Papal products proliferate

The Vatican sent up smoke a little more than a week ago to declare a new pope. But already Joseph Ratzinger's emergence as Benedict XVI is being announced in another, less-ceremonial way, with a stream of pontiff-related products coming on the market.

Like the branded hats and T-shirts that miraculously appear on athletes immediately after their team wins a championship, trinkets depicting Benedict XVI's white-haired visage showed up on souvenir carts in Vatican City within 24 hours of his appointment. Now, as proof that suppliers of religious merchandise are almost as sensitive to demand as their secular colleagues, Benedict XVI books, prayer cards, photographs and other mementos are starting to trickle into Catholic bookstores and other outlets in the United States.

Catholic Supply, a veritable superstore with two locations in St. Louis and an Internet storefront, already is shipping prayer cards and bookmarks. Large, glossy photos are expected to arrive in stock soon.

"The minute he was announced, we had people in the store," said Michael Murphy of Catholic Supply. But manufacturers and publishers had been forced to wait with the rest of the world. "It would have been great if we had had a crystal ball to see who it was going to be."

Though many products aimed at Catholic consumers are made in Italy, domestic producers also have been hustling to address excitement over the new pope, and mourning for his predecessor.

Our Sunday Visitor, an Indiana publisher of Catholic literature, bulletin inserts and offering envelopes, drew up a contract with a writer two years ago for a book about the papal succession. "We Have a Pope!" is expected to go to press this week, less than a month after Pope John Paul II died.

Although the Vatican licenses liturgical content for publication and lends its seal to official merchandise, "to some extent the pope's image is public property," said Richard Pomazal, a marketing professor at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia. "If there's money to be made, the Catholic entrepreneurs will do it just like any others."

But it was mostly secular suppliers that won the race to market.

EBay hosted its first crop of Benedict XVI gear the same day he was elected. The current selection amounts to nearly 600 items, including clocks, plates, watches, T-shirts, charms, ribbon-shaped decals and laser-engraved travel mugs.

Joseph Gourdji entered the papal commerce category last week with cufflinks. At his home in Queens, N.Y., he scaled down and lacquered photographs of the new pope, then affixed them to a pair of nickel-plated cufflinks to create what he calls "a personal item that can be worn without too much flamboyancy."

It's a process that Gourdji, 78, a former figure skater born in Iraq, has fulfilled for other noted figures, including Elvis Presley, George W. Bush and Rudolph Valentino.

"I think of it as the Wal-Marting of America," said Dan Pierson, executive director of the Association of Catholic Booksellers, of the boomlet in papal bric-a-brac. "But maybe it's just the American way to celebrate."

Pierson still recalls with a shudder the "pope soap-on-a-rope" he saw for sale during a papal visit to New Orleans in the 1980s.

"To me, that's not at all tasteful," he said. And yet, he welcomes the attention the church reaps as it makes history, a process that has probably drawn new customers into the United States' estimated 1,400 Catholic bookstores.

"The coverage has been very good to help people understand the Catholic Church and I'm sure it's going to be good for sales," Pierson said, even as he wonders, "Who would want cufflinks of the pope?"