CENTRAL AMERICA-Pentecostals 3 --September JLR
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Transcript of CENTRAL AMERICA-Pentecostals 3 --September JLR
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CENTRAL AMERICA
The third horseman of
neoliberalism:The Neo-Pentecostals (part 3)
JOS LUIS ROCHA
Neo-Pentecostalism is applying its mallet
to the stones of the Catholic rubble.
As Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodrguez put it,
Qu 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 schemesthat are providing generous dividends.
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
mutacin religiosa de Amrica Latina [Latin Americas 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 Salvadors Public Opinion University
Institute (IUDOP), 33% of Salvadorans over the age of 18 are Protestants and 50% are Catholics.
The San Jos, 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).Jess Garca-Ruiz, who specializes in studies on religious issues, quoted David Meja, president of
the Evangelical Alliance of Guatemala, as saying there were 20,000 Protestant churches in that
country and that 45% of the countrys 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 ONeill
echoed those who sustain that Guatemalas devastating 1976 earthquake was a religious
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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 decades 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 ONeill 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 doesnt 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
Prez de Antn in El gato en la sacrista (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 inEurope 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.
Prez de Antn 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 Americas transnational Pollo
Campero, which has given Kentucky Fried Chicken a run for its money, he is someone who
travelledtaking the most classic routethe itinerary idealized by the Neo-Pentecostal
congregations at the instigation of their pastors.
Prez de Antn 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 knewand it upset themthat 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 abeliever 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
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For Prez de Antn, 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 abandonedthe 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 clergys 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 Prez de Antn 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 Schnemann. 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 directrelationship 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
Lets 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. Its 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 ordersincluding prominent intellectualspaid 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 administratornot pastor?of a religious
organization.
Taking note of this new climate, Prez de Antn 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 Enlightenments sapereaude (dare to
know) arrived timidly and latebut did arrivein 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
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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 ideologicalstimulus 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 changingthe ecclesiastical human capital
The downward mobility in the social strata followed a deteriorating quality of the clerical
pensum. Save for exceptional cases, it wasnt possible to maintain the same levels of academic
demand with young people who came from the dolce far niente [pleasant idleness] thatgoverned 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 Prez de Antns 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 schoolsparticularly in Nicaragua, more than
in Guatemalaare 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 Americas aristocrats,
men and women of letters and technocrats.
Universities such as the Catholic University (UNICA) and the Ave Mara College in Nicaragua
are basically run by orthodox and ultramontane Catholic laypeople. And while UNICA is linked toCardinal 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
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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 dont 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 bilingualor trilingualand 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 arent enough for those most eager about religious practice . After asometimes 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 Hosannas 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 Catholicismfor work or family reasons
telling others and themselves that Hosanna isnt a church, but rather a multi-denominational
meeting place, although they sound more convincing than convinced.
Religious conversionsfor sociological motives
A third reproach from Prez de Antn 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.
Prez de Antn 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 cant handle. The
authoritarianism of the Catholic hierarchy is proverbial and doesnt 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 coupleHe created them male and femaleseen as an
impediment to accessing the highest rungs of the ecclesiastical career is a fixed burden thatrewards 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. Its not a question of
decadenceat least not in all aspectsbut 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 societys common sense.
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Prez de Antns reproachestaken here as representative 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 careerfor social sectors lower on the economic scale, denunciation of unbridled greed, prioritizing the
communitys 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 Prez de
Antn 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. Its 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 bishopreneursperhaps 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 mostcriminal 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.
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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 Unionwith total assets of $1.153 trillion), only five
(Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and PNC Financialwith 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 legislationsigned into lawby Obama in 2010has 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
Morgans London investments, bet on the quick recovery of the US economys financial health
and lost US$2 billion in May 2012 through irresponsible speculations.
Following his exploits, JP Morgans value at riska measurement of the total losses it could
face in a single dayrose 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 worlds 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 Morgans
moral file dont 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 Americas
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
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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 Lowneys 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 beingeven older than Telefnica and the English Court. Would many Jesuits be proud of that
comparison?.
Christian virtues and heroismin a managerial key
Lowneys 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 potentialbut 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, Lowneys 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
Ill now try to analyze ideological trends: their directions, roots and appeal. Im therefore
interested in highlighting the contrast between Lowneys 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 Garca-Villoslada published
his Manual de historia de la Compaa de Jess (Society of Jesus History Manual) whose eulogiesfocus 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 Idgoras, 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
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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 Lanez and Salmern, chosen to participate in the Council of Trent,Villoslada highlights their dazzling interventions and their humility in lodging in a mule-boys
room, without table or light to study. Lanez and Salmern 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 Idgoras, with the kind of critical audacity that would not be allowed today.
Ignatius in a Volvo andan aggressive Jesus Christ?
The very title of Idgoras 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 Lowneys book in mind, Garca-Villoslada prophetically lamented that swept along by theastonishing 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 womens 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 Christs nature changed for these
Evangelical fanatics, why couldnt 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 Jos Mara
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
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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 Len Giecos song, famously sung by Mercedes Soza,
managerialism is a big monster that treads hard. It is not easy to avoid its influence, in Lowneys
siren songs or in coercive tactics. A large number of NGOs of religious inspiration are subjectedto 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 Alegra and
other entities, including the Juan XXIII and Nitlapn 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 Postjournalists
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 theunquestionable.
Their incursion into the religious field is somewhat new, but they have had a long academic
career. According to Colombian political scientist Jos Francisco Puello-Socarrs, 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 epistemological
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 mythor perhaps fairy tale
that maintains an attitude of expectancy in an always pending and promising futuredepending
on the suitable attitude of the individualand 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 methodsstrikes, protests, awareness-building, and consciousness-
raisingand 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 ofentrepreneurialism, 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.
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7/30/2019 CENTRAL AMERICA-Pentecostals 3 --September JLR
11/11
Jos Luis Rocha is a researcher for the Jesuit Service for Migrants of Central America (SJM) and a
member of the envo editorial council.