Robert Tilton and the Prayer Cloth

← Back to People

Who Robert Tilton Is

Robert Tilton is an American televangelist who pastored the Word of Faith World Outreach Center in the Dallas area of Texas and hosted Success-N-Life, a daily television programme carried by stations across the United States through the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Tilton preached a Word of Faith message in which words spoken in faith, backed by a financial pledge he called a vow of faith, were said to release God's provision into a believer's circumstances. He asked viewers to telephone the programme with their prayer requests and to send those requests by mail, and he told them he prayed over what they sent.

In November 1991 the ABC News programme Primetime Live broadcast an investigation into how that mail was handled. The report, built on material gathered with the Trinity Foundation, a Dallas watchdog organisation led by Ole Anthony, said that prayer requests had been recovered from commercial waste after the money enclosed with them was removed. Tilton denied the characterisation, answered it on his own broadcasts, and pursued litigation against ABC. Success-N-Life lost stations, and by the mid-1990s the daily national programme in the form viewers knew had ended.

This page covers one man. It sets out who Tilton is, what he taught, what the 1991 investigation reported, what he said in reply, what the public record does and does not establish, and what the Catholic Church actually teaches about blessed objects and about money in ministry. Where a matter was never resolved, the page says so rather than filling the gap.

Success-N-Life and How the Programme Worked

Success-N-Life was a daily half-hour television programme built around Tilton preaching to camera, and its structure explains almost everything about the ministry that followed from it. Tilton bought time on independent stations and cable channels across the United States, in slots that were cheap because few people were watching, chiefly late at night and early in the morning. That buying pattern reached an audience with particular characteristics: people awake at three in the morning, often alone, often unwell, often worried about money.

The programme did not depend on a congregation in a hall. It depended on a telephone number and a mailing address. Tilton preached, described conditions and troubles his viewers might be facing, and directed them to call the number on the screen. Operators took the calls. The caller gave a name, an address and a need. That call created a record, and the record created a mailing.

The mailing is the part of the machine that matters. A viewer who telephoned once would receive letters, and the letters continued. They referred to the caller's own stated need, they promised prayer, they frequently enclosed an object of some kind, and they asked for a gift. A donor who gave once received more letters than a donor who had not given. The economics of direct mail are ordinary and are used by charities everywhere: a responsive name is worth more than a cold one, and a proven donor is contacted again. What distinguished this operation was the content of the promise attached to the ask.

Tilton's on-air manner was rapid, physical and highly emotional. He would pray aloud in tongues on camera, weep, point at the lens, and speak directly to individuals he said God had shown him. Viewers who called described feeling personally addressed. The programme was engineered to produce that feeling at scale, and the mail that followed reinforced it in writing.

What Robert Tilton Taught

Tilton taught a form of the Word of Faith message, and that message deserves to be stated as its own teachers state it before anyone answers it. Word of Faith teachers hold that God has bound himself to promises set out in Scripture, that faith is a spiritual force which becomes effective when it is spoken aloud, and that a believer who speaks in line with those promises and acts on them can expect God to honour them in health, in provision and in circumstance. They cite Mark 11:23 on speaking to the mountain, Romans 4:17 on God calling into existence the things that do not exist, and 3 John 2 on prospering and being in health. Many who hold this teaching are sincere, give generously themselves, and would say that faith is directed at God rather than at money.

The teaching about giving follows from this. Word of Faith preachers commonly teach seed faith: a gift given to God's work is a seed, and a seed produces a harvest greater than itself. They cite Luke 6:38 on giving and receiving, and 2 Corinthians 9:6 on sowing sparingly and sowing bountifully. In its milder forms this is an exhortation to generosity that most Christian traditions would recognise. In its stronger forms it becomes a transaction with a stated rate of return.

Tilton preached the stronger form. His broadcasts tied a specific pledge to a specific expected outcome, and he framed the pledge itself as the act of faith that made the outcome possible. The name he gave it was the vow of faith.

This site has a full treatment of the doctrine and of the Catholic answer to it, and this page will not repeat that argument. For the teaching itself, its biblical texts, its major figures and where Catholic teaching parts company with it, read our guide to the prosperity gospel and what the Church teaches about wealth.

The Vow of Faith

The vow of faith was Tilton's central appeal, and it is the reason his ministry drew the scrutiny it did. A viewer was asked to pledge a sum to the ministry, to speak the pledge aloud as an act of faith, and to send it. The pledge was presented as the point at which the viewer's own faith became active. A vow of a set figure recurred in the broadcasts, and the thousand dollar vow is the amount most associated with the programme in the reporting of the period.

Sourcing note: the figures and practices described in this section are those reported in mainstream American coverage of the ministry from 1991 onward, principally the ABC News Primetime Live investigation, and in materials published by the Trinity Foundation of Dallas. This page gives no revenue or donor totals for the ministry, because reported estimates from that period vary between sources and cannot be checked here.

Three features of the appeal are worth naming plainly, because they recur in every ministry of this shape.

The first is that the vow was addressed to people in trouble. Late-night television viewers facing illness, debt, an eviction or a broken family are the audience the appeal was designed to reach, and a person in that condition is not in a strong position to weigh a promise. The vow asked for a sum that many of the people watching did not have.

The second is that failure was pre-explained. Where an outcome is tied to the strength of the giver's faith, a gift that produces nothing can always be attributed to the giver rather than to the promise. That structure makes the claim unfalsifiable, and it leaves the disappointed donor with the added burden of believing that the fault lies in his own soul. Scripture does the opposite for the suffering. Job's friends argued that his losses proved a hidden fault in him, and the book ends with God rebuking them (Job 42:7).

The third is that the vow made money the medium of the relationship with God. Paul warned Timothy about teachers who imagine that godliness is a means of gain, and told him that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:5 to 10). Peter wrote of teachers who in their greed exploit believers with fabricated words (2 Peter 2:3). Those texts are not obscure, and they are addressed to exactly this practice.

The Prayer Cloth and Acts 19

The prayer cloth is a piece of fabric a preacher has prayed over and sent to a believer, to be kept, carried, or laid on a sick person, and Tilton's ministry was one of many American ministries that used them. Cloths, oil, and other small objects went out with the mail, often with instructions to use the item, hold it during prayer, and return it or an enclosed slip together with a gift.

The practice has a biblical text behind it, and the text should be read before it is dismissed. Acts 19:11 to 12 records that God did extraordinary miracles through Paul at Ephesus, so that handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were carried to the sick, and their illnesses left them and evil spirits went out of them. Scripture states that this happened. Christians who use prayer cloths appeal to that passage, and they are pointing at something really in the text.

Read the passage to the end of the paragraph, though, and Luke's own framing appears. Luke calls the miracles extraordinary, which marks them as unusual even by the standards of the apostolic ministry he is describing. God is the actor throughout: the cloths carry nothing of their own. And the very next episode, Acts 19:13 to 16, tells of the seven sons of Sceva, itinerant exorcists who tried to use the name of Jesus as a formula they had picked up from Paul, and who were overpowered and driven out of the house naked and wounded. Luke sets a warning against treating holy things as a technique directly beside the account of the cloths. Both passages belong to the same page of Scripture, and a ministry that quotes the first while ignoring the second is quoting selectively.

The Catholic tradition is comfortable with objects that carry a blessing, and it has been for two thousand years. What the Church has always refused is the idea that the object contains a force the user can operate, and the idea that the blessing can be bought. Both refusals are treated below.

The Mail Operation

Tilton's ministry ran a large direct-mail operation, and understanding its mechanics is necessary to understand what the 1991 investigation was actually about. Viewers telephoned a number given on air. Their names, addresses and stated needs were recorded. Letters went out under Tilton's name, referring to the person's situation, promising prayer, often enclosing an object, and asking for a gift. Replies came back to a processing address, and gifts enclosed with them were banked.

Two claims made on air are the ones that mattered. Tilton told viewers that he prayed over the prayer requests they sent him. He described handling them, and he described praying over them personally. That promise was the reason many people wrote. A prayer request is a private thing, and a viewer who writes out an illness, a marriage or a debt and posts it to a stranger is acting on the belief that the stranger will read it and pray.

The second claim is the volume. A national television ministry receiving mail at that scale cannot have one man reading every letter. Mail of that kind is processed by contractors and by banking arrangements built to separate the payment from the paper quickly, because the payment is what the operation runs on. Nothing about that arrangement is unusual or unlawful in itself. The question the investigation raised was what happened to the paper, and whether the promise attached to it was kept.

The 1991 Investigation

The investigation that reached television in November 1991 was reported by ABC News for Primetime Live, the network's newsmagazine, with Diane Sawyer among its correspondents, and it drew on work by the Trinity Foundation of Dallas. The Trinity Foundation was a small Christian organisation led by Ole Anthony that had made a speciality of examining American television ministries, and it had been looking at the Tilton operation's mail handling.

The method was documentary. Investigators recovered material discarded by the businesses that processed the ministry's mail, in commercial waste containers, and examined what had been thrown away. Rubbish placed out for collection is a lawful source of documents in American practice, and it has been used by journalists and by law enforcement for decades. The point of the method is that it produces the actual paper rather than a description of it.

What the investigators reported finding was prayer requests: letters written by viewers, with their names and their stated needs, discarded. The donations that had come with them had been removed and banked. The letters themselves, which Tilton had told his audience he prayed over, were in the trash.

Sourcing note: this section describes the reporting of the ABC News programme Primetime Live broadcast in November 1991 and the material supplied by the Trinity Foundation of Dallas. It reports what those parties said they found. This page does not have independent access to the recovered documents and does not assert facts beyond what that reporting stated.

What the Broadcast Reported

The broadcast placed Tilton's on-air promises next to the physical evidence of what happened to the mail, and that juxtaposition was the whole of its force. Viewers saw Tilton saying he prayed over the letters people sent him. They then saw the letters, recovered from waste, with the money gone.

The report also examined how the ministry solicited: the vow of faith, the objects sent out with instructions, the repeated mailings to people who had already given, and the promises attached to the giving. It set the appeals against the circumstances of the people responding to them, and it interviewed people who had given money and had received nothing they were promised.

Broadcast investigations of this kind are ordinary journalism rather than legal proceedings, and the distinction matters. A network newsmagazine reports; it does not convict. What the programme established is that the network, having examined the ministry's discarded mail and its on-air claims, put a specific account before a national audience and stood behind it. What it did not establish, because a broadcast cannot establish it, is any finding of a court.

Robert Tilton's Response

Tilton rejected the report, and his answer belongs on this page in full. He used his own broadcasts to reply, at length and directly to camera. He maintained that he did pray over the prayer requests sent to him. His account of the discarded paper was that the letters had already been read and prayed over before they were disposed of, and that finding them in waste therefore proved nothing about whether the promise had been kept. He described the investigation as an attack on a Christian ministry and on him personally, and he continued to solicit from his audience while the story ran.

Tilton pursued litigation against ABC over the broadcast. The public record does not show a defamation judgment against the network arising from the report. He has never accepted the characterisation of his mail operation that the programme gave, and his stated position across the years since has remained that his ministry is legitimate and that God works through it.

A reader who wants to be fair has to hold several things at once. Tilton's explanation of the discarded letters is not impossible on its face: mail that has been opened, read and processed does eventually get thrown away, and a promise to pray over a letter does not entail keeping it forever. The investigation's response to that explanation was the scale and the pattern of what was recovered, and the accounts of donors who received the appeals. Nothing in the public record resolves the disagreement with the finality of a verdict. What the record does contain is a national broadcast investigation that stated its findings, a preacher who denied them, litigation that produced no judgment against the broadcaster, and an audience that stopped giving.

Litigation and Official Scrutiny

The years after the broadcast brought civil litigation and official attention, and the outcomes are less dramatic than the coverage. Former donors brought civil suits against Tilton and his organisation in the period following the broadcast, on claims arising from the solicitations and what was promised in them. Civil suits of this kind are commonly dismissed, withdrawn, or settled without any admission of liability, and reported outcomes for the Tilton cases differ between accounts.

State authorities in Texas took an interest in the ministry during the same period. This page states that fact in general terms and gives no case names, docket numbers, dates of filing or outcomes, because those specifics cannot be verified here and a wrong one would be worse than none.

The one point that can be stated with confidence is negative and important. No criminal conviction of Robert Tilton arising from the 1991 broadcast or from the mail ministry appears in the public record. Readers encountering claims that he was imprisoned are reading something the record does not support. An investigation is not a charge, a charge is not a conviction, and a civil settlement is not an admission. Those distinctions protect the innocent, and a Christian site is obliged to keep them even when writing about conduct it regards as indefensible.

What Happened to the Ministry

The national programme did not survive the coverage in the form it had before. Stations dropped Success-N-Life, giving fell, and the daily national broadcast that had carried the ministry through the 1980s ended in the years after the report. Tilton's association with the Dallas church he had pastored also came to an end during that period.

Tilton returned to television afterwards, buying time in late-night and overnight slots on cable channels and continuing to preach and to solicit. The later broadcasts operated on the same commercial logic as the earlier ones: cheap airtime, a telephone number, a mailing list. The audience was smaller and the reach was narrower, and the pattern of the appeal was recognisable to anyone who had watched the earlier programme.

Two things follow from that, and both are worth saying plainly. A televangelist exposed by a national newsmagazine can continue to broadcast, because nothing in American law prevents it and nothing in the structure of paid religious television requires accountability to anybody. And an audience for the appeal remained. The same is true of other figures on this site: Peter Popoff, whose healing crusades were exposed in 1986, returned to television by mail order and was still broadcasting decades later. Exposure removes a career less often than people assume.

The Parody Clips

Many people who search for Robert Tilton first encountered him through parody videos, and the point deserves a short and careful treatment because it distorts what people think they know. In the internet era, clips of Tilton preaching, praying in tongues and contorting his face were re-edited with crude sound effects added, and circulated very widely. The best known series is the one that dubbed flatulence over his broadcasts. That material is comedy made from footage of a real man.

Two things follow. The parodies are not evidence of anything. Mocking a man's face and voice establishes nothing about his mail operation, and a reader who forms a judgment from a joke has formed it on nothing. If Tilton is to be criticised, the criticism has to rest on the documented record, which is why this page spends its length on the 1991 investigation rather than on the clips.

The second thing is that ridicule is not the Christian response to a false teacher. Scripture's response is to name the error, warn the flock, and pray for the man. Paul names Hymenaeus and Alexander and hands them over to be taught not to blaspheme, with correction in view (1 Timothy 1:20). Nothing on this page is a verdict on Robert Tilton's soul, which belongs to God alone.

What This Page Does Not Claim

The record on Robert Tilton has open parts, and honesty about them protects the reader more than confident assertion would. The following are things this page does not say.

This page does not claim that Tilton never prayed over a prayer request. His stated position is that he did, and no court has ruled on it. What the record contains is the investigation's account of discarded letters and Tilton's competing explanation of them.

This page does not claim that Tilton was charged with, or convicted of, any crime arising from these matters. No such conviction appears in the public record.

This page gives no revenue figures, no donor counts and no totals for money raised. Estimates published in the coverage of the period vary, and an unverifiable number would be a fabrication however often it has been repeated.

This page gives no case names, filing dates or outcomes for the civil suits brought by donors, or for any state inquiry, because those specifics cannot be verified here.

This page makes no statement about Robert Tilton's private life or family, which are not matters of public ministry and are excluded on that ground.

This page does not track developments after mid-2026, and it makes no claim about Tilton's current activity, health or circumstances.

This page passes no judgment on the salvation or the interior state of Robert Tilton or of anyone associated with him. That judgment belongs to God (Romans 14:4).

The Catholic Response

Catholic teaching answers the vow of faith at the level of what prayer is, and the answer is older than television. Prayer is a relationship with a Father who already knows what his children need before they ask (Matthew 6:8). Christ taught his disciples to ask for daily bread, plainly and without many words, and warned against praying as the pagans do, who think they will be heard for their many words (Matthew 6:7 to 11). Petition for material things is entirely proper. A rate of exchange is not.

The Catechism describes prayer as a covenant relationship and a communion, in which the whole person is engaged with God. Nothing in that description supports the idea of a transaction with a stated return. God is free. A God who could be obliged by a sum of money would be a God under management, and would not be God.

On giving, the Church is direct and demanding. Christians are obliged to support the Church and to give alms, generously and in proportion to their means. What Scripture praises in the widow at the treasury is that she gave everything she had (Mark 12:41 to 44), and what Christ condemns in the same chapter is scribes who devour widows' houses while making long prayers (Mark 12:40). Both verses are in the same passage. A ministry that quotes the widow's generosity while behaving like the scribes has read half of it.

On healing, the Church holds that God heals, that the sick are anointed and prayed for in the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick (James 5:14 to 15), and that the Holy Spirit gives to some a charism of healing (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1508). The Church also examines healing claims with a rigour that surprises people who expect credulity, requiring an objectively diagnosed serious illness, a cure not explicable by treatment or by the course of the disease, and a recovery that is sudden, complete and lasting. Belief that God heals and careful testing of healing claims belong together.

On suffering, Catholic teaching refuses the premise that underlies the vow. Sickness and poverty are not proof of insufficient faith. Christ was poor, Paul had a thorn that God declined to remove and answered with grace instead (2 Corinthians 12:7 to 9), and the whole book of Job exists to demolish the argument that affliction proves hidden fault. Our page on what the Church teaches about suffering works through that at length.

Sacramentals, Simony and the Blessed Object

Catholics use blessed objects, and a Catholic critique of the prayer cloth has to begin by admitting that. Holy water, blessed candles, medals, scapulars, rosaries, blessed oil, and cloth touched to the relics of a saint are all part of ordinary Catholic life. The Catechism calls these sacramentals, sacred signs instituted by the Church which signify effects obtained through the intercession of the Church and prepare people to receive grace and cooperate with it (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1667 and 1670). A Catholic who accuses a Pentecostal of superstition for using a prayer cloth, while carrying a St Benedict medal, is not arguing consistently.

The Catholic position draws its lines elsewhere, and there are two of them.

The object has no power of its own

A sacramental works through the prayer of the Church and the faith and disposition of the person using it. It does not work automatically, and it contains no force. The Catechism is explicit that attributing the efficacy of religious practices to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions they demand, is to fall into superstition (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2111). A blessed medal is a prompt to prayer and a sign of the Church's intercession. Treating it as a charm that produces results by being possessed is the error the Catechism names, and Catholics fall into it as readily as anyone.

A blessing cannot be sold

Simony is the buying or selling of spiritual things, and the Church has condemned it from the beginning. The word comes from Simon Magus, who offered money for the power to confer the Holy Spirit and was told by Peter that his silver would perish with him (Acts 8:18 to 24). The Catechism states the principle without qualification: it is impossible to appropriate spiritual goods and behave toward them as their owner or master, since they have their source in God, and one can receive them only from him, without payment (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2121).

The rule shapes Catholic practice in concrete ways. A priest cannot charge for a blessing, for a sacrament, or for absolution. Offerings connected with the celebration of Mass are regulated by Church law precisely to keep them from becoming a price. Blessings of objects are free, and the object is normally something the person already owns. A parish that sells rosaries in its shop is selling beads and the work of making them, and the blessing is given away.

Set the mail appeal against those two lines. An object sent with instructions to use it and return it with a specified sum makes the object the mechanism and attaches money to the spiritual claim. Both lines are crossed at once. That is a Catholic judgment about the structure of the exchange, and it says nothing about whether the fabric was ever prayed over.

Prefer to give instead of buy? You can support this ministry with a donation.

How to Test a Television Ministry

The practical questions below come out of the Tilton case directly, and they can be applied to any broadcast or online ministry asking for money. None of them requires theological training. The general scriptural framework for testing any teacher is set out in our guide to false prophets and the biblical tests; what follows is the narrower set of questions a paid television ministry raises.

Is a specific outcome promised in return for a specific sum? A promise of a return is the single clearest warning sign, and it is the feature the vow of faith turned into a system. Legitimate appeals ask for support of a work and describe the work.

Are the finances independently audited and published? Ask where the annual accounts are, who audited them, and what proportion of income goes to programme costs, airtime and salaries. A ministry that will not say has answered the question.

Who governs it? Ask who sits on the board, whether they are independent of the preacher, and whether any relative of the preacher can be outvoted. A board of the preacher's family and employees is not oversight.

Does anything you receive have to be returned with a gift? An object sent free is a gift. An object sent with a return slip and a suggested amount is a sales device wearing religious clothing.

Does the ministry accept correction? Ask what happens when someone questions the preacher. A teacher accountable to a church, an order, a bishop or a synod can be corrected. A teacher accountable to nobody cannot.

What happens to your data? A telephone call to a television ministry creates a record, and that record produces mail. Ask how often, and what is done with the list.

Does the teaching explain away its own failures? Where a bad outcome is always attributed to the believer's lack of faith, the claim can never be tested, and the person harmed is told the harm is his fault.

Christ gave the test that governs all the others. False prophets come in sheep's clothing, and you will know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:15 to 16). The fruit of a ministry includes what happens to the people who gave it their money.

Related Reading on This Site

Several pages on this site cover the wider questions that a reader arriving here will have, and each owns its own subject.

• The prosperity gospel sets out the seed faith and Word of Faith teaching in full, with the Catholic answer on wealth, giving and the promises of God.
• False prophets and how Scripture tells you to test a teacher gives the general framework of discernment, which this page applies to one case.
• Cults and Christianity explains what makes a group a cult and where a bad ministry differs from one.
• Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement describe the traditions Tilton drew his vocabulary from, stated as their own members hold them.
• Miracles covers how the Church examines a claimed miracle and what it requires before recognising one.
• Peter Popoff and Kenneth Copeland are the two closest cases on this site, one a documented exposure of a healing crusade, the other a living Word of Faith teacher.
• Church scandals takes up the harder question of what a believer does when scandal touches his own church.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Robert Tilton?

Robert Tilton is an American televangelist who pastored the Word of Faith World Outreach Center in the Dallas area and hosted the syndicated television programme Success-N-Life, which ran on stations across the United States through the 1980s and into the early 1990s. He preached a Word of Faith message in which a spoken vow backed by a financial pledge was said to unlock God's provision, and he asked viewers to telephone in prayer requests and send them by mail. In November 1991 the ABC News programme Primetime Live broadcast an investigation of his mail operation, and the programme lost stations in the period that followed.

What did the 1991 Primetime Live investigation report about Robert Tilton?

The ABC News programme Primetime Live reported in November 1991 that prayer requests mailed to the Tilton ministry had been recovered from commercial waste after the donations enclosed with them were removed, and that letters Tilton told viewers he prayed over had been discarded. The material was gathered with the Trinity Foundation, a Dallas watchdog organisation led by Ole Anthony, which had been examining the ministry's mail handling. The broadcast placed those findings alongside Tilton's own on-air statements about praying over every letter he received.

How did Robert Tilton respond to the investigation?

Tilton rejected the report. He used his own broadcasts to answer it, maintained that he did pray over the prayer requests sent to him, and said the paper recovered from waste had already been prayed over and processed before it was discarded. He described the investigation as an attack on his ministry. Tilton pursued litigation against ABC over the broadcast, and the public record does not show a defamation judgment against the network arising from it. He has never accepted the characterisation of his mail operation given by the programme.

What is a prayer cloth, and is it biblical?

A prayer cloth is a piece of fabric a preacher has prayed over and sent to a believer, usually to be kept, carried or placed on a sick person. The practice appeals to Acts 19:11 to 12, where handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched Paul were carried to the sick and illnesses left them. Scripture records that God worked in that way through Paul at Ephesus. Scripture does not present the cloth as a mechanism the believer can operate, and the passage immediately following, in which the sons of Sceva try to use the name of Jesus as a technique and are overpowered, reads as a warning against exactly that.

Was Robert Tilton convicted of a crime?

No criminal conviction of Robert Tilton arising from the 1991 broadcast or from his mail ministry appears in the public record. The period that followed brought civil litigation from former donors and scrutiny from state authorities in Texas, and the public record does not establish criminal charges against him. Readers who encounter claims that he was jailed are reading something the record does not support. This page does not track developments after mid-2026.

Does the Catholic Church allow blessed objects like prayer cloths?

The Catholic Church blesses objects and calls them sacramentals: holy water, blessed medals, scapulars, rosaries, oil, and cloth touched to a relic. The Catechism describes sacramentals as sacred signs that dispose people to receive grace and make holy the circumstances of life (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1667 and 1670). Two limits are firm. A sacramental works through the prayer of the Church and the faith of the person using it rather than by any power in the object, and attributing efficacy to the object itself is condemned as superstition (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2111). Selling a blessing, or attaching a price to a spiritual thing, is simony and is forbidden (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2121).