Pope Benedict will grant Nancy Pelosi an audience tomorrow. The notoriously conservative Pope is apparently granting legitimacy to Nancy Pelosi's fraudulent misrepresentation of church father's views on abortion--Thomas Aquinas and Augustine were pro-choice.

I've long been interested in the dynamics of religious movements, which nowadays is also the dynamics of political movements.

Churches, like any large voluntary organization, have at their core a contradiction. In order to attract newcomers, they must have low barriers to entry. They must be unintimidating, friendly, and compatible with the culture they are a part of. In order to retain their membership, however, they need to have an identity distinct from that culture. They need to give their followers a sense of community—and community, exclusivity, a distinct identity are all, inevitably, casualties of growth. As an economist would say, the bigger an organization becomes, the greater a free-rider problem it has. If I go to a church with five hundred members, in a magnificent cathedral, with spectacular services and music, why should I volunteer or donate any substantial share of my money? What kind of peer pressure is there in a congregation that large? If the barriers to entry become too low—and the ties among members become increasingly tenuous—then a church as it grows bigger becomes weaker.

Well you can't get lower than zero, so I guess that Roman Catholic church is near death.