Outsourcing, the Vatican, and the separation of church and state

During a recent conference in Madrid celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Bretton Woods Agreements, the IMF´s Economic Counsellor, Raghuram Rajan, prasied the benefits of outsourcing as a means of promoting global economic growth.

The catholic church seems to have taken this message quite to heart. Faced with an acute shortage of priests, the Catholic church has decided to outsource some of its peripheral activities to clergymen in India, thus allowing priests in developed countries to concentrate on the church´s “core business”. Daniel Drenzer points us to an article in the NY Times that highlights the effort of the Catholic Church to unburden its overworked priests.

With Roman Catholic clergy in short supply in the United States, Indian priests are picking up some of their work, saying Mass for special intentions, in a sacred if unusual version of outsourcing.
American, as well as Canadian and European churches, are sending Mass intentions, or requests for services like those to remember deceased relatives and thanksgiving prayers, to clergy in India....

What, you ask, will the priests do with all this extra free time? If the Bush administration has its way, priests will use their suddenly cleared schedules to increase their levels of political activism. Among other things, the Bush administration would like to see priests deny communion to Catholic political candidates who take church-disapproved stances on various controversial topics including abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research.