[NYer]

Maulbronn Monastery

"Founded in 1147, the Cistercian Maulbronn Monastery is considered the most complete and best-preserved medieval monastery complex north of the Alps. Surrounded by fortified walls, the main buildings were constructed between the 12th and 14th centuries. The monastery's church, built in the transitional Romanesque-Gothic style, had significant influence on the spread of Gothic architecture over much of northern and central Europe. The water management system at Maulbronn, with its elaborate network of drains, irrigation canals and reservoirs, is exceptional." - UNESCO's World Heritage List

[NYer]

The large Maulbronn stone crucifix is sculpted from one single mighty stone slab. It looks, however, like a roughly hewn wooden cross with its joins and surface cracks and the body of Christ nailed to it. The artist signed his work with the initals CVS and the date 1473.

[fishtank]

A lot of the modern Cistercians I know are socialists.....

The RCC might have had some role in the birth of capitalism, but it was the predominantly Protestant countries of Western Europe that matured and guided capitalism through the Industrial Revolution. The mostly RCC countries of Europe have traditionally lagged behind the Protestant economies of northwestern Europe and America.

[fishtank]

One of these two threads has to go............

[LiteKeeper]

SPOTREP - Economics

[Aggressive Calvinist]

How Catholicism created Capitalism

ROTFLMAO

Yeh, next you'll tell me it was Catholicism that discovered the moons of Jupiter...looking through that telescope...

You're joking, of course. Good one.

[Coleus]

`

[A. Pole]

Thus, the high medieval church provided the conditions for F. A. Hayek’s famous "spontaneous order" of the market to emerge. This cannot happen in lawless and chaotic times; in order to function, capitalism requires rules that allow for predictable economic activity. Under such rules, if France needs wool, prosperity can accrue to the English sheepherder who first increases his flock, systematizes his fleecers and combers, and improves the efficiency of his shipments.

In his 1991 Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II points out that the main cause of the wealth of nations is knowledge, science, know-how, discovery — in today’s jargon, "human capital." Literacy and study were the main engines of such medieval monasteries; human capital, moral and intellectual, was their primary economic advantage.

Free traders have no clue how the civilization is being built. All they know is how to make a quick profit by wasting the cultural/social capital accumulated through centuries.

[jimkress]

The first entrepreurs were the bishops that sold indulgences, pieces of the 'true' cross, and the blood of the saints.

[GOP_1900AD]

The biggest problem which prevents moderns from understanding any of this is that present day capitalism is dominated by us US folk. Americans are reflexively turned off by the old European aristocratic underpinnings and cultural pillars. Imbued as we are with Jacobin continentalism, we think we are better off as innate revolutionaries; in our minds we are at the barricades, guillotines at the ready, lashing out against the feudal and the monarchical. Of course, all of this is somewhat amusing given the fact that in a very cruel and increasingly anti Western world, it is firstly our uniquely British cultural, legal and economic heritage, stemming as it did from the ancient monastical influences and quasi-feudal traditionalism, which is the one thing which can bolster us against the coming storm. Embrace it now, or deny it at our peril.

[stfassisi]

Capitalism, it is usually assumed, flowered around the same time as the Enlightenment — the eighteenth century — and, like the Enlightenment, entailed a diminution of organized religion. In fact, the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was the main locus for the first flowerings of capitalism.

It was not really capitalism as we know today,especially in the modern sense like in the US system, it was Distributism the Church founded. Capitalism rots from the inside due to usury and greed

Anything associated with protestant enlightenment idea is based upon denial of the supernatural,thus anything that flows from this eventially fails

From 1851 article from La Civiltà Cattolica...

“Once they abolished the supernatural realm and returned to pagan rationalism, the modernizers of society found that they could not stop. They had to continue their demolition, beginning with the moral truths that serve as a foundation for the existence and order of society, and then society’s whole natural organic structure….All that remains to do now is to have the individual unlearn all the essences of things, deny all the laws of logic, and burrow into the Night of complete ignorance in order that he be said to reach the apex of perfect liberty.” (La Civiltà Cattolica, I, vii, 1851, 45; II, i, 1853, 31.)