Heroic Leadership

by Chris Lowney

  Beyond providing the Jesuits with work opportunities and financial support, well-connected or noble Europeans sometimes went so far as to petition for admission into the society, despite the fact that Loyola imposed the same rule of poverty on the well connected as on the "lesser" mortals. The company's membership roster soon boasted names that are familiar to any tourist who has wandered Italian museums and palazzos: Borgia, Gonzaga, Acquaviva, Bellarmine. While each left wealth behind to join the Jesuits, none abandoned his family name or connections. And the company benefited no less from those connections than any successful company would today from well-networked employees sporting a Rolodex of high-powered contacts.

  But every once in a while, Jesuit cultivation of Europe's elite backfired. Loyola surely was delighted that someone as powerful as Juana of Austria had taken supportive interest in his Jesuits. His delight became dismay when an enthralled Juana announced her plan to join the Jesuits. That she was a woman who had every intention of continuing her royal lifestyle didn't seem an insurmountable obstacle to her, and she apparently didn't expect Loyola to be deterred by such minor considerations either. He was left with a no-win situation. To turn her down would be to risk the wrath of a spurned princess not much accustomed to being told no. To accept her would be to risk horrific embarrassment and the whiff of scandal should her royal brother, her royal father, or the general European public learn that the fledgling Jesuits had granted the unique favor of admission to a woman known to be personally friendly with Ignatius Loyola.

  Juana got her wish but was admitted on the condition that her membership remain strictly confidential. She merrily pursued her royal affairs while secretly relishing her privileged status as the only woman member of the Jesuit company she so admired. To the immense relief of Loyola and his inner circle, no lower-ranking Jesuit clerk ever inquired about the mysterious Mateo Sanchez who never seemed to show up for meals, in chapel, or in the recreation room.

  To be precise, then, the Jesuits are now an exclusively male order, as they always have been, with only one exception-or one exception that has so far come to light.

  Virtually all religious orders have something else in common: they've fallen on hard times. Pity the poor recruiter peddling "poverty, chastity, and obedience" to the MTV generation. Membership in religious orders has gone into free fall. In 1965, there were nearly 230,000 religious-order priests around the world; today there are less than 150,000-even as the Catholic population they serve has continued to grow.16 And the demographics don't presage a bright future: the average age of clerics in the United States is approximately sixty. The Jesuits have not been exempt from these trends. Worldwide membership reached 36,000 in the 1960s and today hovers around 21,000. Still, they've fared better than most. Throughout much of their common history, the Jesuit order was dwarfed by the Dominican and Franciscan orders; today the Jesuit order stands as the largest fully integrated religious order in the world.17

  But Jesuit resiliency has been fired in far hotter crucibles than the inhospitable popular culture of the early twenty-first century, and the Jesuits' own tactics helped stoke the flames that threatened them. Loyola seemed well aware from the outset that his Jesuits' ambitious and sometimes brash operating style was dangerous. A Jesuit visiting the grand duchess of Tuscany's court railed against the excesses of wealthy women who adorned themselves with expensive baubles while the poor went without basic necessities. Loyola no doubt endorsed the sentiment, but he nonetheless rebuked the Jesuit for too bluntly hammering his hosts about their lifestyles: "We [already] have a reputation among some persons who do not trouble to find out the truth, especially here in Rome, that we would like to rule the world." 18

  Loyola's worries proved prescient. The Jesuits never learned to keep a low profile. They inevitably found themselves in the middle of controversies, too often because they had stirred them up in the first place-and they took righteous relish in rubbing their opponents' noses in it. Over the decades, their aggrieved enemies formed the oddest collection of bedfellows. Non-Jesuit missionaries in China condemned the progressive tactics of Matteo Ricci and his successors as heretical. Liberal Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, many of them educated by the Jesuits, saw the company as the only group capable of intellectually rebutting their attacks on the Catholic Church. Politicians throughout Europe made the Jesuits a political dartboard in attempts to beat back Vatican power. Conservatives and liber als, politicians and priests, devout believers and atheists certainly could not have found anything at all to agree on, save one thing: wanting the Jesuits to go.

  By the mid-1700s, with the company reaching a membership of twenty-five thousand, the Jesuits' detractors caught up with them in spectacular fashion. Banished from one country after another, the Jesuits were entirely disbanded by the pope in 1773. The Jesuit general was jailed, their schools shut down, and their properties confiscated. Many of the suddenly ex-Jesuits were marched to deportation ports under armed guard and sent to wander Europe as outcasts. For nearly forty years the company remained shuttered.

  The Jesuits never learned to keep a low profile. They inevitably found themselves in the middle of controversies, too often because they had stirred them up in the first place.

  Truth be told, the claim that the pope entirely suppressed the Jesuits is a slight exaggeration. Though more than 99 percent of the company was shut down, two hundred Jesuits hung on in an unlikely jurisdiction sheltered by an unlikely defender. Catherine the Great so valued the four Jesuit schools in Russia that she never allowed promulgation of the papal suppression decree on Russian soil. This rump group tenaciously exploited the loophole, electing a general from among their ranks and continuing their work. Over time, small knots of "suppressed" Jesuits crawled out of the woodwork to join this Russian Jesuit order, levering themselves back into tenuous existence. Georgetown University, alma mater of the forty-second American president, proudly boasts being the first of twenty-eight Jesuit-founded colleges in the United States. But Georgetown was founded in 1789, in the middle of the Jesuit suppression and therefore by ex-Jesuits. Moreover, these ex-Jesuits joined the Russian Jesuit order in 1805. The odd affiliation lasted only a few years, as the Georgetown team and others rejoined the global order upon its 1814 papal restoration. Those fond of histo ry's wackier hypotheticals can while away a few hours pondering what might have become of this Georgetown University had the Russian Revolution come before the Jesuit restoration.

  Luck, shrewd diplomacy, and the shifting geopolitical landscape all played a part in keeping the Jesuit company alive through their time of crisis. But vastly more critical was the scrappy tenacity of Jesuits in the field who refused to let their company and its vision die. It's the kind of story that plays itself out today on a smaller stage when sports teams believe in themselves enough to rally and overcome late-in-the-game deficits, when the employees at Harley-Davidson pitch in to pull their company back from the brink of collapse, or when parents sacrifice to get their families through seemingly overwhelming financial difficulties: success that flows from the undying commitment and persistence of many, not the isolated efforts of one.

  THE MEANING OF COMPANY

  The Jesuits are routinely called a company throughout this book, something that will grate equally on some Jesuits and non-Jesuits alike. Some Jesuits will resent the sullying of their noble, lofty enterprise by the implicit association with the crass pursuit of profit. Conversely, die-hard free marketers will reject the comparison-the Jesuit order isn't a for-profit enterprise, and it's disingenuous to present it as a company.

  But there's a straightforward reason to call the Jesuits a company: that's what they called themselves. When the first handful banded together, they had no name at all. People took to calling them Iniguistas or Ignatiani-the people following Ignatius Loyola. This type of nickname had plenty of precedents. After all, the Dominicans were the followers of St. Dominic, and the Franciscans followed St. Francis. But Loyola, perhaps appalled at the prospect of
a personality cult, pressed his colleagues to come up with something different. They settled on Compania de Jesus, the "Company of Jesus." In formal Latin documents the name was rendered as Societas Iesu ("Society of Jesus"), hence Jesuits' occasional references to themselves as "the Society."

  Whatever the first team called themselves, it certainly wasn't "Jesuits." That nickname originated in the mid-1500s. For some it was simply shorthand, but for many more the word implied something more sinister. One Englishman complained about "the most dangerous infections, and-.-.-. irremedilesse poyson of the lesuiticall doctrine." Like other groups throughout history who have been labeled with offensive nicknames, the Jesuits eventually wrested control of theirs by using it themselves. Still, they never totally shook the negative connotation of jesuitical that continues to appear in edition after edition of dictionaries.

  So they founded a company. What kind of company did they think they were founding? What did they mean by the word? Today, company almost inevitably connotes a commercial enterprise. But sixteenth-century companias were usually something quite different: religious organizations, military groups, or simply groups of friends. Though it may not seem like it to those laboring in obscurity within one of America's corporate behemoths, the words company and companion do, after all, share the same root. And that's exactly how the Jesuit founders understood their compania: it was, first and foremost, a religious organization, made up of "companions of Jesus," in some spiritual sense. But equally they were companions and friends to one another, and they intended for that spirit to infuse their compania. Recall that a key motivation behind their incorporation was their desire to work in a group in which "those who are sent from our midst will still be the object of our affectionate concern as we will be of theirs."

  Calling the Jesuits a company highlights the parallels between their compania and our modern-day companies. The more intriguing question is not whether it's legitimate to call the Jesuits a company but why the word's connotation has drifted so far afield of its early meanings. The Jesuit company was animated by the rich undercurrent of "friendly companionship," and drew talented recruits eager to pursue an "uninterrupted life of heroic deeds and heroic virtues." How many Fortune 500 companies feel that way? How many people join companies looking to prove their heroism in action? Why has the modern company so thoroughly ceased to be "a group of friends," and is such camaraderie irretrievably lost?

  Later chapters detail how the Jesuits built such a company and how their four-pillared approach can still mold heroic leaders today in all walks of life. But this Jesuit leadership story first skips ahead seventy years after their founding, to a man dying alone in a remote corner of China.

  The more intriguing question is not whether it's legitimate to call the Jesuits a company but why the word's connotation has drifted so far afield of its early meanings.

  CHAPTER 4

  Leadership Role Models

  Three Unlikely Case Studies

  y any conventional standard, Benedetto de Goes, Matteo Ricci, and Christopher Clavius are three unlikely leadership specimens. None of them ever managed scores of subordinates; none of them rose far in the Jesuit hierarchy. They were neither the holiest, most prominent, nor most influential Jesuits in history. But they were leaders. And it's precisely because they don't fit our conventional leadership mold that their lives raise important questions about what it means to lead-whether as a seventeenthcentury Jesuit or in any walk of life today

  THE EXPLORER

  Benedetto de Goes died a failure. Or so it would seem-he was broke, more or less alone, and well short of a goal he had doggedly pursued for nearly five years. No one knows where he was buried or even whether he was buried at all. No one informed his relatives, because no one knew if he had any. The cause of death remains a mystery. In all likelihood he simply drove himself to death, physically broken and exhausted after a three-thousand mile trek through some of Asia's remotest and most forbidding terrain. But rumors of foul play also surfaced, suspicions that he had been poisoned by thieves or religious zealots.

  He was not completely alone when he died in 1607. Plenty of curious locals in Xuzhou, China, must have gone out of their way for one last glimpse of the stranger who had lived in their town for well over a year. Goes was not a curiosity simply because he was a foreigner; the Chinese in Xuzhou had seen plenty of foreigners. To those living in China's coastal provinces, dusty Xuzhou, near the border of what is today Gansu province, might have seemed the middle of nowhere, one thousand miles from Beijing.' But for merchant caravans traveling from the opposite direction, Xuzhou signaled the end of a bone-wearying journey through Gobi Desert wilderness and a return to civilization. Many traders arrived after years on the road, their fortunes hitched to caravans that snaked along the Silk Road all the way from India or the Middle East. Buying and selling as they traveled, most traders either settled at oases along the way, turned back after completing part of the journey, or died en route. Of those who made it all the way to Xuzhou, some stayed for good, founding their own small communities of Muslim traders.

  But Goes was something strange and unique even to those in Xuzhou who were well accustomed to foreign faces: he was the first European to enter their town during living memory, perhaps the first European ever to enter Xuzhou.

  It wasn't the first time Goes had made a curious entrance. He was a twenty-year-old soldier an ocean away from his birthplace in the Azores when he showed up in Goa petitioning admission to the Jesuits. He may have been a man looking to sweep away an earlier life and start afresh on a new continent-a sort of legionnaire of the spiritual life, as it were.

  If that was the case, perpetual poverty, chastity, and obedience may have been too much, too fast. Goes walked out after two years of Jesuit training, only to reappear four years later, begging reinstatement.

  The second time around, Goes stayed-and prospered. He apparently was a gifted linguist, so he was included in a threeperson Jesuit embassy to the Mughal emperor Akbar's court in Agra. The Persian-speaking Mughal conquerors of northern India controlled an empire that by that time sprawled over much of what today forms northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. Akbar's grandson conceived the architectural masterpiece that is the Taj Mahal, and Akbar's own vision was no less grandiose: he aimed to tidy up the confusing array of world religions by folding them into one perfect, all-encompassing faith. He had summoned the Jesuits to his imperial court to help him with his grand plan and listened to them defend their Christian religion alongside Muslim mullahs and Hindu Brahmins. The ex-soldier Goes did not shine in theological debate, unlike his more extensively educated Jesuit colleagues. But his mastery of Persian won him access to Akbar and eventually the emperor's trust as well. When Akbar determined to conclude a peace with the Portuguese viceroy of India, Goes was his emissary to the negotiations.

  The mission that ended Goes's life began soon after word arrived that one of his Jesuit colleagues had won permission to reside in the Chinese imperial city of Beijing. No Jesuit-no European-had been tolerated in the imperial city for well over a century. Now one of their team was not only living there but apparently had cultivated contacts close to the emperor himself. The successes in India and China undoubtedly encouraged Jesuits to imagine these two great kingdoms as emerging hubs of what they hoped would become their spiritual empire in Asia, and that vision spurred them to pioneer an overland link between the two countries. A superior linguist and a resilient ex-soldier, Goes was an obvious choice for the mission.

  Interfaith dialogue, seventeenth-century style

  This image of two Jesuits at the court of the Mughal emperor is taken from a 1605 Mughal-era miniature depicting the Jesuits engaged in a debate with Hindu and Muslim scholars on their respective faiths.

  Neither the Jesuits nor any other westerners had the vaguest idea of what lay between these countries. Their hosts offered no reliable maps of the vast Asian interior. And while ocean-borne European explorers were slowly tracing Asia's coa
stal perimeter, the inland expanse remained largely unknown.

  Trying to find a less-expensive way

  Goes and his Jesuit colleagues had two vital reasons for wanting to create this overland route through the unknown. The first was a very literal matter of life and death. Their progress in Asia had not been without cost. Not least of the difficulties was the treacherous ocean voyage from Portugal to Asia. Jesuits set out on tiny wooden ships only slightly longer and far less watertight than modern subway cars. Celestial navigation techniques allowed pilots to judge their latitude with some accuracy, but estimates of longitude were utter guesswork and would remain so for another century. Simply put, explorers, traders, Jesuits, and others bobbed along on ocean journeys seldom knowing just where they were or how far they might still be from where they were going.

  Not surprisingly, the journeys took a horrific toll. In some years, as many as a third of the Jesuits heading east died in shipwrecks or through disease. Even successful voyages could drag on for years. Becalmed ships sat in dreaded doldrums off the African coast. Storm-damaged vessels limped into Mozambique or other intermediate ports and lost months completing needed repairs. Ships sat off Goa waiting for the seasonal turn of trade winds to allow onward journey.

  Those who survived the journey arrived weakened and malnourished in alien environments, often having lost years of their lives. Yet even those who survived hadn't seen the last of difficulties caused by the primitive transport network. They could communicate with their colleagues elsewhere in Asia or back home in Europe only through letters posted on those same few ships that plied the trade routes. One Jesuit in what is now Malaysia reminded impatient superiors in Rome to "consider that when you send an order-.-.-. you will not be able to receive a reply to what you send us in less than three years and nine months."2 Another in China poignantly shared a more personal anguish: "Often when I call to mind the number of lengthy letters that I have written about this place to those who were already dead, I lose the strength and the spirit to write any more."3