Vatican Offering Cyber Monday 50% Off Sale On All Indulgences

Even though far more Catholics shopped online than in churches on Black Friday weekend, they are apparently not done yet.

A new EOTT survey released Sunday estimates that some 67-million Roman Catholics will shop online for their remission of temporal punishment in purgatory due for sins after absolution on Cyber Monday. That’s up only slightly from last year’s 65-million shoppers.

With Walmart and Amazon recently entering the Cyber Monday indulgence “game,” the Church is now offering heavy discounts as well, not only online but, more crucially, in churches. That move, which reflects how penitents shopped for forgiveness in 2016, is also meant to lower the stress of the Vatican website, which last year buckled under the intense eSpiritual-commerce pressure that naturally comes with Cyber Monday.

The evidence of the migration of “church shopping” to eSpiritual-commerce is incontrovertible: Eternal Fortune Magazine told EOTT on Sunday that eSpiritual-commerce sales between Thanksgiving and Saturday rose 13.7% to top $6.1 billion in new indulgences.

“The brick-and-mortar churches have made a big leap with their online efforts this year,” USCCB analyst Devin Thomas told EOTT yesterday. “They’re starting to get it. The USCCB says 63% of Black Friday indulgences placed on their website came from mobile devices…something we believe shows Catholics are growing more comfortable with pushing the “forgive me” button on smartphones.