As the years progressed, Der Wanderer's circulation and influence spread across the nation. It was a major opponent of the "Americanizing" tendency within the Church led by the archbishop of Baltimore, James Cardinal Gibbons, and the archbishop of St. Paul, John Ireland. That tendency was addressed by Pope Leo XIII in his 1899 apostolic letter, Testem benevolentiae.

     Under the editorship of Joseph Matt (the present writer's grandfather), Der Wanderer was instrumental in promoting the principles of the Church's social teaching as set forth in Pope Leo XIII's great encyclical, Rerum Novarum.

     During  the 1930s and 1940s, Wanderer editors were much involved in the growing liturgical movement in the United States led by Dom Virgil Michel, O.S.B., of St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.

     As the world watched the rise to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler with fear and fascination, The Wanderer was among the first to denounce Nazism as totalitarian and antithetical to Christian principles. In September of 1933, the newspaper was barred from Germany where it reached some 1,200 readers. During World War II, its editor, Joseph Matt, monitored the course of the war each week, and published a series of brilliant and penetrating analyses of the longrange geopolitical effects of what he saw as an unholy alliance between the Western powers and Communist Russia. He rightly predicted the move by Josef Stalin to expand Soviet hegemony as Nazi power was crushed and the West hesitated to challenge the Soviets. Not surprisingly, as the war drew to a close in 1945, the official Soviet newspaper, Pravda, demanded that the U.S. government suppress The Wanderer "for urging the Allies to make war on the Soviet Union or expel her from the United Nations."

     The years since the council were turbulent ones both for the Church and The Wanderer. A spirit of dissent, experimentation, and innovation pervaded many members of the clergy, religious, and theologians. The effects on catechetics, liturgy, and traditional Catholic practices were significant. Even bishops were divided in their views of the council.

     The single most divisive issue in the postconciliar Church was that of contraception (brought into sharp focus with the development of the "Pill" in the early 1960s), and it created renewed and controversial debates on sexuality. Pope Paul VI met this challenge and hoped to resolve the problem with the encyclical Humanae vitaeThe Wanderer was unyielding in its defense of that encyclical and helped to mobilize support for Humanae vitae by joining some other Catholic leaders in organizing Catholics United for the Faith, now a leading Catholic lay group in the United States.

     The Wanderer found itself more and more in opposition to the theologians, clerics, religious, and bishops who used the council as the pretext for advancing new and untraditional programs. The newspaper was a vigorous opponent of the Call to Action Program in 1976 which threatened to loosen the ties of the Church in the United States to the Vatican and to focus on social change with a leftwing bent. Some new catechisms, liturgies, and scriptural theories were frequent targets of The Wanderer's writers and editorialists.

     As the twentieth century draws to a close, the Church in the United States is slowly returning to a calmer, more traditional mode under the leadership of Pope John Paul II. His issuance of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and his appointment of increasing numbers of bishops loyal to the Vatican's views on doctrine and discipline were welcomed by The Wanderer.