I’m a sucker for charts and graphs, so this preliminary study on “The Economics of Sainthood” had plenty to entertain me. The authors explain their purpose:
Saint-making has been a major activity of the Catholic Church for centuries. The pace of sanctifications has picked up noticeably in the last several decades under the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Our goal is to apply social-science reasoning to understand the Church’s choices on numbers and characteristics of saints, gauged by location and socioeconomic attributes of the persons designated as blessed.
In some cases, what they found confirms what one might have expected — for one, the drastic increase in the annual rate of beatifications and canonizations for the popes of the last 50 or so years:
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They speculate that Benedict’s canonization rate is higher than John Paul II’s simply because of the sheer number of blesseds that John Paul left his predecessor — there are currently 371 blesseds awaiting canonization:
Other interesting trends included the decrease in the number of years that elapsed between a person’s death and his beatification or canonization — a number that has dropped most sharply under (surprise!) Benedict and John Paul II. Also, the fraction of male canonizations has fallen through the centuries — from around 80% to something closer to a 50-50 split — though the greater percentage of saints are still “urban dwellers” with some degree of “formal schooling.”
This last chart may have been the most interesting to me — it shows the geographical distribution of saints, based on their location at their time of death:
What is up with all those Italian saints? Their share has been on the decline, but they still hold a surprisingly large corner of the sanctity market.
Finally, a warning about “saint-making fatigue”:
Another result is the significantly negative coefficient on pope’s tenure, given by the coefficient -0.0229 (s.e.=0.0095) in Table 3, column 1. This result implies that a one-standard deviation increase in tenure (8.5 years in Table 2) reduces the canonization rate by 0.2 per year. Thus, there is a little evidence that popes experience saint-making fatigue as their tenure in office lengthens.
Plenty more facts and figures in the complete paper here.
[H/t Marginal Revolution via First Thoughts]
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