“Octavian was declared a god shortly after his death.” This is from the profile for Octavian that I just edited for the Western Civ I book. Being declared a “god” in this case seems something like beatification in the Roman church. Thinking of this, the obvious occurred to me: it’s called the Roman church because it grew out of the Roman Empire and was/is centered in Rome. Surely after Edict of Milan all notions of Roman reality didn’t get subsumed under the Christian worldview. In fact, the Christian worldview grew out of this Roman world, so it stands to reason that certain habits/notions from Roman religion persisted in Christianity. Hence it seems logical that this ritual of declaring this person or that person a god might carry over into the Roman church in the form of beatification. The differences, I’m sure, are enormous, and I’m not so naïve as to suggest that it’s a one-to-one relationship. However, the basic notion is the same.
That being said, even if it were empirical, historical fact that the idea of beatification grew out of the Roman deification of its rulers (which is, to be sure, not strictly a Roman notion and probably exists in cultures around the world — Japan and ancient Egypt come immediately to mind), that would not change Roman Catholic practice. Once it’s been so entrenched, how could anyone change it? Even if Pope John Paul II said, “Look, we’ve come to the realization that this beatification thing is nothing but a carry-over from pagan Roman religion,” no-one would buy it. They’d want to chalk it up to senility. Of course if the Pope said this as a holy pronouncement, then papal infallibility would kick in and then we’d have all kinds of cognitive dissonance.