Competition for Sainthood and the Millennial Church

Abstract

The Roman Catholic Church has been turning out new saints for two millennia. The argument advanced here is that the saint–making process is arranged as an open contest for sainthood: by combining competitive initiative and pressure from below with exclusive adjudication from above, it provides effective incentives for participants to direct their efforts toward the best interests of the church. This is a key factor that counters bureaucratic ossification and keeps the church thriving. The argument implies that the secular pattern of canonizations should mirror the changing pattern of church demand rather than any exogenous supply of saintly persons, and should translate into a pattern of rise and decline of religious orders which specialize in particular virtues meeting particular demands. Statistical data on canonizations in the second millennium strongly support this empirical implication. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at a panel on Public Choice and the Millennium in the annual meeting of the European Public Choice Society, Siena, 26–29 April, 2000, whose participants provided interesting discussion. The author is particularly indebted to George Akerlof, Vani Borooah, Alberto Cassone, Joan Delaney Grossman, Gregory Grossman, Ronald Wintrobe, Robert Young, and a referee of this Journal for useful comments and suggestions. The revised version was completed while the author was visiting professor at the Department of Economics of the University of California at Berkeley, whose support is gratefully acknowledged.

Monastic Governance: Forgotten Prospects for Public Institutions

“…2. Our analysis is related to the economics of religion (for an overview, see Azzi & Ehrenberg, 1975;Ferrero, 2002;Held, Kubon-Gilke, & Sturn, 2007;Iannaconne, 1998;McCleary & Barro, 2006;Miller, 2002;Stark & Finke, 2000). 3.…”

Competition Between Exclusive Religions: The Counter‐Reformation As Entry Deterrence

“…Canonization could henceforth be exclusively awarded to those groups that best served the general interests of the Church. In turn, the groups that came out on top of the saint-making contest were now the new religious orders, which had both the organizational resources and the incentives to successfully promote their founders and other worthy members; for, securing more saints meant increased prestige, influence in Church politics, better applicants for membership, and higher donations and bequests (Ferrero, 2002). Similarly, the operation of the lay confraternities also relied on competitive incentives: the groups and individual militants who signaled themselves by outstanding performance were rewarded with influence and privilege in the local society and in the Church organization, while at the same time advancing overall Church interests.…”

The Cult of Martyrs

“…Early Christianity was beset by excessive, unnecessary sacrifice of lives, both in the mainline church (discussed in detail in the next section) and in several deviant, radical sects such as the Montanists (Klawiter 1980;Trevett 1996, 121-29, 176-84) and the Donatists (Frend 1971): decentralized cult was too strong (Ferrero 2006). Thereafter, in the mainline Western church, a secular shift to centralized canonization by the popes occurred, both for martyrs and saints in general, which gradually brought the cult under church control-something that makes sense only if the cult itself had been judged excessive in the earlier period (Delooz 1969;Ferrero 2002). This shift was a controversial affair that began in the High Middle Ages and came to a head with the Counter-Reformation.…”

“…A saint may be anything, including martyrs as a subset. To sharply differentiate between martyr and saint one needs a bureaucratic procedure to process cases, which is what the Roman Catholic Church has: a martyr is someone who chose to die for the faith when this was not inevitable, not somebody caught in the crossfire; a saint is everything else but dying for the faith (see the discussion in Ferrero 2002). We will see these distinctions in action in section Christian Martyrs: The Cult versus the Hereafter Hypothesis.…”