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Catholicism doesn't cause poverty per se , but literacy/education and its economic benefits did come to those countries much later than it did in the Protestant countries. For instance, as recently as 1960 more than half of the non-rural population of Italy was illiterate. I have heard similar things said of Spain and Portugal. France fared a little better, but they have a somewhat different and independent culture. Ireland I'm not that familiar with.
Plus Protestants have disdained the display of wealth and plowed whatever wealth they had back into their businesses, whereas Catholic countries tended to draw off extra capital and put it into cathedrals, palaces and generally "pretty things. This deprives those economies of capital needed for greater growth.
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