miserably defeated

The Protestant Reformation which was led in countries such as Germany, Holland, Switzerland, England and France, and the Counter-Reformation where Portugal and Spain stood alone against them all was a battle of ideas turned ultimately into a propaganda war.

In this war, the Spanish Inquisition was heralded as a symbol of Catholic intolerance. Recent research has shown, however, that the Inquisition in Portugal and Spain was extremely mild when compared with the religious persecutions and atrocities committed in the allegedly free countries of Northern Europe.

The ideas of liberalism, with their emphasis on individual freedom under authority, and limitation of state power, originally developed by Catholic scholars at the universities of Salamanca, Coimbra e Evora, were appropriated by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightment, like Adam Ferguson, David Hume and Adam Smith. They turned them into a skeptycal philosophy whose distinguishing characteristics were cultural relativism, the refusal to accept all forms of authority, the sovereignity of the masses through democracy and the market, the rule of law (that is, of jurists acting as expert representatives for the majority) and the laicity of the state.

Under Catholic rule, the Portuguese and the Spanish run two empires stretching the entire globe. There were wars of conquest at times, but they were small. The Portuguese stand as vivid proof of the predominantly peaceful character of the entreprise, as there is no way a country of one million people could subdue almost half of the world by war. They did it mostly by word, by sex and by trade.

The great killings and the great wars of modern times were not fought in the name of religion or by predominantly Catholic countries. They were fought in the name of ideology and by predominantly Protestant countries where laicity prevailed. This is certainly the case of the two World Wars. It is still the case today in Iraq where a war is fought in the name of the ideology of our time - democracy and freedom, Protestant style.

The war of anti-Catholic propaganda that started with the Reformation and reached its heights with the French Revolution was won by the Protestant side. I am not sure it changed the World for the better. What I am inclined to believe is that Catholic intellectuals - by which I mean mainly Spanish and Portuguese intellectuals -, were miserably defeated in this battle. They did not even put up a decent fight for their culture and values. Actually, they sided with the enemy remaining to this day incomprehensively fascinated by the ideas, the culture and the values that come from the North and ostensibly dismissive of their own´s.