The Vatican, a private monopoly of two thousand years, should not be selling nationalisation

I disagree.

My quarrel is not with the call for healthcare as such; I have no objection to anyone being well. It is with the coverage, which has cast the coming meeting in Buenos Aires as a moral examination the President of Argentina is bound to fail. Look at the market structure and the roles reverse.

The Catholic Church is, by any reasonable measure, the oldest continuously operating private provider in the world. It has delivered its core product for roughly two thousand years without a licence from a single national regulator. It writes its own terms and conditions and runs its own complaints procedure, which has a famously long horizon. It has resisted every attempt at outside price control, including several by emperors. It has survived the fall of Rome, the Reformation and the invention of Sunday trading. No nationalised industry I can find has managed a tenth of that.

It also competes. Within a few streets of almost any cathedral one finds rival suppliers offering different service levels, differing small print on the hereafter and, in at least one case known to me, a better coffee morning. That is a market. The Church has never asked for it to be replaced by a National Salvation Service with a single provider, a central booking line and a target that every soul be seen within eighteen weeks of referral. I suspect it knows exactly what would happen.

According to an estimate I made over breakfast, a nationalised salvation service would require 4,300 regional absolution coordinators, an independent regulator (Ofgrace), and a public consultation on whether purgatory should count towards the waiting list. The Treasury would then ask, not unreasonably, why a product with effectively eternal demand is free at the point of use.

So I find it curious to hear the world’s most durable private operator recommend the public monopoly to others. It is rather as if the oldest family firm in Europe wrote to the Competition and Markets Authority suggesting everybody else be nationalised. Mr Milei, whatever one makes of his views, has at least been consistent: he would like the state out of most things. The Church has wanted the state out of its own affairs since roughly the fourth century. Structurally they are allies. They simply have not noticed.

I make no judgement on the health systems of Uruguay, Argentina or Peru, which are matters for those countries and their voters. I ask only for a consistent principle. If the case for a single public provider is sound, the Holy See should apply for a licence, submit to annual inspection and publish its outcome data. I would very much like to see the outcome data.

Until then, I propose that the meeting proceed on ordinary commercial terms: two independent operators, neither regulated by the other, politely disagreeing about who should run everything else. It may prove the least awkward meeting of the tour. It may also be the only one at which both parties agree that the state should wait outside the room.