This statement ignores many other suspicious correlations. For instance,

1. The larger the number of olive trees per capita in a given nation the worse the debt problems of the country.

2. The percent of a nation’s land area that is geographically considered a peninsula has a direct correlation to the amount of debt held by the public of that nation.

Combine the above facts with this statement from the BBC article, and we get three easy steps that Italy can do to fix it’s debt problems:

1.Close the Vatican and convert, en masse, to Lutheranism

2.Raze all olive groves to the ground.

3.Construct a pan-Italian canal just south of the Alps, thus converting the Italian peninsula to an island.

Based on the data, in the article Catholicism is still MUCH better for your fiscal health than Orthodoxy. So, perhaps step one goes a bit too far…