Santa Barbara City College marketing and e-commerce professor Julie Ann Brown is your Internet go-to person for holy cards.
Brown, 45, is on a personal mission to preserve and share “God's calling cards” lovingly made over 75 years ago by European nuns and clergy. “My quest remains the same: to spare and share the beautiful holy images from those who have loved and lived before us,” said the Catholic mother of two college students.
Visitors to Brown's holycards.com website can e-mail a free virtual holy card to friends or download a Christian image for a one-time fee of $2-$3, no royalty strings attached.
During a 1996 shopping trip to an antique mall in Palmdale, Brown happened upon a collection of holy cards. “That day, I found the buried treasure of memories,” said Brown. It had been decades since she had seen similar holy cards, which she had enjoyed buying as a child. “It was my collection of penny holy cards purchased after Mass that brought the Scriptures alive to me; like many others, I am a visual and kinesthetic learner,” she said.
After learning from a graphic arts teacher how to scan and digitally preserve the antique holy cards, which are royalty free since they are classified as “public domain” under copyright law, Brown decided to post her growing holy card collection on the Internet. She called her business “Chant Art,” combining her love of the sung prayer form, Gregorian chant, with the “visual prayer” of holy cards. “I'm hoping this art will create a resurgence of faith in Europe. Nobody has seen a lot of these images in generations,” declared the community college professor.
“People's Art”
According to Brown, holy cards were considered Catholic “people's art” that was affordable and easily transportable in pockets or prayer books. Brown's collection contains hand cut and hand punched paper lace cards dating from the 1600s-1800s. They were often made by cloistered nuns as a way to inspire the faithful who could not afford expensive illustrated prayer books.
“It was a German tradition to hand out holy cards at funerals. The Belgians and the French distributed them on feast days and also passed them out at first Holy Communion services. The Irish and British loved Marian and Christmas-themed holy cards,” explained Brown.
To finance holy card buying trips to Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Switzerland, Brown sold her mother's heirloom jewelry and taught extra classes. Though she was able to get discount plane tickets through her airline pilot husband, she estimates she spent close to $150,000 amassing her collection, which also includes images from prayer books.
She owns one of only three U.S. copies of “Lives of the Saints,” color chromolithographically illustrated by renowned Flemish artist, Father Kellerhoven. She also has a German “Catholic Family Book” published in 1910, which she obtained in Switzerland.
“Time is running out for most antique paper,” noted Brown. “Modern technology is a part of God's plan to help not only with remembering the past but creating future possibilities that at this time we cannot imagine.”
Initially, Brown sold high-resolution digital image CDs grouped into categories such as “Jesus,” “Mary,” “sacraments,” “saints,” and “Euro symbols.” Graphic designers loved the quality and affordability of the images, but in the late '90s business was slow among Brown's target market of Catholic parishioners.
Prophetic Words
Her daughter, Christina, who was her mother's website master, told her: “Don't worry, mom, my generation will know what to do with your hi-res images. You just have to wait.” Christina's words proved prophetic as sales began increasing with the surge in digital cameras and people became proficient in manipulating photo jpeg files for their own graphic designs.
Since January of this year, all of Brown's 4,000 religious images on her HolyCards.com website are downloadable for instant use. People have used the images to create their own personalized holy cards, baptismal and wedding announcements, t-shirt transfers, needlepoint patterns, coloring books and religious education materials.
The Vatican used one of Brown's images on a banner to celebrate the feast of St. Cornelius. Italian actress Sophia Loren's production company in Canada used many of the images for a mini-series on the lives of the saints. In the U.S., the Hallmark Channel recently used an image of St. Hildegard of Bingen.
Besides continuing to add images to her website from her over 100,000 holy card collection, Brown plans to create religious clip art from 19th century Catholic and Christian European books, booklets and scraplets. “This project of collecting, preserving and providing Christian art will take the rest of my life to complete — it's my mini-vocation,” said Brown.
(This article courtesy of The Tidings Online.)
