Mary Margaret Alacoque’s Prayer Card

I first discovered Catholic eBay when a journal editor asked me to provide images to accompany an ethnographic article on millennials’ Catholic devotional practice of Holy Hour. Without permission to print any of my personal snapshots from the field, I somewhat haphazardly searched ebay to see what I might find. I promptly bid on and later won a prayer card of the originator of the devotion: St. Mary Margaret Alacoque.

The prayer card came from Great Britain with French prayers printed around an image of the saint kneeling in front of an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It arrived wrapped in plastic and with small pencil marks on the card. As I carefully unwrapped and then scanned the card at 300dpi, I was in the midst of a tactile example of my article’s argument about Catholics updating and reworking devotional practices.

My contribution to this roundtable considers how Catholic eBay interacts with ethnographic research among Catholics in the U.S. The process of eBay--shopping, bidding, receiving--requires a disposition of curiosity that mirrors ethnographic dispositions. But Catholic eBay also offers a demographic archive of Catholic objects that expand how we understand what it means to be Catholic. Drawing on the specific example of my Mary Margaret Alacoque prayer card, I suggest that Catholic eBay is a way to reconsider the locations of Catholic practice, expand conceptions of who does Catholic prayer, and reconceive of the boundaries of our research.