Msgr. Michael Witt has made sharing Church, local history his life’s work
Msgr. Michael Witt can’t help seeing history everywhere he goes.
Take his cell phone number, for instance. Someone else might read it as a collection of random digits. He knows it’s the year that Canterbury became a diocese, paired with the year that a certain Middle Ages emperor (redacted for privacy) contracted cholera and died.
Luckily for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Msgr. Witt has dedicated the past three decades to sharing his passion and knowledge of Church and St. Louis history as a Kenrick-Glennon Seminary professor, author and radio contributor.
“I’m very much influenced by the writings of Henri de Lubac, and his seminal book is ‘Catholicism.’ His whole idea behind that was that God became incarnate, and by doing that, entered history,” Msgr. Witt said. “And so for me to study Church history and especially local Church history is part of that incarnation that Jesus gave us, and that’s really important.”
Msgr. Witt traces his fascination with history back to a fourth grade, when he picked up a copy of “A History of the Great War,” published in 1919, in his great uncle’s south St. Louis basement. He read it cover to cover. A middle-school teacher at St. Patrick School in University City also encouraged his growing interest.
He joined the Christian Brothers at age 19, and after the novitiate, was given permission to study history at Christian Brothers University. He started his career in teaching in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before being transferred to CBC High School in St. Louis. He took summertime courses to earn his master’s degree, then earned his doctorate in modern European history.
He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of St. Louis in 1990 and began teaching Church history at the seminary in 1996. He covered “modern” Church history — that is, the year 1274 onward.
“I tell people here in St. Louis that if you see a priest and he doesn’t have white hair and he’s not bald, he’s probably a former student,” Msgr. Witt said.
Around the turn of the new millennium, then-Archbishop Justin F. Rigali asked Msgr. Witt to be part of a team that wrote “Archdiocese of St. Louis: Three Centuries of Catholicism,” a history of the archdiocese up to the year 2000. Then, in 2014, he took a sabbatical from the seminary to tackle some writing projects and settled on an expanded history of the local Church.
The project became a four-volume series titled “Saint Louis: The Story of Catholic Evangelization of America’s Heartland.” It followed in the footsteps of earlier histories, including Father John Rothensteiner’s 1928 “History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis” and Father William Faherty’s 1973 “Dream by the River.”
As the Archdiocese of St. Louis celebrates its bicentennial this year, knowing our history can help us contextualize the present and trust that God is at work, Msgr. Witt said. The local Church has a long history of welcoming both immigrant priests and lay immigrant parishioners, for instance. While lower numbers of priests cause concern, we’ve dealt with that before, too.
“As much as we’re going through challenging times now, we’ve had even greater challenges,” he said. “We talk about a shortage of priests — well, go back 200 years, and there was this number of years where there was one priest in this archdiocese, and this diocese at that point went from the southern boundary of Arkansas to the Canadian border and from central Illinois to the Rocky Mountains.”
Msgr. Witt also partnered for many years with Covenant Network, a local EWTN Radio affiliate, on a regular Church history show. Episodes are now available online, which means his history lessons have reached around the world — he’s heard from listeners as far-flung as Alaska, Australia and Afghanistan.
“There were no boundaries set on (the show). So I was able to run with it and do what I love to do,” he said. “We did a whole half an hour just on the Carthusians and the development of chartreuse.”
Msgr. Witt retired from parish ministry in 2023 and from teaching at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in summer 2025. But even as a professor emeritus, he’s finding work to keep him busy. He’s currently researching the 55 or so popes throughout history who died of natural causes within the first year of their papacy, looking into their accomplishments and legacies.
And after decades of learning local lore, “I can’t go anywhere in St. Louis now without thinking about its history,” he said. “And it’s so, so rich.”
Listen to Msgr. Witt
Msgr. Witt has been a longtime contributor to Covenant Network, a local EWTN Radio affiliate. His 169-part series on Church history and 200+ episode series on St. Louis Church history are available on ourcatholicradio.org or major podcast platforms.
St. Louis Church history: ourcatholicradio.org/saint-louis
Church history: ourcatholicradio.org/churchhistory
