a very grave mistake

As this post makes it clear, in our Catholic tradition the discussion of ideas is not a matter that is open to everybody or something that can be done in a democratic environment where the opinion of one man counts as much as that of every other man. Discussion of ideas is in the Catholic tradition reserved to an elite and to be part of the Catholic elite a man must qualify for it. It is not my purpose in this post to discuss the conditions that must be met for a man to gain access to the elite, even though faith, learning and wisdom (experience) seem to figure chiefly among them.

The question I want to raise refers to the contrast between the Catholic tradition, according to which truth is a monopoly of an elite, and the Protestant tradition where truth is a democratic, competitive affair, in the sense that everybody can have access to it independently of any prior qualifications.

This is a point of overwhelming interest to an economist. Modern Economics, with its emphasis on the benefits of competition, is predominantly a Protestant science. Adam Smith, the first economist, was a presbyterian coming from the most radical anti-Catholic country of his time, Scotland. In his The Wealth of Nations (1776) when it comes to point out examples of what should not be done in terms of economic policies his preferred examples are Spain and Portugal. Over the last century, the United States, another Protestant country, has been the intellectual Mecca for economists and, by far, the largest producer of Nobel prize-winners in the field. Add to this the curiosity that no economist doing his work in a Catholic country has ever won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

The question I set out above and which I will try to answer in the course of the coming days can be formulated as follows: is the democratic, competitive, Protestant model to reach the truth and other ends in life (such as economic ones) necessarily better than the elitist, corporative, Catholic model?

Again, this is a chief question for an economist. In my view, it is a very grave mistake - a mistake of which I was once myself both an agent and a victim - for a young economist to go to a Protestant country, such as the USA or Britain, to learn Economics and then come back and try to impose its (Protestant) solutions in a predominantly Catholic environment, such as that of Portugal. Usually, they do not work. Thus, I suspect that an important line of research for Portuguese economists is the development of a new field of Economics, which I would call Catholic Economics, as opposed to conventional Economics which, may I say it again, is predominantly Protestant Economics.

I hope that while trying to answer the question stated above I will make a contribution to this end.