The Founder’s personal interest in establishing missionary museums is behind the history of an astonishing number of the Society’s museums, of which this author made a subject for this present study. This study includes the history of over 40 museums founded or managed by the members of the Society of the Divine Word. It is a unique itinerary leading to many different places on five continents across the world. This long journey, starting with the first missionary collection at the Motherhouse in Steyl (1884), will conclude with the most recent initiative of the Italian Province SVD to take over the management of the Roman Catacombs of St. Priscilla in 2015, which was terminated in 2018.

The study explores an impressive variety of museums initiated and conducted by SVDs, even if later some of them disappeared or were handed over to other institutions. The wide gamut of these museums bears various names: Missionary, Memorial, Ethnographic, Anthropological, Natural Sciences and Natural History, Biblical, Maritime, Archeological, Yerba Mate and Roman Catacombs.