A quote from David Brooks in The New York Times, 15 December 2005

In his new book, '”The Victory of Reason,” the Baylor sociologist Rodney Stark argues that the West grew rich because it invented capitalism. That’s not new. What’s unusual is his description of how capitalism developed. The conventional view, embraced by most of his fellow cultural determinists, is that during the Renaissance and Reformation, Europeans shook off the authority of the Catholic Church. When a secular world was created alongside the sacred one, when intellectual freedom replaced obedience to authority, capitalism and scientific advances were the result. […]

But the more we learn, the more we realize that most of the progress we link to the Renaissance or later years actually happened during the Middle Ages. […] Five hundred years before Adam Smith, St. Albertus Magnus explained the price mechanism as what “'goods are worth according to the estimate of the market at the time of sale.” Catholic monasteries emerged as capitalist enterprises, serving not only as manufacturing and trading centers, but also as investment houses. […] These innovations and discoveries, Stark argues, were not made by the newly secular, but by people who had a distinctly Christian sense of the sacred. Catholic theology had taught them that God had created the universe according to universal laws that reason could discover. It taught that knowledge and history move forward progressively, so people should look to the future, not the past.