{"id":279,"date":"2009-02-17T12:21:38","date_gmt":"2009-02-17T12:21:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/holy-cards-the-latest-collecti.html"},"modified":"2009-02-17T12:21:38","modified_gmt":"2009-02-17T12:21:38","slug":"holy-cards-the-latest-collecti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/holy-cards-the-latest-collecti.html","title":{"rendered":"Holy Cards: The latest collectible"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Holy<\/span>An Italian fellow named Graziano Toni from the northeastern Italian city of Faenza has catapulted holy card collecting into a serious hobby–he has 50,000 cards in his personal collection and has compiled about 2,000 of his finest ones in a 512-page book titled “The First International Catalog of Holy Cards,” recently published by the Italian firm Unificato.
\nIt’s a potent mix–devotion and cash. (Like baseball card collecting, I suppose.) Rare or elaborate designs can command some $4,700 at antique markets and collectors’ fairs. Unfortunately, a central reason for such prices is the increasing scarcity of these cards.
\nRNS’s Vatican correspondent Francis X. Rocca has the story<\/a> and the fascinating back story:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The history of holy cards begins soon after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, in 1440. The same technology that would help spread Protestantism through reformers’ tracts and Bible translations enabled the proliferation of religious images that Protestant iconoclasts abhorred.
\nDuring the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, evangelizing Jesuit priests were eager distributors of holy cards, particularly among the illiterate.
\nFrom early on, holy cards were also put to secular use. Notaries often attached them to legal documents to guarantee their legitimacy, and travelers would put them inside trunks as supernatural insurance against theft.
\n[snip]
\nThe holy card’s age of “maximum splendor” came in the 17th and 18th centuries, Toni said, when the handiwork of monks and nuns grew increasingly refined. Gems from this period often feature intricate cutting to produce the effect of delicate lace borders, miniature watercolor portraits, and collages made of such luxurious materials as silk, velvet and seed pearls.
\nIn the 19th century, a more efficient way to reproduce images (lithography) transformed holy cards into a mass market industry, with images commonly circulating by the thousands.
\nLarge-scale production hardly meant the demise of quality, Toni said, pointing to the vivid colors and fine lines that distinguish outstanding work in the 1800s. It was during this period, amid rising literacy rates, that prayers commonly appeared on the flip side of a saint’s image.
\nThe 20th century, especially the period since World War II, has witnessed the decline of holy cards in both quality and popularity. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The morale of the story: Hold on to your holy cards. Better yet, start using them again.
\n(RNS photo: A French steel engraving from the middle of the 19th century, portraying an unnamed pilgrim. The caption reads, “Pilgrimage is an offering to God.” From the first international catalog of holy cards.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Italian fellow named Graziano Toni from the northeastern Italian city of Faenza has catapulted holy card collecting into a serious hobby–he has 50,000 cards in his personal collection and has compiled about 2,000 of his finest ones in a 512-page book titled “The First International Catalog of Holy Cards,” recently published by the Italian…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nHoly Cards: The latest collectible - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/holy-cards-the-latest-collecti.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Holy Cards: The latest collectible - 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}