This is pretty bizarre, right? (Yes, it’s four years old. It’s news to me.)
It just reminds you that the Catholic Church has been around for a loooong time, and that institutional memory is way longer than even societal memory. This is an interesting collision of medieval theology and information-age convenience. Back in the middle ages, this kind of stuff was standard: monasteries functioned more or less as prayer factories, or perhaps more accurately as sin-processing-plants where the accumulated bad deeds of the moneyed classes could slowly be burned away through hour after hour of psalms. In this day and age, we tend to prefer our relationships with God to be up-close and personal, so my guess is that the American Catholics are just thinking of this as a donation. (We’re all familiar with the virtuous thrill that comes from first having money in your pocket, and then not having it anymore.) But like I said, the Church has a long memory, so the masses get performed.
(I found out about the story while poking around the deeply hilarious winners circle of the Ig Nobel Prize, which in turn I was referred to by that most reliable of time-sinks, BoingBoing.)