When Homo Erectus beat Neanderthal over the head with mastodon bones to secure the best watering hole and hunting grounds: market share.
When McDonald’s offered Newman’s Own Coffee and Starbucks launched Pike Place Roast and Dunkin Donuts introduced hot pumpkin latte: market share.
When your wife has most of the covers and all of the pillows in the middle of the night: market share.
And so, it should come as no surprise that an organization we least associate with hard-headed, market-driven, commercial competition—like our friendly neighborhood church—is still really much about: market share.
Yes, saving souls. Surely, helping the needy. Of course, producing the Christmas pageant. But make no mistake: organized religion is also about market share.
Witness the recent decision by 82-year-old Pope Benedict XV to amend Vatican laws to make it easier for Anglicans to become Roman Catholic. One of the Pope’s supporters called this decision “ecumenical dialogue.”
You say “potato.” I say “market share.”
It’s hard, living in Massachusetts (where some of the worst of the clergy sex-scandal played out, and where the Catholic church has been forced to consolidate), not to see this as an attempt to stem the tide of disaffected Catholics migrating to the Episcopal, Lutheran and other mainline Protestant churches. Or perhaps even to win them back.
And Episcopalians, of course, are going through their ugly, once-a-generation split, this time over the ordination of female priests and an openly gay bishop. So they would appear to be an especially good market segment which to target, ah, enter into ecumenical dialogue.
The Ten Commandments forbid stealing. They do not, however, forbid inviting, welcoming, luring or tantalizing. They most certainly do not forbid “ecumenical dialogue.”
So, the Pope has offered a big idea, borrowing from Roger Enrico, the former head of Pepsico, who operated under the credo that "Big changes to big things is the way you build a business."
Of course, the Pope’s decision isn’t quite as impressive as Paul telling the gentiles they didn’t need to be circumcised to become Christian. That was a big idea. Still, the new ordinariates will allow Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Pope while continuing to practice a large part of their traditional liturgy.
If the Powers That Be are watching, they can’t be too pleased by all this. Pepsi may want to “own a market,” but it feels a little unbecoming for organized religion to be quite so transparent. As senior devil Screwtape wrote to his nephew and demon-in-training, Wormwood, "The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell, and we must keep them doing so.”
0 Response to "Holy Market Share!"
Post a Comment