The Lucrative Business of Sainthood

For most of organized religion - regardless of the faith - the three pillars of the faith business come down to power, control and not least money. And few institutional religious focus on these three pillars more than the Roman Catholic Church, especially in terms of money and control. All power flows from Rome in a model not too different from that of the Roman Empire upon which the Church's power structure came to be modeled. And as for money, as in the days that led up to the Reformation, the Vatican is all about money and ways to generate money - including making saints as a lure for pilgrims to come to Rome where they can be separated from some of their hard earned cash. And the master of utilizing sainthood to benefit the Church's bottom line (and by ripple effect the merchants and hoteliers of the City of Rome) was John Paul II who has now been beatified himself. I'm on the record against the raising up of a man who knowingly allowed and/or sought to cover up the molestation of countless thousands of children and youths. Such is anything but saintly behavior. A piece in New York Review looks at the monetary side of John Paul II's sainthood factory if you will. Here are some highlights:
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Do Romans really feel the way [Mayor] Alemanno thinks they should about fasttracking John Paul II for sainthood? Roman merchants, at least, are keeping all their bases covered. Newsstands offer 2012 calendars with “Saint Giovanni Paolo II,” John Paul biographies, John Paul key chains, John Paul refrigerator magnets
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It was, after all, John Paul himself who discovered how lucrative the mass encouragement of sainthood can be, both for the city and for the Church. Over his two-and-a-half-decade papacy, he beatified 1,340 people and canonized 483—more than his predecessors had done in four centuries, attracting millions of Catholic pilgrims to the Vatican in the process. His Vicar for Rome, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, supervised the creation of a bus tour called “Christian Rome” modeled on the city-run Archeobus, which led from the Forum down the Appian Way; now the yellow open-top buses of Roma Cristiana are a huge business . . . .
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The way Rome’s residents actually feel about the late pope depends on their own experience. For Eastern Europeans, he symbolizes the great change in their own lives. Romanians now make up the largest foreign community in Italy, having exchanged the Soviet bloc for the European Union. Their ranks in Italy include a large population of Romas, many of whom, desperately poor, live in makeshift shanty towns underneath viaducts, amid the rushes in the flood plain of the Tiber, in the bushes of the city’s parks. . . . For these people, John Paul is a powerful symbol. Italians and native Romans, many of whom saw the late pope in person, run the gamut from faithful Catholics to rabid anticlericalists; opinions show the same range among most of the foreign communities in Rome outside the former Eastern bloc.