Buying a Mass Card Online

What an Online Mass Card Is §

Your friend’s father has died two states away, the wake is tomorrow, and you’re looking on your phone for a Mass card. What comes up is a mix: parishes and shrines with request forms, religious communities that mail cards or send them by email, and shops with a chalice on the front of every card. They don’t all promise the same thing.

A card from a parish or a shrine usually means one Mass, offered for that one person. Each offering given and accepted is owed a Mass of its own (canon 948), and the parish writes it in a book kept for the purpose (canon 958).

An enrollment card is a different gift. Many religious communities enroll the person in the Masses and prayers they offer for everyone on their list, often for a year, or for always in a perpetual enrollment.¹ That’s real prayer, and a good thing to give, but it isn’t one Mass for one person. If that’s what you want, ask which kind of card it is.

A sympathy card can look like either and promise no Mass at all. Paper or email makes no difference; what matters is the Mass behind the card (what to write inside).

How to Tell a Mass Card From a Greeting Card §

A real Mass card comes from someone who will answer for the Mass: a parish, a shrine or a religious community, and behind each of them a priest.

Ireland has seen what happens otherwise. In 2014 The Irish Catholic reported that a County Limerick parish priest had found sympathy cards on sale by mistake under a sign reading “Signed Mass Cards on Sale Here,” with “the image of the chalice, missal and candle on the front of the cards,” though the sender’s intentions would only form part of one missionary priest’s prayers.² In 2017 Bishop Phonsie Cullinan of Waterford and Lismore said of such cards that “if one tries to find out who the priest in question is, where he ministers, one will simply not be told.”³

The Church draws the same line. In 2025 the Dicastery for the Clergy told bishops and pastors to make plain to everyone the difference between a Mass applied for someone and a simple remembrance at Mass or in a celebration of the Word, and called asking for, or even merely accepting, an offering for a simple remembrance gravely illicit (decree of 13 April 2025, Art. 4 §§2 to 3, in Italian). A card that takes an offering in the name of a Mass should mean a Mass.

Five Questions to Ask Before You Give §

They work the same for a parish, a shrine, a monastery or a website, and a good office answers them without fuss.

Who Will Offer the Mass, and Where?

Ask for a church, a community or a priest by name. A parish with more requests than it can hold may have Masses said elsewhere, unless the person who asked has expressly said otherwise (canon 954). Whoever passes a Mass on must choose priests he is satisfied are beyond all question, and stays responsible until word comes back that the Mass was accepted and the offering received (canon 955). If the place matters to you, say so.

When Will It Be Said?

Some parishes can give you the day and the time. Not every shrine can: one Wisconsin shrine promises a Mass within twelve months but is “not in a position to guarantee any specific dates, times, and locations.”⁴ Either answer is honest. No one may accept more offerings for Masses to say himself than he can satisfy within a year (canon 953).

Will It Be Written in the Mass Book?

A parish that takes Mass offerings keeps a book of the Masses to be said, the intentions, the offerings and the Masses once said, and the bishop examines it every year (canon 958). A priest who passes Masses on writes down both those received and those sent, with their offerings (canon 955 §3).

If It’s Passed On, Does the Whole Offering Go With It?

It should. Whoever passes a Mass on must send the whole offering with it, unless what was given beyond the diocese’s usual figure was meant for him personally (canon 955 §1). Nobody in between keeps a share.

Will You Let Me Know When It Has Been Said?

No canon requires a parish to tell you. But the office must write in its book when the Mass has been said (canon 958), so it can always answer if you ask (how to ask for a Mass).

Why Ask Your Own Parish First §

A Mass at your own parish, or at the church where the funeral was, is said among people who may have known the one who died. You can go, and so can the people who receive the card. And you can call the office that keeps the book.

The Irish bishops’ advice is to have a blank Mass card signed at a church or by a priest you know, who then offers the Mass himself or passes it on to another priest or community.⁵ Shrines and religious communities are good places to ask too, since any priest may accept an offering for a Mass (canon 945). One shrine in France, for instance, takes requests on its own website for a Mass “for your particular intentions.”⁶ Wherever you ask, the same five questions apply (Masses for those who have died).

Why the Church Keeps Trade Away From the Mass §

People search for where to buy a Mass card. The card is paper, but a Mass has no price, and canon law guards that line closely:

A stipe Missarum quaelibet etiam species negotiationis vel mercaturae omnino arceatur.

Every appearance of bargaining or commerce is to be kept entirely away from offerings for Masses.

Canon 947. Latin · The Holy See’s English · Our translation.

The canon keeps away the appearance, not only the fact. The 2025 decree rests the whole discipline on two things: “justice toward the offerers, that is, keeping the word given to them, and the duty to avoid even the mere appearance of ‘commerce’ in sacred things” (preamble, in Italian, our translation). Gifts for the Mass, it recalls, were regarded as a recompense, a gift or alms, “and never as a ‘sale price’ for something holy; that would in fact become an act of simony.” Canon law punishes whoever makes an unlawful profit from a Mass offering (canon 1383).

So the offering is a gift, a share in the Church’s care for her ministers and works (canon 946). The bishops of the province set the customary amount, and a priest may not ask for more, though he may accept more if it’s freely given; religious communities keep the same rule (canon 952). If you can’t give anything, ask anyway: priests are earnestly urged to offer Mass for people’s intentions, especially those in need, even when nothing has been given (canon 945 §2) (how much to give).

None of this makes asking online wrong. A parish’s web form is a new way of handing the office an envelope, and the questions are the ones you’d ask at the counter.

Mass Cards in Ireland §

From 1 September 2009 Irish law made it an offense to sell a Mass card except under an arrangement with a bishop or the provincial of an order of priests.⁵⁷ Section 37 of the Charities (Amendment) Act 2024 repealed that law from 27 January 2025,⁸ though some Irish pages still describe it as in force. The Church’s rule hasn’t changed. The Irish bishops said in 2011 that they don’t approve signed or stamped Mass cards sold in shops and other commercial outlets, because the practice “undermines a correct understanding of the Eucharist.”⁵