The History of the Mass Card

Before There Were Cards §

When St. Monica was dying, she asked her sons for one thing: “I simply ask you to remember me at the Lord’s altar wherever you are.” The Catechism quotes her where it teaches that the Eucharist is offered for the faithful departed (Catechism, 1371). A Mass for a particular person is far older than any card that announces one.

In the early centuries, the Holy See recalled in 2025, Mass was already being celebrated at the request of the faithful for a particular intention, “even when no gift went with the request.” Then the decree goes on:

Successivamente si sviluppò l’uso di offrire un’elemosina per la celebrazione di una Messa e di dare doni al sacerdote o alla Chiesa. Proprio questa pratica costituisce il precedente dell’offerta per la celebrazione della Messa. A partire dalla fine del decimo secolo, per chiedere la celebrazione della Messa per una determinata intenzione, venivano offerti doni commemorativi. In questo stesso periodo sorgono le fondazioni di Messe, ovvero l’obbligo di celebrare Messe per intenzioni prefissate. Nacque così l’uso di elargire un’offerta in occasione della Messa, usanza che la Chiesa, non solo approva, ma raccomanda e promuove.

Later the custom developed of offering alms for the celebration of a Mass and of giving gifts to the priest or to the Church. This very practice is the forerunner of the offering for the celebration of Mass. From the end of the tenth century, commemorative gifts were offered when asking for Mass to be celebrated for a particular intention. In the same period Mass foundations arose, that is, the obligation to celebrate Masses for intentions fixed in advance. So the custom was born of giving an offering on the occasion of the Mass, a custom the Church not only approves but recommends and promotes.

Dicastery for the Clergy, decree of 13 April 2025, preamble. Italian · Our translation.

Scholars are careful with the dates. “It would be hazardous to attempt to state exactly when the Mass stipend, properly so-called, became a normal part of the daily life of the Church,” the Jesuit theologian Edward Kilmartin wrote in 1966. He found the custom of giving alms for a special remembrance at Mass approved in the rule of St. Chrodegang, bishop of Metz from 743 to 766, and he added that “as yet no satisfactory history of the development of Mass stipends has been written.”¹

Pope Paul VI called the offering “a kind of sacrifice of their own” that the faithful join to the sacrifice of the Mass (Firma in traditione, 1974, our translation), and canon law still names the custom (canon 945). None of these sources mentions a card.

When the Card Appears in the Record §

In the American newspapers the Library of Congress has put online, the earliest page we found that mentions Mass cards sent at a death is from 1914. In May 1914 The Yale Expositor, a Michigan weekly, reprinted an Ontario paper’s account of a farmer’s requiem Mass: “Many mass cards testified to the wide popularity of the deceased.”² In January 1920 a household in Ottawa, Illinois, put a card of thanks in the Free Trader-Journal for “the beautiful flowers and many mass cards sent” after the death of a son and brother.³

Neither notice explains what a Mass card is, and neither shows when the custom began.

The words haven’t always meant the same thing, either. In April 1909 The Washington Herald reported that a church in Washington would use “a new set of mass cards” the next Sunday, lettered by hand “in illuminated text, on Italian vellum” by a Baltimore artist.⁴ Those were cards to be used in the church itself, not cards sent to the bereaved.

The Mass Card in Ireland §

In the 1930s, schoolchildren in Ireland compiled folklore for the Schools’ Collection, and their pages are now in the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin. One page from Bodyke, County Clare, on funeral customs, names two cards. The friends of the dead “get Mortuary Cards in memory of the deceased,” it says, and then: “Mass Cards are given and I fear the masses are not always got said. There is a lot of vanity about these cards. Every person’s name appears on the local papers. It seemingly shows great popularity.”⁵

By the 1980s, in one corner of Ireland at least, the two could share a name. The anthropologist Lawrence Taylor, who did fieldwork in southwest Donegal from 1973, wrote in 1989 of “the Mass or memorial card”, a laminated card with a devotional image on one side and, on the other, a prayer and, “these days, a small photograph of the deceased if one is available.” People kept these cards in a drawer with the rosary and missal, or “among the pages of the missal itself at the points appropriate to their death dates, so that the dead will come to mind and be prayed for on their anniversaries.” He ends on a joke made in life by the old man whose wake he describes, and remembered at it: “That will make a good photo for my Mass card.”⁶

The Irish bishops’ advice in 2011 was to get an unsigned Mass card and have it signed at a church or by a priest you know. Signed or stamped Mass cards sold to the public in shops and other commercial outlets, they said, were not approved by the bishops’ conference or by the superiors of religious orders and missionary societies.⁷ Irish law had taken up the question in 2009, defining a Mass card as “a card or other printed material that indicates, or purports to indicate, that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass (howsoever described) will be offered” for the intentions it names, and making it an offense to sell one except under an arrangement with a bishop or the provincial of an order of priests.⁸ That section was repealed from 27 January 2025.⁹ The story of those years is in buying a Mass card online.

Memorial Cards, Enrollments and Printed Cards §

A few other pieces of paper sit near the Mass card in the archives, and each has its own story.

The memorial card is often handed out at a funeral, with the person’s name and dates. Boston College’s library notes that memorial cards “first appeared in England in the 1840s and were quickly adopted in the United States as well.”¹⁰ The note cites no source, and no source we found ties the memorial card to the Mass card, beyond Taylor’s shared name.

Devotional societies left paper too. The Irish Capuchin Archives hold a 1938 certificate of a woman’s membership in the Happy Death and Purgatorial Society attached to a church in Cork.¹¹ Whether today’s enrollment cards from religious communities descend from societies like that one, no source we opened says.

Some cards speak from the giver’s side. The University of Galway’s archive holds a card, which it dates in brackets to between 1931 and 1956, “noting that” two people “will be offering Mass” for a woman.¹² The wording is the giver’s way of speaking. Applying the Mass for someone is the priest’s act (canon 901); what the faithful join to it with their offering is, in Paul VI’s words, “a kind of sacrifice of their own.”

And at least one Mass card can be traced to its makers. The University of Maryland holds a 1965 card that begins “The Holy sacrifice of the Mass…”, from the press of Stanbrook Abbey, the Benedictine nuns near Worcester, England: “lithography by Messrs. W.S. Cowell Ltd., letterpress by Stanbrook.”¹³

What the Law Asks of a Card Today §

None of the canons on Mass offerings mentions a card. What they guard is the Mass behind it. Each offering given and accepted is owed a Mass of its own (canon 948). Whoever passes a Mass on sends the whole offering with it and stays responsible until word comes back (canon 955). The parish writes the intention, the offering and the Mass once said in its book (canon 958). Every appearance of bargaining or commerce is kept entirely away (canon 947), and priests are urged to offer Mass for people’s intentions even when nothing has been given (canon 945).

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, 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). The Bodyke writer’s worry, that the Masses were “not always got said”, is the one the law answers: a card that takes an offering in the name of a Mass should mean a Mass.

What the Record Doesn’t Say §

We found no source that settles any of these: who printed the first Mass card, or in what country; whether the custom began in Ireland and traveled with emigrants, or grew up in several places at once; whether the first cards were written by hand or printed; or when parishes began to keep cards of their own at the office. The pages we found that answer any of them cite nothing we could open.

The record that exists is scattered: in old newspapers, in folklore collections, in archives and in the cards people kept in their missals. If you’d like a card for someone today, the place to start is your own parish office (what to write in it).