Holy Cards

Barbara Calamari is a freelance writer who has worked in film and television. Sandra DiPasqua is a graphic designer and art director. The two women have col­laborated on Patron Saints, Holy Cards, Visions of Mary, Novena: The Power of Prayer and Holy Place: Sacred Sites in Catholicism. Both authors live in New York City.

Holy cards offer comfort, consolation, and encour­agement to Catholics, who often carry these portable images with them and use them in daily religious rituals. Given as remembrances at wakes and funerals, Communions, and confirmations, holy cards are also a widely popular—and highly collectible—form of folk art. This handsome volume is both a richly illustrated survey of this devotional art and a gallery of saints organized thematically along with brief biographies, attributes, and powers. Prophets and angels, disciples and evangelists, martyrs and hermits, visionaries and mystics are among the religious figures in Catholicism represented here—in exquisite depictions that are at times dramatic and disturbing, at times moving and comforting. This book explains the often enigmatic symbolism in these cards in a beautiful package that makes an ideal gift for first Communion, confirmation, or graduation.