You may have seen trading cards with statistics on baseball players and other sports figures, but have you seen the St. John Vianney Priesthood Cards?
Kids in the region are collecting and trading them like sports cards but they feature photos of priests in the Omaha Archdiocese.
The statistics are such things as childhood parish, seminary school, favorite prayer and saintly friend.
Four women of Omaha’s St. Peter Catholic Church created the cards to honor priests and to interest more children in religious vocations. They printed 30,000 packs of cards in July and have sold about two-thirds of them.
“We did not realize how huge it would be,” Lori Mellender said. “They are ordinary men who have answered an extraordinary call. It has opened up the kids’ eyes to interesting lives the priests live. It’s made the priests more human to them.”
Children have been intrigued that priests have lives beyond church and school and that they own dogs, enjoy hobbies and travel to faraway places. And the kids have been surprised by some amazing facts priests shared on the cards.
Among the most startling, Mellender said, was the card for James Novotny, pastor of Holy Family Parish in Lindsay, Neb.: “I fought a bear and chased him up a tree, carried a backpack 2,000 miles, paddled a canoe 2,000 miles and was kissed on the hand by Mother Teresa.”
Since the cards have been distributed, Mellender has noticed children getting excited when a priest visits their church or school and saying something like: “That’s father ‘so-and-so’ and I have his card.”
Mellender traced the genesis for the trading cards to a trivia game night almost a year ago at St. Peter Catholic Church near 28th and Leavenworth Streets. Sister Maryann Frances Polson of the Daughters of the Eternal Father in Omaha mentioned to those sitting near her that not enough had been done to draw attention to the Catholic Year for Priests, which concluded in June 2010.
Someone mentioned holy cards, and that was all it took. Mellender and fellow parishioners Diane Anderson, Cathy Hula and Melia Vankat decided to meet for a “moms night out” to brainstorm ideas.
They wanted something that would be of interest to children like their own and something that would encourage kids to think about religious callings. The women believed the trading cards would work.
More than half of the priests in the archdiocese — 121 out of 220 — agreed to participate in the project, Mellender said.
“Some of the priests weren’t sure about being on the cards,” Mellender said. To make sure the cards were dignified, the women decided to name the cards in honor of St. John Vianney, the patron of parish priests.
“We wanted everybody to get to know all the priests in the archdiocese and pray for them and to see the variety of people called to the priesthood,” Mellender said. “One little girl stores her cards by birthday so she knows who to pray for that week.”
Approximately 2,000 cards were printed on each priest. Then the cards were randomly sorted into packages of eight cards each.
The packages have been distributed at church events in the area for a suggested donation of $1 per pack. The proceeds were then donated to the Archdiocesan Seminarian Fund to pay for the education of new priests. By January, card donations totaled $15,000.
Some people have been so enthusiastic that the women now have collector sets with all 121 cards for a suggested donation of $100.
Mellender said the project has been fun for the four women involved with it. Two of them e-mailed and phoned priests to get information for the cards. The other two solicited funding for printing and packaging the cards.
People in 10 other archdioceses have contacted the women about how to create a priesthood card tradition in their archdioceses, and the foursome began work on a manual in response.
St. John Vianney Priesthood Cards are available in some religious bookstores. Additional information is online at http://stvianneycards.com.
Contact the writer:
402-444-1052, jane.palmer@owh.comg
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