You also have to explain how the Catholic Church being against the death penalty today is the economic thing to do. How does making sure we continue to house and feed inmates on death row the economic thing to do from the religion's standpoint?
You'd also have to explain why the Catholic Church is shrinking in the West if everything it does is economical.
> You're treating this whole idea as though there's a nefarious organization deliberately managing things
Actually this is precisely the tone you took in the comment I first replied to:
> The Catholic approach is economical: it's expensive to keep dying people alive [...] but trying to carve out euthanasia exceptions wasn't going to play well to medieval peasants.
This clearly implies top-down strategizing.
I note you keep insisting "they would change beliefs" but you've neglected to ever include what changes you think would obviously disprove this hypothesis.
You're treating this whole idea as though there's a nefarious organization deliberately managing things (which there is in some cases, but the why is unacknowledged).
But a cell in your body has an energy economy that means it adopts certain strategies based on it's constraints.
Similarly, successful religions have an economy of beliefs that they have to adopt based on constraints. Almost all religions portray an afterlife, so all religions have a problem where they need to stop people short-cutting to get there - otherwise they promptly stop existing. But then they also have followers with limited resources so they also can't preach infinite life-extension since that undermines the afterlife narrative, and is economically unfeasible for followers (particularly since you also need to collect donations to your church to keep the organizational structure running).