The third horseman of neoliberalism: The Neo-Pentecostals (part 3)

Neo-Pentecostalism is applying its mallet to the stones of the Catholic rubble. As Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodríguez put it, “¡Qué cosa fuera la maza sin cantera!” (What good the mallet without the stone?) But why are Catholics emigrating to neo-Pentecostalism? Our region abounds in religious investment schemes that are providing generous dividends.

José Luis Rocha

The last five decades have borne witness to how and how much the Catholic Church has lost its monopoly
in the Latin American religious market. In 1997, Jean-Pierre Bastian published his study La mutación religiosa de América Latina [Latin America’s Religious Mutation], in which he showed that up to the 1950s the vast majority of consumers of the religious goods of salvation accepted the necessary mediation of Catholic cleric-producers of such goods. But now, he stated, increasing social strata are diversifying the source of their purchase.

In 1960 only five Latin American countries had a population in which the Protestant Christian tradition accounted for over 5% of the total population. But by 1985, many countries already had a Protestant population close to or beyond the 10% mark, in some cases reaching 20%. In Central America, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua were among the former while the latter included Guatemala. That trend continued in the following two decades. According to a 2010 study by the Central American University of El Salvador’s Public Opinion University Institute (IUDOP), 33% of Salvadorans over the age of 18 are Protestants and 50% are Catholics.

The San José, Costa Rica-based Latin American Socio-religious Studies Program (PROLADES) registered Protestants as accounting for 36% of the population in Honduras (2007), 34% in El Salvador, 31% in Guatemala (2006), 24% in Costa Rica (2008) and 23% in Nicaragua (2005). Jesús García-Ruiz, who specializes in studies on religious issues, quoted David Mejía, president of the Evangelical Alliance of Guatemala, as saying there were 20,000 Protestant churches in that country and that 45% of the country’s population belonged to some denomination of the Evangelical nebula. The most accelerated increases in Protestantism, understood as the historical separation from Catholicism, have taken place in the last two decades.

In his essential book on the topic, City of God, Canadian anthropologist Kevin Lewis O’Neill echoed those who sustain that Guatemala’s devastating 1976 earthquake was a religious watershed in that country, with the membership of Evangelical churches rising by 14% in the months following that natural disaster and achieving an annual growth of 23.6%, almost four times the previous decade’s annual rate of expansion. The palpable solidarity and the unexpected universality in the way the aid was channeled to the victims demonstrated their proselytizing effectiveness. US historian Virginia Garrand-Burnett, from whom O’Neill took this theory, stated that this boom benefited the Pentecostals more than any other group.

How to explain the flight
of middle-class Catholics

This accelerator of the religious mutation focuses on the grassroots sectors and on Pentecostalism, but doesn’t address the mutation to Neo-Pentecostalism experienced by middle-class segments of Catholicism. Whether true or not, the episodes of Evangelical growth as a direct consequence of verifiable actions invite us to wonder about the other side of the coin: the decline of Catholicism and its causes.

The alarm was raised from the conservative side of Catholicism. According to Francisco Pérez de Antón in El gato en la sacristía (The cat in the vestry), “in the New Continent, where half of all Catholics live today, indifference, disrespect and apostasy are following the same path as in Europe and the United States. In 1960, for example, 75% of US Catholics went to Mass on Sundays. By 1987, that figure had dropped to 54% and it is currently estimated that only 30% attend, with the figure 25% in big cities like Chicago.”

Pérez de Antón put forward a number of theses on the “indifference, disrespect and apostasy” gnawing away at the base of Catholicism. They are particularly relevant to my argument because his vision is that of a middle-class conservative Catholic who rose to the upper class thanks to his managerial abilities. Creator of Central America’s transnational Pollo Campero, which has given Kentucky Fried Chicken a run for its money, he is someone who travelled—taking the most classic route—the itinerary idealized by the Neo-Pentecostal congregations at the instigation of their pastors.

Pérez de Antón attributes to liberation theology a level of backing it never actually had among the ecclesiastical hierarchy just so he can point out that the preferential option for the poor and the condemnation of wealth preached by bishops and priests in the decades following the Second Vatican Council frightened off the most enterprising Catholics, who were tormented by a bad conscience, uncomfortable at the inability to reconcile their ambitions with the new religious discourse. They knew—and it upset them—that the commitment “was no longer personal, but rather a class one. And only by joining the social revolution and helping it to its ultimate consequences could I reach salvation, as I heard an angry and flatulent preacher say on one occasion. In short, Catholicism had been contaminated by the ideological war being waged outside of the Church. Suddenly the church pews were divided between ‘reactionary’ believers on the one side and ‘progressive’ ones on the other. The Catholic Church was preaching an irreconcilable Catholicism. Its social doctrine was contrary and alien to the one in which my generation had been educated. And the suspicion gradually began to dawn on me that as a believer I was being the object of a colossal fraud. I fear that it was around then that I started to lose faith in an institution that cared more about itself than the faithful and that, whichever way you look at it, was exploiting their ignorance.”

First reason: Condemnation
of wealth, apology for poverty

For Pérez de Antón, the heart of the matter was the inconsistent Catholic condemnation of wealth and private property: “And it was clear that a Council plagued with conflicts and disagreements had transformed private ownership into an ambiguous and insecure right. After having abused it for centuries and having owned and created a good part of the large landed estates of Europe and Latin America, the high clergy was criticizing the presumed perversion of ownership of people like myself who were not even the owners of the houses we lived in.” As a result, “millions of Catholics and tens of thousands of clerics, monks and nuns also abandoned the church, most of them due to the exclusionary policy the high clergy was practicing on those of us in disagreement. The Catholic Church distanced from itself a good part of the middle classes that did not agree with the clergy’s interference in public life, let alone in the home.”

In summary, his main explanation for the erosion of the Catholic social base among the middle classes was the condemnation of material prosperity and the defense of the poor; in other words, the fact that socialist thinking started to become the ideological support of Catholicism. What Pérez de Antón points out with a severe wag of his finger coincides with what Juan Carlos Abril, pastor of the Guatemalan El Shaddai Neo-Pentecostal church, told German sociologist Anke Schünemann. He felt that the people running Catholic high schools turned them into focal points for recruitment of guerrilla fighters: “In different Catholic high schools people were taken on excursions or activities they were programming to places where there was conflict, where there was a guerrilla presence, where as young people they had a direct relationship with participants, people who were transmitting their ideas. And they were taken by the head teachers, by the people from those schools who were really nuns or priests… Taking a young person who was 15, 16 or 17 years old to a place like that? It was obviously to awaken an interest... There was a direct participation in enrolling people, making them part of the cause.”

Second reason: Another social profile
of priests, monks and nuns

Let’s launch another hypothesis. The second possible reason is associated with a Copernican change in relations between the clergy and professionals with respect to the accumulation and management of knowledge and the power derived from it. It’s a change that has been long in gestation, but has accelerated in the last 20 years.

We can dramatize it as follows, based on real facts: just three decades ago, laypeople sat down to listen to economist priests and sociologist clergymen in university classrooms. Two decades later, a group of members of religious orders—including prominent intellectuals—paid a fortune to the Central American Business Administration Institute (INCAE) to organize a seminar on Central American reality, and the clergy sat down to listen like callow catechumens to the learned talks of the made-in-Oxford-and-Harvard economists, historians and business administrators. More significant still was the fact that, years earlier, the first Central American provincial of a religious congregation, before taking up his post, was pressured into taking a course at the INCAE as training for his new mission as administrator—not pastor?—of a religious organization.

Taking note of this new climate, Pérez de Antón laments that “the intellectual level of the Catholic clergy has been dropping as the educational level of the believers was growing, and it is no longer possible to trick them with arguments of authority or a few sickly sweet and ingenuous phrases.” This new correlation among intellectual levels and the correlation of power in the command of knowledge is due in part to the fact that the Enlightenment’s sapereaude (“dare to know”) arrived timidly and late—but did arrive—in the minds of the professional middle classes, demolishing the idea of ecclesiastical infallibility.

It is also due to a change in the social profile of Catholic ecclesiastics. The religious career as a means of social mobility for rural youth and marginalized urban sectors was an inveterate option for the secular clergy. Countless devout and opulent ladies financed diocesan seminaries and seminarists. But in Central America, most of the religious congregations took many decades to recognize that members of the native peoples could also be the object of vocational calls.

Some religious orders took this great leap towards the second half of the 20th century, when they started to be affected by the scarcity of religious vocation in their traditional quarry and when liberation theology, insisting on the preferential option for the poor, offered an ideological stimulus for that social recomposition of their ranks, previously swollen by well-off foreigners and nationals. At the beginning of this turnaround, the opening focused on the middle and upper classes from smaller cities, on the sons of farmers from small rural towns and on the offspring of urban salary earners from liberal professions. The doors later opened to genuinely marginalized sectors.

It changed the social capital by changing
the ecclesiastical human capital

The downward mobility in the social strata followed a deteriorating quality of the clerical pensum. Save for exceptional cases, it wasn’t possible to maintain the same levels of academic demand with young people who came from the dolce far niente [pleasant idleness] that governed daily life in public elementary and high schools. That reconfiguration of the human capital in one of the most dynamic and influential sectors of the religious ladder, verified in the ferocious classism and social discrimination characteristic of Central America, has alienated both the trust and the donations of the old patrons of its projects, as well as of the parish faithful and students from its high schools and universities.

The social capital changed with the change in human capital. The oligarchy and best paid professionals never again entrusted their children to the traditional religious congregations: rarely as a livelihood for them and often not even as pupils. The attempts to recover that trust other ways have been in vain. In Central America, ex-alumni clubs and associations lack the perseverance and financial commitment of their US counterparts. They are limited to sporadic meetings sprinkled with hugs, toasts and memories.

We cannot infer from Pérez de Antón’s statements that middle-class Catholics are opting towards secularism, however. Many remain interested in continuing with the creed and the rituals of the past, even if they revile the ideological slips. The proliferation of religious high schools and universities testify to the good sales maintained by an education with a religious stamp. But some of the new luxury Catholic high schools—particularly in Nicaragua, more than in Guatemala—are directed and administrated by laypeople who have lured the believing and practicing elites away from the La Salle brothers, the Jesuits, the Teresians and the Oblates, among other congregations that for over half a century educated Central America’s aristocrats, men and women of letters and technocrats.

Universities such as the Catholic University (UNICA) and the Ave María College in Nicaragua are basically run by orthodox and ultramontane Catholic laypeople. And while UNICA is linked to Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the initiative of the archbishop of Managua, Leopoldo Brenes, to found the Immaculate Conception University of the Archbishopric of Managua in December 2011 could be interpreted as an attempt to offer a university alternative with the ecclesiastical imprimatur.

Emigrants to Neo-Pentecostalism

The secularizing wave in confessional teaching is palpable in the flourishing of Catholic high schools, a phenomenon that displays an uneven development in the region. In Guatemala, the most famous elite high schools don’t profess any confession. Their secularism is more suitable for a country in which the offspring of the native elites have to coexist with the sons of Asian and European executives who profess non-Christian and non-monotheist religions, or even no religion at all.

At the other extreme is Nicaragua, where the Christian Academy, Notre Dame, Lincoln Academy, Saint Augustine and Saint Dominic, among other Catholic high schools, are markedly confessional. Their offer of bilingual—or trilingual—and religious education is very attractive for the middle-class strata that desire a private and ritual religiosity focused on sexual morals and removed from any social moral that goes beyond business social responsibility or other audacious strategies that fit camels through the eye of a needle.

It is important to highlight here that those middle and upper-middle strata were longing for more modern and globalized religious reference groups and frameworks to live their faith. The new priests, monks and nuns stopped being the gurus of many Catholics. A lot of couples seek out their equals to talk about issues that affect their day-to-day life, married couples and others who talk about such pedestrian things as how to administer a household and manage money. The Catholic high schools aren’t enough for those most eager about religious practice . After a sometimes very long religious cooling off period among people from the traditionally Catholic middle and upper strata, they migrated to Neo-Pentecostal groups such as Hosanna in Nicaragua and El Shaddai in Guatemala. Part of Hosanna’s membership is made up of middle strata with Catholic roots. They found the discourse, speakers and attention to problems they were longing for among their peers. Many of them keep a foot in Catholicism—for work or family reasons—telling others and themselves that Hosanna isn’t a “church,” but rather a multi-denominational meeting place, although they sound more convincing than convinced.

Religious conversions
for sociological motives

A third reproach from Pérez de Antón is aimed against the dogmatism of Catholic functionaries, which is an aspect to which professionals are more sensitive: “The official Church has continued acting like in the days of Galileo, sustaining obsolete social, economic and custom-related dogmas. We find ourselves before an archaic institution incrusted in modernity and all that is being left of it is a spectacular structure that grows increasingly empty with every passing year.”

Pérez de Antón also mentions other reasons for the Catholic decline that point toward which episodes and events represent “the cats in the vestry” that the middle classes can’t handle. The authoritarianism of the Catholic hierarchy is proverbial and doesn’t merit further discussion. The pederasty cases have had a daily presence in the news and in documentaries and films that cable television has taken into the intimacy of middle-class homes to the outrage of the devout and the delight of the morbid. Life as a couple—He created them male and female—seen as an impediment to accessing the highest rungs of the ecclesiastical career is a fixed burden that rewards a minority to the prejudice of the majority lifestyle.

These negative signs and this incapacity to respond to the demands of the times represent the Catholic rubble from which Neo-Pentecostalism extracts proselytes. It’s not a question of decadence—at least not in all aspects—but rather a failure of Catholicism to adapt. It is a question of its lack of understanding of new trends in the comprehension of reality, the demands, pleasures and hopes of middle-class parishioners who tend to be the ones that set the standard for the group of beliefs that form the main part of a society’s common sense.

Pérez de Antón’s reproaches—taken here as represen¬tative of a particular sector of Catholics—refer to a set of features and trends that could be declared undesirable from a confessional point of view focused on the preferential option for the poor: authoritarianism, dogmatism, antiquated language, the meager protagonism of laypeople and even more meager protagonism of laywomen. They also refer to other elements that the same option perceives as inescapable hard-won conquests that are nonetheless precarious: greater access to the ecclesiastical career for social sectors lower on the economic scale, denunciation of unbridled greed, prioritizing the community’s needs over individual ambition, and the rights of the disfavored.

This is not the place to discuss the moral quality of the features and tendencies that Pérez de Antón condemns, but rather to take note of what is frightening off white-collar Catholics. Today, like yesterday, the so-called religious “conversions” have more sociological motives than religious ones. A yearning for the absorption of secular tendencies, changes to the social strata in the Catholic leadership and a desire for God to bless the itch for material prosperity underlie the conversions of half-hearted Catholics from the professional-managerial class into enthusiastic Neo-Pentecostals. It’s a metamorphosis in which positive thinking and management culture define the “what” and “how,” the ends and the means.

The managerial and entrepreneurial cult:
The case of Chris Lowney

One strategy to recover ground in the religious market has been to calculate the direction of the spirit of these times and follow it, introducing into the Catholic discourse the veneration of entrepreneurialism and reformulating the social challenges in management terms that catch the ears of people used to administrative jargon. In other words, pandering to managerialism.

In practice, this cult to managerial matters and entrepreneurialism has had its Catholic exponents. It is obvious that the Catholic church has always had its venal venerations. The many hierarchs, functionaries and faithful who are currently scandalized by the growing fortune of the Evangelical newcomers to the sacro-millionaire club appear to forget that for two millennia the “bishopreneurs”—perhaps horrified by the manger of Bethlehem and Franciscan poverty—accumulated fiefdoms and farms, carriages and SUVs, ciboria, carpets, stained glass windows and other earthly knick knacks. The Evangelicals are barely out of their nappies in comparison, with nothing resembling the Institute of Religious Works, better known as the Vatican Bank.

The novelty consists of updating the discourse, for which purpose the cult to managerialism plays a star role. Chris Lowney stands out in this field. He was a Jesuit for seven years (until 1983) and then a top bank executive for the next two decades. On his web site (www.chrislowney.com), Lowney presents his best credentials: “Chris Lowney, formerly a Jesuit, was named a managing director of JP Morgan & Co. while still in his thirties and held senior positions in New York, Tokyo, Singapore and London until leaving the firm in 2001.”

Lowney made a career as a member of bank management committees of one of the most criminal and unscrupulous US finance companies, whose speculative activities led to the economic crisis that started in 2008 and cost US taxpayes billions of dollars. According to James Petras, “Every major bank in the US has served as an active financial partner of the murderous drug cartels [in Mexico]—including Bank of America, Citibank, and JP Morgan,” while the same names “are among scores of banks that have been charged with laundering drug money and other illicit funds according to investigations from the US Senate Banking Committees.”

Lowney was a successful “entrepreneur”
in the global speculation casino

With this hallucinogenic but solid and growing financial base, JP Morgan acquitted itself well in the crisis, as it belongs to the exclusive “too big to go bust” club. It benefited from the Federal bailout that intensified the financial concentration. According to Monthly Review analysts John Bellamy Foster and Hannah Holleman, “Of the fifteen largest US commercial banks in 1991 (Citicorp, BankAmerica, Chase Manhattan, JP Morgan, Security Pacific, Chemical Banking Corp, NCNB, Manufacturers Hanover, Bankers Trust, Wells Fargo, First Interstate, First Chicago, Fleet/Norstar, PNC Financial, and First Union—with total assets of $1.153 trillion), only five (Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and PNC Financial—with total assets of $8.913 trillion) survived as independent entities through the end of 2008.”

“The ten largest U.S. financial conglomerates, by 2008, held more than 60 percent of U.S. financial assets, compared to only 10 percent in 1990, creating a condition of financial oligopoly. JP Morgan Chase now holds $1 out of every $10 of bank deposits in the country. So do Bank of America and Wells Fargo. These three banks, plus Citigroup, now issue around one out of every two mortgages and account for two out of every three credit cards.” JP Morgan emerged more opulent than ever from the 2008 crisis, which led to suicides and thousands of bank embargos and left millions homeless, including 400,000 in Florida alone.

As nothing changed in Wall Street after 2008 and the Dodd-Frank legislation—signed into law by Obama in 2010—has been nothing more than a paternally recriminatory wrap on the knuckles of the financial criminals, JP Morgan remained addicted to the speculative investment of the global casino. Bruno Iksil, aka “the London Whale,” who is the executive responsible for JP Morgan’s London investments, bet on the quick recovery of the US economy’s financial health and lost US$2 billion in May 2012 through irresponsible speculations.

Following his exploits, JP Morgan’s value at risk—a measurement of the total losses it could face in a single day—rose from US$88 million to US$170 million. But what does it matter? Following this same method, you win some, lose some, but the financial trade always ends up winning overall. In the first quarter of 2012 alone, the world’s nine main investment banks achieved profits of US$55 billion and the five largest US banks rose from 43% to 56% of the US gross national product between 2006 and 2011. The casino is working, so place your bets please!

Lowney: The Jesuit story in a managerial key

What a tremendous record of successes for the annals of financial entrepreneurialism. Not all of the exploits mentioned happened while Lowney was at JP Morgan, but its methods and links to drug-trafficking and financial frauds were in the incubation stage when he filled the back flap of his major work with blurbs from high JP Morgan executives. Those dust motes in JP Morgan’s moral file don’t bother Lowney, who left one great company (as he describes the Society of Jesus) for another: JP Morgan, which Fortune magazine regularly ranked as one of “America’s Most Admired Companies.”

In recent years Lowney has concentrated on writing and giving talks to reveal the exemplary managerial gifts of the founding fathers of the Society of Jesus. His first book, Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company that Changed the World, published by the Loyola University Press in Chicago, has been translated into 10 languages and promoted in various Society of Jesus websites. It is the Bible for those who teach Ignatian social management. It has the same flavor, albeit with more modern condiments, as Harold Caballeros’ From Victory to Victory: the same eulogy of leadership, discernment (correlate of spiritual mapping) and turn-of-the-century faith that anything is possible. At the end of the day, according to Lowney, we have a marvelous economic system that will only last if dedicated human beings with principles treat our colleagues better… If the solution is so simple, why are so many Jesuits suffering privations and risking their lives among indigenous and other marginalized people?

AUSJAL Letter, the publication of the Association of Universities Trusted to the Society of Jesus in Latin America (AUSJAL), printed Lowney’s text “What 21st-century leaders can learn from 16th-century Jesuits” in which he tries to convince us that the leader in each of us could be brought out by the Society of Jesus through the virtues that made it strong to the point of being “even older than Telefónica and the English Court.” Would many Jesuits be proud of that comparison?.

Christian virtues and heroism
in a managerial key

Lowney’s text defines certain virtues in managerial terms, using the language of “coaching”: self-awareness (“Leaders understand their strengths…”), ingenuity (“the ability to confidently adapt to an ever changing world,” a virtue praised in the book Who Moved My Cheese?), heroism (“to remain energized by great ambitions, a passion to excel…”) and love (“engage others with a positive attitude that recognizes their dignity and potential”…but apparently not their rights or justice).

Lowney compares the strategy of 17th-century Jesuit Roberto de Nobili, who had the sensitivity to adapt to the Hindu culture, with the tactic of “companies that had performed extremely well.” Novitiates are the equivalent of incubators of leaders, while the founding fathers were shrewder than Machiavelli, better trainers than life coaches and better managers than the most experienced CEOs. As a run-through of the history of the Jesuits in a managerial key, Lowney’s book performs an impeccable religious-managerial syncretism and establishes itself as the cornerstone of a new trend, called Ignatian social management.

It is not my purpose to judge whether Lowney is wrong when he attributes a managerial talent to some of the founding fathers who could only have been consummate virtuosos of entrepreneurialism and excelled at careful management before such a thing even existed. Lowney is just another representative of a pretty widespread trend. Another example is Jesuit James Martin who wrote in his enjoyable book My Life with the Saints: “I remember thinking in the novitiate that Ignatius would not have done so poorly in the corporate world.” Revealing.

Another, more Christian vision
of Ignatius of Loyola

I’ll now try to analyze ideological trends: their directions, roots and appeal. I’m therefore interested in highlighting the contrast between Lowney’s perspective and other visions of Ignatianism and of the founding fathers of the Society of Jesus, which also reveals shifts in the winds of the spirit of the times. For example, in 1941, Jesuit Ricardo García-Villoslada published his Manual de historia de la Compañía de Jesús (Society of Jesus History Manual) whose eulogies focus on the feats achieved with “great danger to their lives,” the “amazing energy of will that Ignatius deployed during his life” and other merits relating to the mettle of character rather than management leadership and its theological virtues.

In the mid-eighties, another Jesuit priest, Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, wrote the biography of St. Ignatius, which until recently was the Ignatian catechism distributed throughout the devote communities. For him, the important thing was that St. Ignatius stopped “in the middle of the street or in public squares to address certain words to the children, with not entirely positive results, but leaving behind un-erasable tracks.” One of Ignatius’ contemporaries, the Florentine Leonardo Bini, contributed unexpected information that Tellechea gathered like a treasure: “I have known the Father Ignatius who preached at the Zecca Vecchia and the children threw apples at him. He endured it with patience, without losing his temper and continued the sermon.”

In relation to Fathers Laínez and Salmerón, chosen to participate in the Council of Trent, Villoslada highlights their dazzling interventions and their humility in lodging in a mule-boy’s room, without table or light to study. Laínez and Salmerón dedicated the free time left to them when not attending the important council sessions to “their preferred ministries of confessing, catechizing, visiting hospitals, etc.”, which were tasks at that time “little cared for by the clergy,” added Tellechea Idígoras, with the kind of critical audacity that would not be allowed today.

Ignatius in a Volvo and
an aggressive Jesus Christ…?

The very title of Idígoras’ book, Ignacio de Loyola solo y a pie (Ignatius of Loyola: Alone and on foot), could be updated by Lowney as Ignatius of Loyola: Corporatized and in a Volvo. As if he had Lowney’s book in mind, García-Villoslada prophetically lamented that “swept along by the astonishing energy of will that Ignatius displayed in his life, by the grandeur and precision of his plans and by the result of his enterprises, they have forgotten the inner man. By placing excessive importance on his human prudence, they have neglected his total and trusted devotion and resignation to the hands of God. Glorifying his head for organizing, they forgot his incredible paternal gentleness and tenderness of heart.” If his postmodern biographers now want to turn Ignatius of Loyola into the patron saint of CEOs, it is a symptom of a transubstantiation of values in a direction that Nietzsche never foresaw.

A similar change of direction was produced among the Evangelical fundamentalists of the new Christian Right. According to Karen Armstrong, some of them appeared to harbor hidden fears about what they considered a castrating tendency in Christianity, which had become a religion with women’s values, such as indulgence, compassion and tenderness. Their reaction was to vindicate the virile values of Jesus Christ, with preacher Edwin Louis Cole presenting him as an intrepid leader who challenged Satan, defeated the demons, dominated Nature and censured hypocrites. In his book The Battle for the Family, Tim La Haye insisted that Christ could be ruthless and Christians must also be aggressive. If Christ’s nature changed for these Evangelical fanatics, why couldn’t the nature of the founders of the Society of Jesus also be changed?

Managerialism: A big monster that treads hard

Lowney conceals in his text the fact that the Society of Jesus has always harbored different, very often opposed trends of thought, which has undoubtedly been a cornerstone of its longevity.

In marked contrast to the apology for managerialism and the financial world is the text “La Fe que hace Justicia” (The Faith that Does Justice), published in Promotio Iustitiae, a bulletin of the Social Justice and Ecology Secretariat, whose physical and virtual headquarters is in the General Curia of the Society of Jesus in Rome. Written by Andalucian theologian José María Castillo, who was at the time a Jesuit priest, it savages the financial world and after a series of reflections on the inconsistencies of the Society of Jesus, concludes: “The most serious problem facing the Society today is that it claims to fulfill the commitment to promote justice, but (in fact) seeks to do this while keeping our institution and works integrated in the dominant system… The issue is that the Society maintains institutions within, and supports itself on, an economy to which it is opposed; it maintains public relations that make it an institution perfectly integrated into this system that causes so much corruption, inequality and suffering.”

Unfortunately, to paraphrase León Gieco’s song, famously sung by Mercedes Soza, managerialism is a big monster that treads hard. It is not easy to avoid its influence, in Lowney’s siren songs or in coercive tactics. A large number of NGOs of religious inspiration are subjected to the tyranny of managerialism due to the origin of the funds that sustain them. Throughout Central America, pastoral care for human mobility, Catholic Relief Services, Fe y Alegría and other entities, including the Juan XXIII and Nitlapán institutes in Nicaragua, have to dance to the funders’ tunes, be they harmonious or markedly out of tune. There is no ideological autonomy without financial independence, and anyone who doubts it should remember the advice to “follow the money” that Deep Throat supposedly gave to the Washington Post journalists investigating the Watergate case.

Resistence and submission to managerialism

Managerialism and its cult to entrepreneurialism are predominant trends of thought. They have acquired the rank of common sense that guarantees them a place of honor in the pavilion of the unquestionable.

Their incursion into the religious field is somewhat new, but they have had a long academic career. According to Colombian political scientist José Francisco Puello-Socarrás, homo economicus and the entrepreneur have been basic categories of classical and neoclassical liberalism. But the former, which represented “the human being as a rational economic agent and an eminently calculating individual,” eclipsed the entrepreneur, which in the neoliberal context emerged as a knight errant thanks to “its attitude of confronting uncertainty and deriving benefits from that.” The entrepreneur is an ideological and political episte¬mological requirement that generates a much more functional/accurate understanding of the advanced stage of capitalism.

And I sustain that this is also the case because it is the kind of myth—or perhaps fairy tale—that maintains an attitude of expectancy in an always pending and promising future—depending on the suitable attitude of the indivi¬dual—and acts as a sedative to knock out discontent in its most incipient phase. The religious consecration of entrepreneurialism has reinforced its hegemony. And on the other hand, that baptism of an ideology rewards the Catholic Church and adjusts it to the spirit of these times. This means that, faced with Neo-Pentecostal and secular competition, a sector of Catholicism has reacted with a mixture of competition and mimicry. It has reproduced the managerial culture as an instrument of the new utopias and considers it more effective than the old methods—strikes, protests, awareness-building, and consciousness-raising—and more realistic that the old promises of the kingdom of God, socialism and communes.

That sector is imitating Neo-Pentecostal marketing, offering the siren songs of entrepreneurialism, which at first sound harmonious and promising, only for their stridencies to be revealed later, when individuals face their desolation alone, as the responsibility for their failure rests on their shoulders. As in the Calvinist vision, their lack of prosperity proclaims their social and eschatological condemnation, which are well-deserved in view of his managerial ineptitude.

To be continued.

José Luis Rocha is a researcher for the Jesuit Service for Migrants of Central America (SJM) and a member of the envío editorial council.

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