Angels for All Occasions : Easter, Passover Holidays Draw a Flock of Customers

Here in a wooden shed on the desert grounds of St. Andrew’s Priory, Benedictine monks mold clay into 60,000 saints, angels and other heavenly characters that are shipped to gift shops all over the country. Father Werner P. deMorchoven, a 73-year-old former missionary to China who is now in charge of promotion for the priory, reports that angels are in great demand this spring.

Angels are everywhere inside the workshop--there is a diet angel, a shopping angel, a television angel and a computer angel. “What we have here are angels for all occasions,” says Father Werner, who sports gray suspenders and a fisherman’s cap. He says the line of sports angels is most popular, although some customers object to the football angel because the sport is so rough. Father Werner contends that football players are in great need of angelic protection.

Spring is the No. 2 season for the sale of religious goods, behind Christmas, merchants say. Families buy seder plates for Passover. Parents buy statues for Easter and rosary beads for first communions. Children buy medals for Mother’s Day. Friends buy crucifixes for weddings.

This spring has been especially strong for St. Andrew’s, where the Benedictines started making the plaques in 1970 to raise money for their priory and retreat house, situated on a former turkey farm in the Mohave about 60 miles north of Los Angeles.

Sales this Easter season are up 10% to 15% over last year, says Father Werner. Last year, the priory took in $300,000 from the sale of plaques, and this year looks even better, he says.

Father Werner strolls by bins filled with saints, prophets and Biblical heroes. Not everyone likes the priory’s wide-eyed saints and angels--especially a plaque that shows Jesus roller skating hand-in-hand with three friends in Venice Beach. He says many people aren’t accustomed to religious ceramics that are “whimsical and contemporary.”

Some of St. Andrew’s designs are sold at the San Gabriel Mission, where Easter sales are said to be strong thanks to flocks of tourists. Bonnie Kennedy, the gift shop’s manager, says she sells many foot-high candles, which customers place at the altar inside the mission church. She says rosaries and crucifixes sell briskly around the Easter holiday.

She expects today to be hectic. Each year, churchgoers flood the shop after noon Good Friday services, and “we almost have to fight to get them out by the time we close at one,” she says.

Not all firms are as optimistic. Evelyn Curtiss, owner of Word of Life bookstore in South Central Los Angeles, for instance, says business has been slow, despite a great demand for pocket-size crucifixes that come in plastic cases. Esther Deutsch, co-owner of the Jewish Development Co. in Tustin, says she sold many seder plates and Elijah cups, both of which are used to serve the Passover meal, but no more than last year.

The Christian Booksellers Assn., which represents 3,400 purveyors of religious books and gifts, reports that sales of religious goods grew by about 5% last year. That’s a slowdown from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a recession and joblessness renewed interest in religion and led to an explosive growth in sales.

Sales of religious goods nearly tripled between 1975 and 1980, rising from $161 million to $442 million, the association says. But sales less than doubled during the next five years, rising to $800 million in 1985, with most of the growth coming in the early 1980s.

“The business has always been countercyclical,” observed Peter Schliessner, general manager of Rodo, a Chatsworth wholesaler of religious goods. “When times are bad, our business is good.”

This year there was some concern in the industry that the sex scandal involving television preacher Jim Bakker might hurt business, but so far it hasn’t. “It’s something we’re watching very closely,” says William Anderson, president of the Christian Booksellers Assn.

Some merchants and manufacturers hope to get a boost from Pope John Paul II’s visit to the United States later this year. Carlos George, a salesman for San Francis Imports, a wholesaler in Burbank, is ordering plaques from Spain with the Pope’s picture on them. He figures that the Pope’s visit could increase his firm’s sales of religious goods by $500,000.

Father Werner isn’t so sure. The priory already makes a plaque of the late Pope John XXIII, who remains popular with Catholics. Father Werner isn’t convinced that Pope John Paul II is as marketable. “I think (plaques with Pope John Paul II) would only sell in cities that he visits. And then, what would we do with the ones we don’t sell?”