in connection with several...rites may be of much advantage,” says a Pope Pius XII encyclical. 

Canonizations: Catherine Labouré, Louis de Montfort, Joseph Cafasso 

American Snapshot:

People buy the first new US-made cars since the start of World War II.

Bread is thirteen cents a loaf.

Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American to play in a major-league baseball game in the twentieth century.

Featured in the January 2022 issue of Liguorian Magazine. Subscribe to Liguorian.