But being a Protestant institution for 400 years, they apparently now feel the need to 'diversify' into Catholicism. Perhaps they seek to outdo the equally profound 1667 inquiry by Protestant Richard Baxter:
"Angels can contract their whole substance into one part of space, and therefore have not '*partes extra partes*'. Whereupon it is that the Schoolmen have questioned how many Angels may sit upon the point of a Needle?"
Great progress indeed.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> "Saints Marching in, 1590-2009"
>
> NBER Working Paper No. w16769
>
> ROBERT J. BARRO, Harvard University - Department of Economics, National
> Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
> Email: rbarro at harvard.edu
> RACHEL M. MCCLEARY, Harvard Kennedy School
> Email: rachel_mccleary at harvard.edu
>
> The Catholic Church has been making saints for centuries, typically in a
> two-stage process featuring beatification and canonization. We analyze
> determinants of rates of beatification and canonization (for non-martyrs)
> over time and across six world regions. The research uses a recently
> assembled data set on numbers and characteristics of beatifieds and saints
> chosen since 1590. We classify these blessed persons regionally in
> accordance with residence at death. These data are combined with time-series
> estimates of regional populations of Catholics, broadly-defined Protestants,
> Orthodox, and Evangelicals (mostly a sub-set of Protestants). Regression
> estimates indicate that the canonization rate depends strongly on the number
> of candidates, gauged by a region’s stock of beatifieds who have not yet
> been canonized. The beatification rate depends positively on the region’s
> stock of persons previously canonized. The last two popes, John Paul II and
> Benedict XVI (the only non-Italians in our sample), are outliers, choosing
> blessed persons at a much higher rate than that of their predecessors. Since
> around 1900, the naming of blessed persons seems to reflect a response by
> the Catholic Church to competition from Protestantism or Evangelicalism. We
> find no evidence, at least since 1590, of competition between the Catholic
> and Orthodox Churches.
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-- Peter Fay