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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.

When the dialogues were eventually collected into a book, that audience expanded. Over its lifetime, Father Smith Instructs Jackson has sold well over three million copies in its various editions, and many — perhaps most — ended up in the hands of Mr. Jackson’s real-life counterparts. The book has been used in instructing converts and as an evangelization tool. But it has continued as well to be a useful tool for instructing Catholics who were (in Archbishop Noll’s words) “deprived, during their youth, of a training in the science of God.”

Those words describe most of us to one extent or another. No matter how well catechized we believe ourselves to be, there is always more to learn — though, as Archbishop Noll reminds us, “one may have a vast store of religious knowledge gathered from study and still lack faith — because faith belongs to the supernatural order and is a gift of God.”

Father Smith Instructs Jackson is a valuable resource for study, but you will find it even more valuable if you keep Archbishop Noll’s words in mind as you read it, and ask the Holy Spirit to use the knowledge found herein to open your soul to the grace that will deepen your faith.

A Note on the Current Edition

This Noll Library version is the fourth major edition of Father Smith Instructs Jackson. For over 50 years, and through a hundred or more printings, the first edition of this book underwent minor revisions at the hands of Archbishop Noll and his trusted collaborator, Father Lester J. Fallon, C.M. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Father Albert J. Nevins, a Maryknoll priest who was editor of Our Sunday Visitor from 1969 to 1980 (and publisher for the entire company), created a second edition that incorporated passages from the documents of Vatican II directly into the dialogues and updated the Instructions on the Mass and other sacraments to reflect the changes introduced by Pope Paul VI in 1969.

Later still, the theologian and scholar Paul Thigpen created a third edition (known as the Centennial Edition) that built on Father Nevins’s work and incorporated passages from the current Catechism of the Catholic Church directly into the dialogues.

These monumental efforts by Father Nevins and Paul Thigpen created versions of Archbishop Noll’s work that spoke to contemporary readers, but in the process, the simplicity and the impact of the original text was lost. Archbishop Noll’s style is direct and distinctive, and quite different from that of the Council Fathers and the editors of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Our goal with the Noll Library edition of Father Smith Instructs Jackson is to allow the reader to experience the text as originally written, by returning to the text of the final version of the first edition, with its minor corrections and emendations, that was approved by Archbishop Noll. In doing so, we have preserved the work of Father Nevins and Paul Thigpen by moving any significant additions that they made to endnotes. That way, the reader who wants to go deeper into any particular topic discussed by Archbishop Noll can easily find relevant material from the documents of Vatican II and the Catechism of the Catholic Church without having to set this volume down. Similarly, changes to the Mass and sacraments between the Extraordinary Form and the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite are noted in the endnotes. Finally, the Centennial Edition introduced a first name (“Chris”) for Mr. Jackson, in an attempt to soften for modern ears Father Smith’s form of addressing his student; the Noll Library edition returns here as well to the original text.