Competition for Sainthood and the Millennial Church

The Roman Catholic Church is certainly foremost among the few human institutions that have proven able to survive and thrive for over a millennium. This plain fact in itself invites analysis, given the paucity of like examples. One might note that most of the other millennial institutions in existence are themselves churches or organized religions, testifying to the endurance of religious sentiment across human history. Yet the Catholic Church is unique among religions in the degree of centralization of belief and behavior, a centralization which seems to have steadily increased to this day; and given the extent and intensity of the challenges it has had to withstand by contestants and competitors from within and without over the centuries, the church’s apparent prosperity as it enters its third millennium is all the more puzzling. To the believer, such a remarkable accomplishment will simply be testimony to the fact that the church embodies the Truth, which is bound to prevail over error. But to the scholar committed to the paradigm of rational choice it raises the question of how the church has been able to overcome the tendencies to ossification and decay that seem to be inherent in all centralized institutions in the course of time. Judging by Iannaccone’s (1998) thorough survey, such a basic question seems not to have been asked in the young but burgeoning field of economics of religion. This paper is a first attempt to address the question. In a nutshell, our approach is to view the church as a bureaucracy of salvation, and to look for the inner competitive elements that alone can keep a bureaucracy going.