I’ve spent some time seriously trying to convince a devout Catholic friend of mine about EA. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that EA and the Church have value systems that are almost directly at odds. I mean, that if you take seriously their value system, the rational course of action isn’t EA. At least, not in the manner meant here.
My understanding: Essentially, the Church already has an entrenched long-termist view. It’s just that the hugely disvaluable outcome is a soul or souls spending eternity in hell (or however long in purgatory). In an expected value analysis, eternity is always going to win out over the whatever the life of the universe is. To convince them, then, to pursue traditional EA goals would, I think, require the extra step of motivating them to think those EA goals are more important.
You’re right. What I was trying to get at was that I presume Catholics would start with different answers to axiological questions like “what is the most basic good?”. Where I might offer a welfarist answer, the Church might say say “a closeness to God” (I’m not confident in that). Thus, if a Catholic altruist applies the “effective” element of EA reasoning, the way to do the most good in the world might end up looking like aggressive evangelism in order to save the most souls. And that if we’re trying to convince Catholic Priests to encourage the Church use its resources for usual EA interventions, it seems like you’d need to either employ a different set of arguments than those used to convince welfarists/utilitarians or convince them to adopt answer to the question we started with.