The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [91]
For conservative Catholics the changes amounted to betrayal. Not only did the erosion of believers continue. It may have intensified. After peaking at 74 percent in 1958, by the end of the Council in 1965 weekly mass attendance among American Catholics had declined to 67 percent. Over the next four decades it plummeted to 45 percent. “Religions are in the unusual situation in which it pays to make gratuitously costly demands,” economist of religion Larry Iannaccone once told me. “When they weaken the demands they make on members, they undermine their credibility.” The Church has suffered similarly across the world. In Italy, its stronghold, only 27 percent of Italians say religion is very important to them. In Spain, the share of Catholics who go to mass every week declined from 44 percent in 1980 to 19 percent today.
It is unclear whether there is anything the Church can do to stop the bloodletting, as modernity puts pressure on religious dogma across the board. The current pope, Benedict XVI, has been working to undo some of the Second Vatican Council’s reforms. He reintroduced the Latin mass. And he brought back the plenary indulgence, an innovation introduced during the First Crusade in the eleventh century that consisted in a blanket pardon for repentant sinners to skip purgatory in exchange for good works and acts of contrition.
While the Second Vatican Council was all about adapting the teachings and rituals of the Church to a changing world, Pope Benedict focused on reimposing the primacy of the Church over reality. In an interview with the New York Times, the Reverend Tom Reese, a former editor of the Catholic magazine America, said: “The church wants the idea of personal sin back in the equation.” It felt the need to raise its prices to drive more loyal customers in.
WHAT THE CHURCH WANTS
There’s nothing in the most basic tenets of faith that necessitates an institutional church. But churches abound—recording its dogmas, classifying its rituals, and managing its taboos.
To those who share it, the fundamental appeal of faith derives from the community it creates. If that were religion’s only purpose, churches might not be so ubiquitous. But civilization gave faith another purpose: legitimization of power. For this, churches are indispensable. From pharaonic Egypt to medieval Europe and from Meiji Japan to contemporary Iran, rulers have derived their authority from the divine. Churches harness the beliefs in a spiritual world in the service of earthly power. They set themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of behavior, fitting rewards to virtue and punishments to crime.
During the high Middle Ages the Catholic Church offered a binary option: salvation or hell. To obtain forgiveness sinners had to submit to extremely difficult trials. But around the eleventh and twelfth century, at the peak of its power in Europe, the Church started relaxing its rules and broadening its offerings. It introduced the concept of purgatory, a halfway house where repentant sinners had to spend time after death before being allowed into heaven. It divided sins into the mortal and the venial, so it could introduce more fine-grained pricing of forgiveness and absolution. A key reform was allowing confession in secret before a priest, rather than in public before the whole town. And it began selling indulgences for money. These innovations reduced the average price of sin. Secret confessions allowed priests to use price discrimination—evaluating the wealth of individual sinners and adjusting monetary punishments according to sinners’ ability to pay. It did wonders for the Church’s finances.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ultimately