prayer cards ... to help you pray more effectively Father Rick has devised a special set of Prayer cards ...

Playing with praying cards ... Wednesday, 1 November 2006 Presenter: Kelly Higgins-Devine

Father Rick McCann loves his cards. And spending years playing Solitaire gave him a very good idea - why not invent a deck of cards that allows time-poor Catholics to pray while they’re playing? And so he developed the ‘praying cards’. “It happened over a few years now,” Father Rick explains. ”I’ve got big fingers and rosary beads are hard to come by, and I’ve always been a cards man, and so I was sitting there one day, many years ago, and I thought, well, I could do the rosary – instead of just playing a game of solitare, I could do a rosary, and I worked it out how we could say the rosary and make it meaningful.” The cards look like a typical deck except for the picture cards. “The King has our Lord Jesus on it, and the Queen’s got Our Lady on it, the Blessed Virgin, and the Jack’s got the Holy Spirit sending down its Graces... so you go around playing solitaire, and by the time you’ve got it out, you’ve said the rosary plus three Our Fathers.” Now Father Rick is using the cards as a fundraiser. “Well I thought, why don’t I share this with the world? And then we have our church – it’s a very little church, and we don’t have much to pay for it – and I thought, well, this can got towards building a new church! It’s a start, anyway.” He’s sold about a thousand decks of the praying cards since the beginning of the year. “I’ve had requests from nuns – they’re buying them – and the old people, they just love it, because they’re not just playing cards, they’re praying cards. They’re getting something out of it.” However, the cards weren’t welcomed by all members of the Cathoilc Church. “It’s something that came on quite suddenly, and I’m pretty pushy, I guess, and I tried to explain to them, what I get back to [is that] Jesus Christ went out and prayed in a lonely place by himself, and he would have prayed to his father, ‘my father’, and yet when we say the our fathers, it’s ‘our father’, so I brought this back into a personal prayer with a lot of meaning – like Jesus prayed to his father, you’re by yourself and you pray to your father and brother.. it makes everything into a personal prayer,” Father Rick explains.