A Cath country certainly needs an organic law to make explicit the organization of the state. But it does not need a Constitution. Constitutions were conceived to prevent governments from interfering with the private domain of its citizens. In Cath countries a Constitution is not required to this end. Unspoken and unwritten tradition does the job.
Cath peoples do have a long and standing tradition of resistance against government interference in their privates lives, a tradition in whose development the Catholic Church played a major role. It is this tradition that makes Cath peoples the freest people - in the sense of freedom of action, as argued below - in Western Civilization and probably in the whole Word.
It is only when this unwritten tradition is brought to allegedly rational, public discussion and is made explicit in a written Constitution that Cath peoples open the door for all sorts of government abuses of their private lives, abuses which their ancestors resisted successfully for centuries.
Some of the signs that show a Constitution to be an institution foreign to our tradition do not lie barely in the fact that nobody pays attention to it and nobody really believes it will be respected as law. Probably more important than that is the number of Constitutions we have had since the first was written in 1822.
Whereas the US has had only one Constitution since 1789 and a very small Constitution which has received very few amendments, the Portuguese in turn have had not least than seven constitutions since 1822, one every twenty-five years. This suggests that for the Portuguese constitutions are like dresses or shoes, which come and go with the fashions and idiossincracies of each generation, something they can discard easily and replace by a brand new, radically different one.
Cath peoples do have a long and standing tradition of resistance against government interference in their privates lives, a tradition in whose development the Catholic Church played a major role. It is this tradition that makes Cath peoples the freest people - in the sense of freedom of action, as argued below - in Western Civilization and probably in the whole Word.
It is only when this unwritten tradition is brought to allegedly rational, public discussion and is made explicit in a written Constitution that Cath peoples open the door for all sorts of government abuses of their private lives, abuses which their ancestors resisted successfully for centuries.
Some of the signs that show a Constitution to be an institution foreign to our tradition do not lie barely in the fact that nobody pays attention to it and nobody really believes it will be respected as law. Probably more important than that is the number of Constitutions we have had since the first was written in 1822.
Whereas the US has had only one Constitution since 1789 and a very small Constitution which has received very few amendments, the Portuguese in turn have had not least than seven constitutions since 1822, one every twenty-five years. This suggests that for the Portuguese constitutions are like dresses or shoes, which come and go with the fashions and idiossincracies of each generation, something they can discard easily and replace by a brand new, radically different one.
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