central america-pentecostals 3 --september jlr

7/30/2019 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.


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.

central america-pentecostals 3 --september jlr

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