The Catholic Business Leader - A New Orleans Symposium

I was invited to speak last week at The Catholic Business Leader: A New Orleans Symposium which was co-hosted by Loyola University New Orleans College of Business and Xavier University of Louisiana .

I spoke with Cardinal Peter Turkson for a while. He was president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and commissioned the document The Vocation of the Business Leader in 2012. This was the document that inspired me to pilot and launch Attollo in 2014.

I also met author and speaker chris lowney whose books (Heroic Leadership and Heroic Living) helped me form my thinking around my curriculum to help Catholic business leaders to fully live out their vocation.

I also met in person for the first time Michael J. Naughton who is on the Attollo board of advisors. New Orleans is, of course, a great setting for such an event, and the campuses of both schools Loyola and Xavier were beautiful.

The panel discussion I was on covered solidarity and Catholic social teaching. Here is my high-level outline:

I. Mike Novak wrote in his 2014 opinion piece in Forbes Magazine that said:

• The business vocation is the main hope of the 1 billion human beings who live in poverty.
• Capitalism is lifting the world out of poverty.

II. In the same year I "discovered" The Vocation of the Business Leader" and was struck by a single sentence that changed the trajectory of my career. It was in the Executive Summary and it said: "Obstacles to serving the common good come in many forms but the most significant for a business leader on a personal level is leading a divided life. The split between faith and daily business practices can lead to imbalances and misplaced devotion to worldly success."

III. Business is lifting the poor from poverty, yet business leaders had a tendency to live a divided life! Similarly in the encyclical Gaudium et spes (43) Pope Paul VI wrote in 1965 that “This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age.”

Why does the split between faith and daily business practices deserve to be counted among the more serious errors of our age? At the core of Catholic social teaching is the human person and without love for neighbor (the human person) business leaders will stay stuck in a utilitarian mindset including and perhaps especially malformed Catholic business leaders.?After all, it's the Catholic business leader who should be at Mass every Sunday hearing about their need to love God and their neighbor.

IV. Growing up it was understood, even in my own Catholic family, that there were two basic “career” directions in which one could go. Secular work or God’s work.?

As I dug into this whole “divide” thing (lack of solidarity), I recalled the Baltimore Catechism. I’m old enough to remember it, too young to have been taught it in school. Our career choices were never supposed to an “either/ or” proposition but a “both / and”?more like a stacked level of callings we were to live out all at the same time.?The Catholic Church's order of vocations are:

1. Universal - To know love and serve God.
2. Primary - Gift of self to others - Matrimony, Holy Orders, Consecrated Single
3. Secondary - Our daily work to provide for ourselves in this world while we live out our higher vocations.

V. Our Fallen World – flips the order of our vocations.

The world distorts God’s design for us that is altogether good, true, and beautiful. It kept the vocations but flipped them and changed the meaning. According to the world:

1. Work is our universal calling. It gives us purpose and things to enjoy
2. Others are a gift to us.
3. God is optional so we don't take the time to know Him.

There’s a tug-of-war between the old man and the new man that St. Paul mentions in his letter to Ephesians. We are naturally drawn to the created world, to what we know and can sense rather than to the creator. This creates a barrier to an Integrated Life.

VI. Additional barriers to an Integrated Life

When I piloted the concept for Attollo in 2014, I discovered that the average Catholic business leader is:

Busy and Confused:

• The time they do have is spent working in the business, not on the business.
• There was a lack of understanding of their faith beyond the basics.
• Us versus them. They felt that the "Church" had a negative perception of their vocation. Some felt guilt for making money.
• They are so busy that while their body was at Mass their head/heart was already at work on Monday.?

They found the theological/philosophical language of Rome and academia– (e.g. Encyclicals etc) intimidating, hard to understand, and thus impossible to incorporate into “real” life. Words like solidarity, subsidiarity, dignity……. Are often met with a blank stare.

• Our Catholic language is being hijacked or appropriated by the secular world and thus the meaning of our language became twisted. Take "solidarity" for example.

The pilot also found that the Catholic business leader liked having a clear path forward to an integrated life.

• They had a community of like-minded peers who were both Catholic and business leaders.
• They immediately felt they were among friends who “got” them.
• It eliminated “double” loneliness at the top. Lonely because they have to make the decisions of the organization, and also lonely because their Catholic faith is increasingly marginalized and often attacked by an intolerant public.
• It gave them a forum where they can share openly on matters of faith, family, and business.
• They had others who would hold them accountable to achieve their goals.?
• They received real, tangible, and usable information that could be applied in their lives.
• They felt they had a way to regain control of their lives

The findings above are proven time and time again as I open up new Attollo groups and talk to Catholic business leaders around the country (and other countries too).