I like prayer cards, a.k.a. holy cards, especially as items for babies to play with during Mass, as reminders scattered throughout my house, or as a pocket-sized text of a prayer I'm using for a season.
Here is a confession:
…gosh darn it, I sometimes really hate the art that comes on them. A lot of it is pretty schlocky, and when we know what a modern saint looked like from her photographs, the pictures are sometimes ridiculously unlike the real live person.
I mean, come on: St. Thérèse of Lisieux looks like this:
not this:
Anyway, today I stumbled across a site that seems to produce a better sort of holy card: CatholicPrayerCards.org. For about a quarter apiece you can buy holy cards that look like, um, an actual work of art, like this:
… or something a little more Eastern (remember: icons are the anti-Thomas Kinkade):
… or a photo of the saint in life, perhaps complete with leprosy sores:
The photographic ones are my favorites. Take a look at these:
I think I'll go through my children's "decks" of cards in their Mass bags and perhaps replace some of the more egregious examples of bad art with these.
Because, really, folks. We have Michelangelo in our court. And Caravaggio. And Raphael Sanzio. If you want something populist, I suppose you could go with Millet or something. There is no reason Catholics should have to put up with bad religious art.
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