Reason and Science in Danger.
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Until today many Catholics think that liberalism is evil because of the wide opposition that Catholicism had against it
It confirms that most religions were related to an economic system
Today Protestant and Catholic Churches are reformist in the sense of wanting to reform capitalism in the same way that Labour and Social Democratic parties do (when not in government).
Not that it is winning them any new recruits. The new recruits to christianity are going to the Pentecostals who are not interested in this world as they don’t think humans can do anything to change it, only their god can. Truly, the hope of a hopeless world. It’s how I imagine the early Christians must have been or maybe they were more like the Jehovah Witnesses.
The Episcopal Church in Latin America is recruiting a lot of Catholics because they support abortion, the ordination of women as priests, they support certain working-class claims, they participate in workers strikes, and some priests are moving from the catholic church to the Episcopal because they are allowed to get marry and have children ( they want to have good nights ) homosexuality, divorce, and same-sex marriage. They also have martyrs, and they are competing with the liberation theology.
PS The Jehovah Witnesses support the Early Christians ( but they do not approve other religions including Catholicism and Protestantism in general ) which did not support the state, emperors, and they did not support war and the army, but they believe that human beings can live happily over the earth under the government of God and only a few ( 144,000 ) would go to heaven
The Spanish monarchy was the national capitalist, just as the Tudor autocracy in England was the national capitalist. I am not aware of any protestant representation in Spain, where the main target of the Church were “relapsed” Jews and foreigners. The Catholics More and Erasmus’ writings were banned in Spain as inimical to the new institution of the nation state.
Tridentine (Council of Trent) refers to the re-modelled Catholic Church between the C. of Trent (16th c.) and Vatican II in the 1960s. Tridentine Catholicism was as perfect for capitalism as protestantism was. It depended on the differing national stories of each country. The Spanish empire enriched capitalists just as surely as the Dutch empire did.
None of this contradicts historical materialism. You appear to want things in neat pockets of progression, neat compartments, to fit a fixed narrative you have decided upon. But the capitalist economic narrative in different countries doesn’t necessarily fit the English one.
Am I now supposed to be supporting the Catholic Church because I pointed out some good things about the medieval Church?
As for Latin America, have you not heard of Oscar Romero, the fact that nuns and priests have been tortured under CIA supervision, that protestants assisted in the murder of native people in Guatemala? Again, not to specifically support Catholicism, but just to point these things out.
<p dir=”ltr”>The Spanish monarchy was the national capitalist, just as the Tudor autocracy in England was the national capitalist. I am not aware of any protestant representation in Spain, where the main target of the Church were “relapsed” Jews and foreigners. The Catholics More and Erasmus’ writings were banned in Spain as inimical to the new institution of the nation state.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>Tridentine (Council of Trent) refers to the re-modelled Catholic Church between the C. of Trent (16th c.) and Vatican II in the 1960s. Tridentine Catholicism was as perfect for capitalism as protestantism was. It depended on the differing national stories of each country. The Spanish empire enriched capitalists just as surely as the Dutch empire did.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>None of this contradicts historical materialism. You appear to want things in neat pockets of progression, neat compartments, to fit a fixed narrative you have decided upon. But the capitalist economic narrative in different countries doesn’t necessarily fit the English one.</p>‘The Spanish monarchy was the national capitalist, just as the Tudor autocracy in England was the national capitalist.’
If that were the case in England then there wouldn’t have been the need for the Bourgeois Revolution in 1642. The Reformation was a prerequisite for the formation and rise of the capitalist class but the Tudor and Stuart monarchies did all they could to prevent the rise to power of the bourgeoise. Although I don’t know much about Spanish history I would suggest the failure of the Reformation in that country inhibited the bourgeoisie gaining political power and led to the slow economic development that ultimately led to the pseudo-Fascist rule of Franco?
Just as we (or some of us) are saying that philosophy is irrelevant today a judge has ruled that you can’t discriminate against the Ancient Greek philosophy of life Stoicism:
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/scottish-daily-mail/20200924/282170768585458
The English bourgeoisie was split between those whose interests coincided with the royal monopoly and those who wanted to break it. The 17th c. civil wars were capitalist conflicts.
There wasn’t any failure of the Reformation in Spain. The Catholic Counter Reformation was Catholicism’s Reformation.
You cannot apply the English model to Spain. Spain was the world’s first capitalist superpower. It had its heyday. It was the German states that languished in feudalism, feudal princes embracing Lutheranism in opposition to the nation-forming ambitions of the Catholic Emperor.
Franco privileged the Catholic Church. Are you saying he didn’t represent the capitalist class?
The Church in Spain was autonomous. Its Inquisition was autonomous. As late as Franco, it appointed its own bishops. It was Catholic, but with all the attributes of England’s Henrician established Church.
Was the Spanish slave trade not a capitalist enterprise?
Were the Spanish plantation owners of South America not capitalists?
Were slaveholders not on both sides in the English Civil War?
Were not the beneficiaries of the English Reformation rural capitalists, who evicted the peasant freeholders from the land?
Thomas Moore -I would say that it was the English aristocracy that was split during the English Revolution. It was certainly not a ‘capitalist conflict’ as the court was composed of feudal barons who wanted to maintain their economic power base against the rising bourgeois gentry (capitalist farmers) and prevent ‘free market’ capitalism. Of course you are correct in that the economic power was passing to the capitalist class during the dying days of Stuart feudal autocracy via their trade in slaves, coal and wool but they needed a political revolution to destroy feudal economic relations and so unleash the potential for capital accumulation. You seem to be confusing the existence of capitalists with capitalist hegemony. Germany, although consolidating the reformation with Lutherism, their bourgeoise failed in the revolution of 1848 (they seemed to be more interested in profits than power). Again the rise of capitalists/capitalism within feudal Spain is not the issue but its failure to take political control. The ‘English Model’ of capitalism became global because of its colonialism/imperialism and the economic miracle of the industrial revolution. It was imposed on the world and so, of course, we can use the model to explain Spanish politics.
Nonsense, Wez.
Feudalism began to die three centuries earlier with the Black Death. The Wars of the Roses finished off the feudal noble families. Henry VII’s victory at Bosworth in 1485 begins the capitalist revolution, both politically and economically.
It was the capitalist class that was split in 1642: between those whose wealth was tied up with the King, and those whose growth was stifled by royal monopoly.
The larger bourgeois gentry and the smaller were all capitalists, the descendants of the Tudor sycophants who had been allotted the former feudal lands a hundred years before the Civil War. Those like the Cromwells were joined by the urban capitalists whose wealth lay in the ports and nascent industry – and the slave and spice trades. Having control of the towns and ports, and parliament, they also had the wealth, where Charles had to rely on foreign mercenaries and Irish and Highland chiefs.
The Stuarts were not feudal rulers but royal capitalist monarchs, to be sure of Scottish aristocratic descent. Feudalism was dead and gone before the late Middle Ages were over. Feudal economic relations were long gone.
The English Revolution, unlike the French and Russian, was a 400 year affair, culminating in the consolidating settlement of 1688. There was no feudal vs bourgeois revolution politically speaking. There were no feudals left after 1485.
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