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It started when my mother found the portrait of John Paul II on the floor, propped against the wall, in the hallway of the diocesan offices. In an effort to make way for Benedict XVI, the limited wall space had been ceded to the new pontiff, and JPII’s image had been left without a home. Unable to bear the thought of the future saint being buried in the bowels of office storage like the Ark of the Covenant in that Indiana Jones movie, my mother brought his visage home and hung it in the spare bedroom of my childhood home. He has stayed there for nearly two decades. And he is not alone.
Soon there was the decorative JPII plate my brother brought home for my mother from his summer in Poland. Then, not wishing to appear partisan, my parents added a commemorative poster from Benedict’s visit to the United States in 2008. Then some celebratory printouts of Pope Francis, and now, on the hallway outside the room, a framed photo of me and Pope Francis sharing a laugh.
Some people would still call the space a spare bedroom. Others might view the decor and use less neutral descriptors. Our family calls it the Pope Room.
The Catholic Church has created and inspired some of the greatest art in the world, famous for its quality and history regardless of its religious significance. Catholics can claim Fra Angelico, Edgar Degas and Andy Warhol, among many other artists. We are also responsible for glow-in-the-dark rosary beads, St. Christopher dashboard statues and Pope Francis bobbleheads.
Items credited to names on the first list can be found mostly in museums or cathedrals. But items on the second list are, in my experience, much more commonly found in Catholic homes. The first qualify as fine art. The second, often, as kitsch. It is a term that for me holds some level of affection but etymologically speaking is inherently derisive, originating from a German word for trash.
The value of kitsch has long been questioned. “The presence of so much visual material that is the commercial reproduction, and trivialization of something meaningful, be it the Eiffel tower or the cross of Christ, is what interests me,” the artist and scholar Betty Spackman said in an interview originally published in Verge, a journal hosted by Trinity Western University, about her book A Profound Weakness: Christians and Kitsch. “Many artists have used religious kitsch in their work to denigrate not only kitsch but Christianity. They realize the connection is very strong between faith and these seem[ing]ly shallow expressions of it.” In this light, kitschy art is not simply a poor expression of Christianity but a threat to it.
The scholar Paul Griffiths writes that the standard anti-kitsch argument treats it as simple art for simple people. In his essay “A Defense of Christian Kitsch,” he describes, though does not subscribe to, a common objection to commercial religious objects: “Such things lack, above all else, nuance. They leave no doubt about how you should respond to them, and they don’t invite varied interpretations.”
The connoisseur is often pitched as the kitsch enthusiast’s opposite, Dr. Griffiths writes. But while many might aspire to such a title, Dr. Griffiths says that the attitude required to earn it—one of contempt or condescension paired with a “hushed, detached, analytic gaze”—is more likely to take us further from the type of spirituality that religious art of any sort is intended to inspire.
“The connoisseur is at the margins of the sacred page, if there at all; what kitsch-producers and kitsch-lovers do is, by contrast, at the center,” he argues. “This is a fallen world. Kitsch-love and connoisseurship both have their deformities. But the former is much closer to Jesus’ beating heart than the latter.”
In the aforementioned interview, Ms. Spackman argues that understanding any art begins with real curiosity:
We should be asking questions like: does this artistic expression demonstrate honesty and a real search for truth? How does it reflect the time and place in which it is situated? Who buys it? Why do they buy it? Who makes it? Why do they make it? Does it express both passion and compassion towards others? Does it bring change in people or lifestyles? Does it make us think and see in new ways?
Asking such questions may not make one a fan of every image of the Sacred Heart or hovering guardian angel, but they should prompt a person to consider that even kitsch has something to contribute to the development of the religious imagination. Ms. Spackman states:
Having approached kitsch in this way I was no less intellectually critical but I found myself being more merciful. I even realized that kitsch has played an important role as a street art that sustains the fragmented faith of generations of Christians who have not been allowed to make art or have it in their Churches. The dashboard of the car which becomes an altar with a bobble head Jesus and a glow in the dark cross is not necessarily to be laughed at. The reason it is there is just too complex.
Stories to Tell
When I was in my 20s, I had a small print of “Light of the World,” a painting of a glowing Christ Child by Charles Bosseron Chambers, hanging in my apartment. Looking at it made me feel safe and warm, not because of its historical accuracy (Jesus appears as a small, blond, white child) or theological significance, but because it brought back memories of being in my grandmother’s house, where a version of that painting once hung, and which I always noted with affection when I was a child.
I hung the painting as a tribute to my grandmother, who looked at us with the love and awe with which one might look at the child Jesus. She let us know we were important. And she walked across the street to Holy Name Church to go to Mass each day, which let us know that Jesus was important. I considered myself and Jesus lucky to be loved by such a woman. Like any good Catholic grandmother’s house, hers echoed the warmth of the child Jesus, and I saw that warmth in the Chambers image, too.
David Morgan is a professor of religious studies with a secondary appointment in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. He told me that prints of that Child Jesus “Light of the World” also once hung in the homes of his mother and of his aunt. I was delighted by the coincidence but should not have been surprised. The prevalence of kitsch is, in part, the point. It is art that can be accessed by millions of people, regardless of class or circumstance.
Dr. Morgan recalled attending an academic conference at which someone noted that the venue was home to the original “Head of Christ,” the famous painting by Warner Sallman. Dr. Morgan realized that, due to the image’s ubiquity—it has been reproduced an estimated 500 million times—it hadn’t occurred to him that there was an original at all. He recalls that a colleague launched into a critique of the image as “bad art for bad faith.” But Dr. Morgan thought that such a view ignored the impact of, and reasons behind, its wide appeal.
“Millions of people put that picture in their home and have memories attached to it, and just calling them tasteless doesn’t tell us much, especially about lived religion, what people do in everyday life,” he said.
Dr. Morgan’s research focuses on the reception of popular religious imagery. He has written on Protestant images of Jesus, as well as images of Our Lady of Fatima and the Sacred Heart. While he has a doctorate in art history, he often approaches religious images from a more anthropological angle. “I want to dig into the local circumstances and see what images do to construct life worlds in that place without arguing for some overarching universal scale of integrity and goodness,” he said.
Dr. Morgan said that the home is often where we get “religion by osmosis.” And the way we reflect our faith in our homes is influenced by multiple factors: “The images and the texts and poetry we embrace are a reflection of our social position, our formation, education, bonds of affection,” he said. “They’re also the versions of what we have come to believe religion or faith ought to aspire to.”
But that does not mean that some homes are holier than others, based on their artistic expression of the faith. “I don’t think it’s a single axis of progress,” Dr. Morgan said. “There are just so many different versions of Catholicism, and it has so much to do with the nation you’re in and your history. Korean Catholics may not embrace the images that Irish Catholics will. But it’s not on a single graduated scale.”
Still, one might argue: If religion is learned by osmosis, doesn’t it follow that the “best” art helps produce the best outcomes if you’re trying to raise Catholic children? The picture book artist and author Tomie dePaola once told me, “Only the very best is good enough for children.” Does it matter if my children have more questions about a statue of the Blessed Mother that changes color with the weather than they do about the Sistine Chapel?
“I don’t think blank exposure to great art does anything; there has to be an engaging pedagogical apparatus,” Dr. Morgan said. Which means actually talking about the meaning and history or emotional response to a religious image. “In that context, anything the child is looking at can become significant, whether it’s Sallman or a devotional statute or medal,” he suggested. “Any statue or popular image has stories to tell, but you have to understand how it fits into worlds that may not be your own.”
From Commercial to Devotional
The Catholic Church in which Monica Mercado grew up was sparse. The church building was a gymnasium, and her father often brought her to a Mass celebrated without music. It was at her grandmother’s home in Puerto Rico that she first encountered a Catholicism that included a picture of the pope by the door and religious statues on the shelves.
Now an assistant professor of history at Colgate University and a member of the university’s interdisciplinary museum studies faculty, she described her fascination with Catholic kitsch as “nostalgic and also foreign” to her experience of the faith.
Dr. Mercado’s interest in religious imagery became more personal when she encountered a collection of photos from her “Nuyorican” family, several of whom had First Communion portraits taken in front of studio backdrops with paintings of Jesus gazing down at them. When she read an NPR slideshow on the life of Sonia Sotomayor that included a similar photo of the future Supreme Court justice, she was surprised by their ubiquity.
“These photo studio backdrops were all over New York, so you could get a kid in their fanciest clothing and take these portraits where they are depicted in the loving halo of this very popular visual trope,” Dr. Mercado said.
“My dad, Sonia Sotomayor, and other kids are going to these studios because this stuff is cheap enough that you can have a bunch of these backgrounds,” she said. “There’s something uncomfortable about it being commercial and having a price tag on it, but it’s also something that can connect you to the sacred outside of the church or the shrine.”
These photos, she said, eventually joined the ranks of other devotional items. “My aunt at 8 kneeling in the halo of this benevolent Jesus is put in a frame on my grandmother’s shelf with statues or rosaries, and all of a sudden the kid’s photo becomes something more,” she said.
Dr. Mercado said that she and her fellow historians are intrigued by the fact that kitsch’s “accessibility, which distinguishes it from fine art, also makes it more disposable.” Which means that the Catholic kitsch that dominated much of the 20th century is often found in donation piles, not museums. “If you’re interested in the materiality of Catholicism in the 20th century, it’s found in people disposing of their parents’ and grandparents’ stuff, where some ends up in the trash and some ends up in the garage sales and estate sales and antique stores,” she said.
And some of it ends up on eBay, which is where Dr. Mercado has found herself shopping for door prizes that might be appreciated by her colleagues in the American Catholic Historical Association at their annual conference. It started when someone brought a mid-20th-century, light-up Infant of Prague to the 2020 conference, where it was a hit.
“We started to think about: What does it mean to have this stuff in our houses, to be collectors and scholars, and also to rely on eBay?” she said. In the post-pandemic world, they began to bring more of these items to the conferences, thinking, “Here’s a table with stuff that we bought when we couldn’t be together. Let’s touch it and talk about it.”
“It makes me think again about what is seen as having value,” Dr. Mercado said. “Catholics have all this stuff, and some of it is different from what Protestant stuff has looked like over time, and some of it is intertwined with scholarship or nostalgia or a memory of something our grandparents or parents have. Stuff is very powerful, and seeing all of it through new eyes has been fascinating to me.”
Cultivating Catholic Kids
The Infant of Prague statue on my grandmother’s shelf owned a variety of capes. The silky wraps could be changed according to the liturgical season or feast day. As a child, I loved how the statue seemed both tactile and outside of time. There is something to be said for art that can be held and touched, even broken and replaced, things that do not need to stay on a shelf to maintain their value, that are meant to be held and worn or worn out.
And while the Infant of Prague statue may once have been the closest thing you could get to a Jesus doll, families today have nearly endless options for outfitting their homes and filling their toy boxes with faith-based options intended to inspire a deeper relationship with Jesus. My own home includes a collection of old-timey kitsch, along with a number of items from more modern Catholic companies. I am a proud owner of two pope bottle openers (one with Francis, and one with Benedict XVI on one side and John Paul II on the other); two pope mugs (John Paul II wearing sunglasses and Francis waving from the balcony on the day of his election); a small, plush My First Rosary with a teething-friendly cross; Tiny Saints keychains; socks depicting St. Ignatius; a plethora of squat plastic saints shaped like bowling pins; a memory game in which you match the saints; Holy Spirit hair ties; D.I.Y. rosaries; and a magnetic church scene in which priests, laypeople and church decor can be arranged by children (quietly) during Mass.
I’ve been fascinated by the growth of a number of small Catholic companies that approach Catholic goods with an eye for both aesthetics and quality—items that are accessible and affordable but not cheap. Many are run by Catholic women seeking to offer products with a more modern, Instagram-friendly aesthetic. Some offer a new take on classic devotions, others cater to Catholic children, and some are intended to evoke a laugh.
In 2018, Erica Campbell was a calligrapher in Los Angeles when she noticed the gap between the Catholics she knew and the aesthetics of the Catholic products being offered in religious spaces. “The Catholic products available had not been updated in some time,” she told me by email. “I saw all of these beautiful things around me in the shops [in L.A.], and I wondered why we didn’t have anything like that that reflected our faith.”
So Ms. Campbell got to work. “I handpainted different Marian images that told a story of my own life, designed them into a pattern and then had them printed,” she wrote. When she sold 500 of them in the first week, she was shocked. Then she sold 600 of her Our Lady of Guadalupe swaddle blankets. Her online shop, Be a Heart, was born.
Inspired by both the L.A. event scene and the number of celebrations on the Catholic Church calendar, she began applying her approach to home decor, baby products and the liturgical year, including redesigning First Communion paper party goods for the Instagram era. “I wanted to sell things that look like something you would buy in a boutique in L.A., but had reminders of God in the everyday,” Ms. Campbell said. “I wanted to make things that grandparents could gift to their grandchildren that maybe their non-practicing parents wouldn’t mind having around.”
Ms. Campbell recalled that so many of the special items she received to commemorate sacraments in her own life ended up stored away. So she aims to offer hands-on gifts that kids can create and use, like D.I.Y. rosaries with wooden beads inspired by Mary and St. Francis. One of her bestselling products is a plush doll of the Blessed Mother with various outfits that match her apparitions.
In creating products, Ms. Campbell often considers “things that parents can use with their new baby and be reminded in the exhausting hours of the early morning that they are not alone.” And perhaps this is where shops like Ms. Campbell’s differentiate themselves from the commercially available Catholic products of the past. She views her work as a sort of ministry and a chance to build community.
Even the humorous products—like the bandages that read “Jesus heals”—are meant to also offer moments of real consolation. “For me, it’s little tiny reminders,” she wrote. “When the girls get a tiny booboo, we get our bandages, and now Jesus is associated with healing comfort. Passing on the faith doesn’t have to be sit-down lessons in church, but in the tiny quiet moments of our lives. I want to assist families in doing that.” That Ms. Campbell has sold 50,000 tins of Jesus bandages seems to indicate that others agree.
Of Statues and Saints
In recent years, in an understandable effort to tidy up, much of the papal-inspired decor has come down from the walls of the Pope Room in my parents’ home. The original portrait of John Paul II remains, however, smiling over my children and their cousins as they use the room as a base for arts and crafts projects during visits. On a nearby bookshelf, the papal decorative plate still sits beside my grandmother’s ancient Infant of Prague, dressed in his cape; a green statue of St. Jude and a stained glass Irish blessing complete the tableau. (And, as in any good New England Catholic home, a Red Sox World Series championship pennant is propped up behind them.)
This may not be to everyone’s taste. It may not be Instagram-friendly. But it has become part of the backdrop against which my children’s faith will be formed because of the stories these items tell. These statues and images evoke vibrant memories of individuals whose lived faith is rich and complicated and nuanced, whose lives were themselves works of art.
