The HolyPhone Confessional Crisis
Page 23
For the first time Davide had a glimmer of sympathy for Caterina, seeing that Conor could also be a pain in the butt and that she was basically responding in kind.
The lingering tension was broken by the arrival of the cappuccini and the dolci, which proved to be both plain warm croissants and ones filled with a yellowy, sugary-looking cream substance. This time Conor and Caterina grabbed the latter before Davide could move.
“I love these,” puffed Caterina, devouring the pastry, much like the dog would have done with the steak.
“While you two stuff yourselves, I’ll continue. Where was I?”
“At the end of the confession process in the VCCC,” responded Conor, eating in a more measured fashion.
“Can I have your dolce if you are not having one?” asked Caterina, looking hopefully at Davide.
“All right, yes you can. But next time order more. It’s just as well that I had some fruit earlier, bought from that very same supermarket Conor will be visiting.”
“I’m not sending him. He is volunteering to go, and to pay.”
“On that happy note, which accords wonderfully with the real subject matter in hand, I’ll try to continue. As I was saying, if a sinner does not want to contribute, they do not have to. The priest gives absolution and the confession finishes. In system terms the priest closes the call centre session, which in turn terminates the Santofonino connection, showing a message that it is ready for the next penitent. Then the process repeats.
“If, however, the sinner says they wish to make a contribution of, of let’s say $25, the sinner keys the amount into a special field on the Santofonino screen, which transmits the amount to the VCCC. Two things happen next.
“The first is that the VCCC receives notification of the amount, makes a calculation and suggests to the confessor’s screen the appropriate reduction in the penance to, say, five Lord’s Prayers and five recitals of the Rosary with no reading of Chapter 5 of St Mark’s Gospel.
“The confessor can accept this or can change it, depending on his discretion. He is guided by the confessor’s sense of how repentant the sinner is. By the way, the confessor cannot ask for more money to reduce the penance once the reduction has been offered over the link to the Santofonino. Equally the sinner does not have chance to increase their offer in order to obtain swifter forgiveness or lesser penances. These were points emphatically made to me.
“The second thing that happens has, I think, more relevance for us. The amount offered by the sinner is sent back to the Santofonino and the confessor invites the sinner to pay — by MasterCard, Visa, PayPal or by SinCard. The latter, incidentally, is the name given to prepaid cards that anybody can buy at selected supermarkets, tabacchi, or even in the Vatican Museum Art shop, much like you buy a gift card in a department store. This has a fixed value that reduces as you volunteer to pay.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you?” asked Conor. “You can buy SinCards in ordinary shops? I simply don’t believe it.”
Caterina interjected: “And you cannot buy them in churches. Why not?”
“It really is true. SinCard sales are flourishing and are also issued through special arrangements with a few selected companies offering gift cards, like El Corte Ingles sells in Spain or Harrods sells in London. They even said that someone had suggested using the Apple Store or Amazon, which accept Gift Cards for purchases made online via their stores. Apparently this is still a step too far for the powers-that-be in the Vatican. But it may yet come.”
“Buying SinCards with an Apple logo. That really is lateral thinking. I guess the next step will be to buy virtual SinCards through the Internet that you’d use from your own smartphone to talk to the Santofonino.”
“You may laugh, Caterina,” replied Davide. “Something like that is already being discussed, though it’s still at an early stage. Anyhow, I digress yet again.
“Once the sinner has keyed in his payment details two electronic messages go out from the Santofonino. The first goes back to the confessor via the VCCC system. He only sees on his screen that the payment is being processed. The second goes to an entirely separate set of specialised systems, in fact three of them per VCCC.
“These special systems receive the message with the payment amount and credit card details and then randomly assign that card transaction to one of at least three acquiring banks in the country of the Santofonino. This is in effect asking for approval of the payment via traditional credit card processing just as would happen when paying your hotel bill. Of course, the connection to the credit card processors is fast, meaning the delay for authorisation that we often experience in shops or restaurants doesn’t happen. There’s no need to wait for a connection for each sin payment because there is an always-on high speed data-link in place. Of course all this is hidden as well as separate from both sinner and confessor.
“Within one or two seconds most payments are either authorised or denied. If payment is denied then the confessor sees a message and will invite the sinner to try another method that will either work or not. The default, if no payment obtains authorisation, is to go back to the original penances with no transfer of money.
“You understand?”
As before, Conor and Caterina nodded agreement.
“You nod but I think this is another point where we may need to think. While most authorisations occur within the planned one or two seconds, some do not. What happens here is not wholly clear to me. When I asked I was told that the presumption is that an authorisation will eventually happen. The VCCC’s experience is that the failure rate is so low it enables the Vatican to negotiate special rates with the credit card payment processors, an area you might want to look at, Conor?”
“You know, this reminds me of an example discussed at a California workshop I once attended,” chipped in Caterina. “The example came from a major US telephone company, back when you paid for telephone calls by punching in what was in effect a telephone credit card number, though this was only useful for making calls on that one network. What happened was that you or I would go to a public phone and call a designated 800 number. When this answered you put in the telephone number you wished to call followed by the number of your special phone credit card. As a caller you want the connection to go through as soon as possible. In practice what happened was that some figure like 90 per cent or so cleared within half a second. But some proportion always took longer. The issue the phone company faced was that this might be another second or several seconds, so what should it do? I remember the decision and its reasoning well. To a telephone company a call costs almost nothing once it has invested in all the equipment and cabling and computers. It decided it was better to keep customers happy by making the connection after a second, which was barely noticeable to the caller, even if the authorisation ultimately failed. In practice, if I remember correctly, most delayed authorisations came back cleared with only a minority finally failing.”
“So what you’re saying, Caterina, is that the marginal cost to the telephone company was minimal. Making a connection for those calls that did not obtain authorisation within your half-second was an acceptable business cost because there were so few that finally failed?”
“Exactly, Conor. Thinking on it, there was one extra aspect, which is not dissimilar to the VCCC. For the telephone company each call was unique, with no linkage to any other call, even though the caller was using the same telephone credit card …”
“So one free call did not mean the next one would also be free even when using the same card number. Have I understood correctly? Hmm. I want to absorb this.
“Davide, I think you could have an interesting point here. Caterina, mark it down but now I need my break, and a few minutes to consider. I’ll be back within ten minutes, okay?”
Not waiting for an answer, Conor headed for the door.
“That looks like a man in dire need of a bathroom,” observed Caterina.
Davide agreed.
Tuesday, Monteverde
“Oh good. The transfer of all my data has finished and is now encrypted on the server. I’m going to install some software, if I may? This is my own creation. I have found it useful for analysing lots of information.”
“You bought the systems. They’re yours to play with. Providing you don’t do anything to my laptop, I’ve no problem with what you install.”
Davide thought he sounded a little abrupt and even shrill about his laptop. On the other hand it was the tool through which he made his living. He couldn’t do without it. Even being parted for a day could be agony.
Caterina did not seem to notice anything amiss with how he had responded. She just carried on, entering commands into the system and starting what appeared to be more automated work.
“Don’t worry,” she said over her shoulder, “my systems are clean, virus-free and constantly scanned for anything unusual. That is something the ACC drummed into me from the start.”
Conor reappeared.
“Let’s resume. Carry on, Davide.”
“Before turning to how the financial aspects of the Santofonino work, let me quickly add some details about the systems. As mentioned before the back end technology does not look especially novel. Everything seems to be running on standard Dell blade servers, from what I could see when they took me into the data centre. There were two physically distinct clusters of systems, the bigger one to support the call centre activities, and the smaller one devoted to the credit card processing. To my eye there was nothing that stood out as special. You have to remember that the number of transactions — if you can call a confession a transaction, though seemingly everybody running the systems does — is not that large. With 750 priests, perhaps 80 per cent are actually hearing a confession at any one time, and at slow periods it may be much less. At most a confessor can handle between ten to twelve calls per hour. From what I heard this means that the VCCC processes at most some eight thousand confessions per hour. Not all of these will produce a voluntary contribution. By banking standards this is not big, though it could grow much bigger as more of South America and Africa or Asia come on board.
“As another aside, I heard of one entertaining possibility, well at least to me — though you may deeply disapprove, Conor. As I described, most priests can only hear about ten confessions per hour. All too frequently, however, some sinners want to talk, not so much confess but to have someone to speak with …”
“Little old ladies, I bet,” muttered Conor, to the obvious disapproval of Caterina.
“You are sexist and ageist!” she snapped.
“Irrespective of that, one of the challenges described to me was that this number of confessions an hour per confessor, what they called the Confession Throughput Rate or CTR, is a major practical constraint. If it could be doubled or tripled, to twenty or thirty confessions per hour, then fewer priests would be needed in call centres, which could become smaller and cost less.
“This seems impossible, however. There are too many ritual aspects to confession that the Vatican insists must be observed. One priest, nevertheless, proposed an innovation although it was immediately shot down.”
“Which was?” asked Caterina, intrigued. Consideration of mechanisms and how they worked was music to her ears. “By the way, do you know what operating system those blades run? No, not now: tell me later.”
“Fine. The innovation was to suggest that when a penitent enters a confessional he or she would hear from the Santofonino the ritual words of a priest inviting the sinner to tell his sins. Then the sinner would see a menu of sins and be asked to choose all those relevant. At this point no connection would yet have been made to the VCCC.”
“You mean press 1 for adultery, 2 for beating your partner, 3 for robbing a bank, 4 for swearing?” suggested Conor. Davide nodded. “I don’t believe it. That would be far too close to an example I once heard on a US radio show. Apparently some government office in Florida had a telephone answering system that responded with something like, ‘Press 1 for English, 2 for Spanish, and 3 if you can’t count.’ ”
At this all three sat helplessly giggling for some minutes. The possibilities were immense and ridiculous.
Once they had recovered some poise, Davide continued: “This is exactly what the priest suggested. His argument was that if the sinner preselected the sins that they had committed, then these could be submitted together to the VCCC before talking to an actual confessor. The VCCC could calculate the penances required and put the information on the Call Centre screen for the confessor with the intention being that the time to complete each confession would drop by more than half. He even suggested that the sinner enter the amount they thought would be appropriate in advance, along with the payment details, so that all the confessor would have to do was agree the net amount of penances to be performed. That at least was his theory.
“It failed to move forward for two reasons. One I’ve given already, namely the importance of the rituals aspect. Care to guess the other?”
“Too antiseptic,” said Conor.
“Too many sin types to index and offer in a simple enough form,” said Caterina.
“It was more like what Caterina suggested, though what Conor said was apparently a third objection. It turns out that the creation of a SinDex simple enough to navigate was found to be nearly impossible. There are, apparently, too many sins as well as grades and degrees of sin. Choosing from lists was thought just too complicated to be practical, even if the time pay-off was attractive.
“A different variant more recently suggested was to use something like Apple’s Siri, with the sinner in effect confessing to the Santofonino, which would digest and pre-process the sins against the SinDex before a connection was made to the VCCC for absolution. This is being actively investigated, though it sounds horrid to me.”
Caterina said, “One can never believe what technology can do. I guess someone will come up with a Confession App for Android and the iPhone.”
“No, that was seriously considered; but one of the attractions of the Santofonino concept is that it brings people into churches, which keeps these and the priests relevant. Conversely, though a Confession App would not too be difficult to produce, it would, or so many argued, devalue confession especially if it became a bathroom ritual.”
“You mean the sense of sanctity would be lost if you are sitting on the john? I can relate to that.”
The three of them again paused to consider. There were dimensions to the Santofonino that they had never imagined. Probably there would be more strange possibilities to come.
At length Caterina said, “Shall we go out for lunch? It’s been a long morning understanding even the basics. We don’t have to take long.” .
Tuesday, Monteverde
“That was not the greatest meal I have had in Italy. I should have asked José Antonio for somewhere that might be good nearby. Anyhow, now it’s time to consider what happens with the Santofonino payments.” Davide had not had a good lunch. He had presumed that the pasta would be safe and simple. It was certainly not the latter and he hoped there was nothing that would make him sick. His penne had been swimming in what tasted more like engine oil than any decent sauce.
Caterina was waiting with her laptop reopened to take notes while Conor doodled on paper. The good news was that the flip-board had arrived over lunch and was now ready for action.
“You will recall I explained that after the sinner authorised a payment two messages emerge from the Santofonino, the second to the VCCC indicating that the payment processing was starting and the first to the separate payment system that connects to the global financial networks. As I also described, once the payment message arrives at the payment cluster it is randomly assigned to an acquiring bank or card processing organisation. This is how each transactio
n enters the global financial system. Remember that in this scenario the Vatican is to all intents and purposes a merchant like a restaurant or department store. The Vatican has signed multiple merchant agreements in each country with the likes of MasterCard, Visa, Amex, PayPal and certain country-specific institutions where necessary. Plus there are the Sincards.
“Once a sin payment receives authorisation from the card holding organisation, the card processing cluster tells the VCCC and it tells the confessor that payment is approved and absolution can occur. For the sinner and the confessor this is the end of the Santofonino confession process. But it is not the end of the financial process.
“As with most credit card processing, the acquiring bank, the one the merchant talks to, requests payment from the card holding organisation. The latter places the charge, say for twenty-five euros, on the card holder’s account — under the name ‘Roman Catholic Church’ or whatever is the local language equivalent — and passes the payment through the credit card network to the acquiring bank. This is pretty much, as far as I could determine, as you would expect for buying gasoline or food.
“In normal circumstances the acquiring bank or organisation then pays the account of the merchant, subtracting any individual agreed transaction fees. In the case of the Santofonino these transfers go into an account at the acquiring bank held in the name of the Vatican after deducting those agreed charges. One of the areas, Conor, where you might like to focus is on whether these charges are reasonable and what they are made up of. I was told that the average rejection total is lower than for most merchants, even huge ones like airlines that do much of their business by credit card. As far as the VCCC financial staff is concerned this is an adequate test of reasonableness, which demonstrates that the Vatican is being treated fairly. They do review this regularly and have a policy to renegotiate annually.”