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8. The corrupting influence of commercialism has all but destroyed the sacredness of the symbols of the Church. Her counter-cultural religious heritage is fast losing its stabilizing influence upon American and international cultures. Michael Bodde argues, “?the “Big Five” churches in Britain (the Anglican Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Methodist, Baptist, and United Reformed churches), which decided that their appeal would be increased if all cruciform images were eliminated from advertising even (or especially) at Easter. For their part, corporate ad agencies are eager to work with churches; marketing professors have noted with interest that “the clergy seems to be more open to advertising than the general public.” Churches, in the eyes of ad execs, represent “viable potential clients for advertising services,” since they are among the largest groups in the under-served (by ad agencies, anyway) nonprofit sector,” (The World Journal).

9. Many of the religious symbols, signs, stories and information, once held sacred by the faithful as artifacts of worship, are now very much the shared property of culture industries. The Vatican entered a partnership with IBM to digitize the entire holdings of the Vatican Library. “IBM is spending $1 million a year to scan 20,000 images in a multiyear project; the resulting information will become part of the IBM Digital Library, which will combine the Vatican collection with those of other major institutional archives,” (Michael Budde, pg.8; The World Journal). In its idolatry, the culture industry uses the sacred artifacts of the church to worship the false gods of secularism, humanism, materialism and capitalism at the altar of commercialism.

10. In their relentless pursuit of lucrative opportunities to make profits, the clergy is preaching a strange brand of evangelicalism and are willing to pay the costs of losing their own souls. There is no prebend for these fanatical commercial-evangelists; they simply want all they can get. The culture industry, in joint venture with the church, is paving the road for their conglomerates to become transcontinental behemoths with increased power in the realms of commercialism and capitalism on a global scale. They will stop at nothing short of multicultural transformations of every nation on the planet.

11. Regarding commercialism in the church, the bible says, “Entering the Temple, Jesus drove out all who were buying and selling there, and overturned the money-changers’ tables and the seats of the pigeon-dealers,” (Matthew 21:12, Richard Weymouth, The New Testament In Modern Speech). Commercialism in the early Church was taboo. Jesus, The High Priest and founder of the Church, overturned the tables of the capitalist and banned them from using the courtyard of the church for a marketplace. Today, church leaders have welcomed the culture industry to set up their money tables right smack-dab in the aisles of the Church.

12. To some, the culture industry has become the ’still small voice’ reassuring the modern-day prophets of the church. To others, they are like a country preacher spitting out his message of hell-fire and brimstone frightening the Church with a hellish nightmare of lean coffers. Then, with the cunning of a serpent, they beguile religious leaders with the promise of prosperity but only through the satanic power of contemporary commercialism and at the cost of compromising the sacredness of their religious cultural symbols.

13. The Roman Catholic Church alone influences more than one billion people worldwide and thus is a powerful non-profit, counter-cultural, religious institution. In the person of Pope John Paul II, the Catholic church has a worldwide media personality with high visibility and popularity ratings in multinational markets and media, which is a cultural industrialist heaven. This is why for-profit global culture industries have given the Catholic church a significant role to play now and in the future. Like Colin Powell and Newt Gingrich, Pope John Paul II has entered the ranks of big-advance authors employed by global publishers. “Based on surprisingly strong sales of the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church, Alfred A. Knopf in 1994 paid a $9 million advance for the rights to Crossing the Threshold of Hope, a collection of Pope John Paul’s spiritual and philosophical introspection,” (Michael Budde, The World Journal).

14. Whether other churches will have any significant role to play depends on how much money the Catholic Church make for the powerful culture-transforming, for-profit global culture industries.

15. The joint venture between the Catholic Church and the culture industry made possible not only a worldwide promotion of the Pope’s publication, but simultaneous releases in “?21 languages and 35 countries, with extensive public relations campaigns in major cities coordinated by the Italian publisher Arnaldo Mondadori Editore, which acquired the worldwide rights to Crossing the Threshold (Michael Budde, The World Journal). Industry experts project worldwide grosses from the papal blockbuster of between $100 million and $200 million.

16. More recently, and much more ambitiously, Michael Budde wrote, “?the Vatican has authorized the production of merchandise “inspired” by the Vatican Library’s collection of more than one million books, 100,000 prints and drawings, and other holdings, and has taken on a corporate partner for the venture. Spokespersons estimate initial licensing revenue to the Vatican of $5 million a year for the first five years,

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