"We are poorer than the Greeks, and we kept the rules, so we are not bailing them out." Good for the Slovaks, two-thirds Catholic and really quite observant about it.
There is a Protestant work ethic, but there is at least as much a Catholic one, forming and defining half of the Germans, more than half of the West Germans during their post-War economic miracle, half of the Swiss, half of the Dutch, and great tracts of the working classes of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand during those countries' industrial heydays.
The richest German Land is profoundly Catholic Bavaria, the homeland both of the present Pope and of BMW, Siemens, Audi, Allianz, Puma and Adidas, to name but a few.
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Bavaria's Duke is the Jacobite claimant to the Thrones of the Three Kingdoms. You don't get any more Catholic than that.
ReplyDeleteWell, it is a bit more complicated than that. Catholics were not always keen Jacobites, and the single most fertile soil for them was High Anglicanism, which was far more used to political power and which did not have the culture of English Catholic political quietism.
ReplyDeleteBut the roots of the American Republic, of the campaign against the slave trade, of Radical and Tory action against social evils, of the extension of the franchise, of the creation of the Labour Movement, and of opposition to the Boer and First World Wars, do indeed stretch back to Catholic, High Church (and thus first Methodist and then also Anglo-Catholic), Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker and other disaffection with the Whig Revolution of 1688, such that within those communities, long after any hope of a Stuart restoration had died, there remained a sense that the Hanoverian State, its Empire, and that Empire’s capitalist ideology were less than fully legitimate, a sense which had startlingly radical consequences.
Radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy.
It still does.