About us
NZ Catholic is an award-winning fortnightly newspaper which is distributed throughout New Zealand. The only national Catholic newspaper in New Zealand, it is published by the Catholic Bishop of Auckland.
In addition to providing significant Catholic local and international news, we provide material of a reflective and spiritual nature, articles that are relevant to a broad range of interests and age groups and discuss wide-ranging, important issues of life and faith that affect Catholics in everyday life.
We aim to inspire and challenge our readers to reflect upon what it means to be Catholic in today’s world.
Our history
NZCatholic is part of an unbroken line of Catholic publications owned and operated by successive Bishops of Auckland for almost 100 years.
In July 1918 a publication called The Month was launched under the ownership of Bishop Cleary (the 6th Bishop of Auckland). It was published until 1934, when the Bishop of Auckland at the time, Bishop James Liston, decided to replace it with a weekly newspaper called Zealandia, which continued until 1989 with a circulation of nearly 30,000. From 1962, Zealandia came under the control of four successive bishops, and had eight editors. The first lay editor was appointed in 1971.
In a period of rapid social change, circulation began to decline but despite this, Zealandia had a larger circulation than any weekly Church publication of any denomination in New Zealand.
In 1989 a decision was made by the bishop and the board to change format to a monthly magazine-type publication, renamed New Zealandia. Other dioceses in the country had begun to produce their own periodicals, and a decision was made to revitalize the Auckland-based Catholic paper by moving from a weekly news-based paper to a monthly magazine.
After seven years of publishing New Zealandia, the glossy magazine was found to be financially unsustainable. A review of readership suggested that readers would prefer a regular source of Catholic local and international news and have a more strongly Catholic identity, and it was decided to return to a newspaper format, published fortnightly, to be named NZ Catholic. The first issue was in October 1996.
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