When Enric Juliana refers in his chronicles to the discipline imposed on us by Berlin, he usually adds the adjectives "Spartan and Lutheran". He alludes to the religious background of the crisis, perhaps appropriating Max Weber's well-known thesis , according to which there are three ways of conceiving economic life: Lutheran, Calvinist and Catholic. In Juliana's version: Berlin, Geneva and Madrid. On final: the confrontation between the Carolingian, on the one hand, and the Latin Mediterranean, on the other. Although all three religious forms are Christian, there are important differences between them, and not only dogmatic ones.

Lutheranism stressed the dignity of the intrahistorical status , the place of meeting of the Christian with his professional responsibilities, and emphasized the secular and social consequences of the faith. Calvinism, inclined to Puritanism, established a close relationship between intramundane success and eternal predestination. For its part, Catholicism, especially Latin Catholicism, although grafted to the same root, reacted by fleeing from temporal activities, justifying itself in an exaggerated providentialism, beyond all reasonable prudence, and in an optimism often lacking any foundation. Such flight may have been the cause, according to Weber, of the fact that many Catholic nations joined Western economic progress with great delay.

Understood in this way, Juliana's brilliant neologisms point to the lack of seriousness of the Mediterranean in business, underlining that we prefer leisure to the well-done daily work ; and that there are people among us who presume to evade taxes, to buy multinationals without really risking a single euro, and to get rich overnight only by cunning.

In these matters, we Catholics have much to learn from Berlin and Geneva, at least in the way we work, showing, moreover, that the fullness of the Christian faith is compatible with taking seriously both the present time and the eschatological hope; and that one can raise one's eyes to heaven while keeping one's feet firmly anchored on earth.