Heroic Leadership

by Chris Lowney

  THE GREATEST RISK IS NOT TO TAKE RISKS AT ALL

  Jansenists and Enlightenment thinkers were far from the only ones throwing stones. Jesuit advocacy of indigenous people's liberties might have pleased indigenous communities, but it hadn't quite enhanced Jesuit popularity with colonials. And the colonials had other compelling gripes. Jesuits in Latin America, Asia, and Africa had operated plantation estates to support their mission colleges and churches. They considered themselves to be on equal footing with their competitors in the export business, but the playing field looked anything but level to their commercial competitors. The Spanish crown exempted religious orders in Spain's New World colonies from paying sales taxes on their revenue-producing plantation activities, an advantage that enabled Jesuits to underprice competing merchants in sugar, wine, cattle, and other produce. What's more, while colonists ran small, fragmented, and isolated farms, the Jesuits operated on a vastly larger scale, and their network of houses and communities-in the interior, in Latin American port towns, and in major European cities-helped them surmount the inevitable hiccups that afflict export businesses. Whatever animosity merchants felt toward Jesuits for their advocacy work was amplified by what they saw as unfair business advantages.

  Irritated colonists soon added their own fabulous rumors to those circulated by the Jansenists and others: that the Jesuits operated vast gold mines; that they monopolized exports in cacao, Madeira wine, and other goods; that they were masterminding a vast global trading empire.

  The rumors, the innuendoes, and the slights real and imagined crescendoed at a most unfortunate moment for the Jesuits. European states were looking for ways to assert power against an ever more vulnerable-looking Vatican. The Jesuits were an easy target. The Parliament of Paris decried the unpatriotic spectacle of French Jesuits pledging allegiance to their foreign general in Rome and proposed that French Jesuits instead govern themselves. Embarrassed French Jesuits of course rejected the idea, and their opponents had a field day vilifying the ultramontane Jesuits' allegiance to a foreign authority.

  In Lisbon, foreign minister and card-carrying Enlightenment disciple Sebastiao de Carvalho itched to bring to his native Portugal the same subsidiary relationship of church to state that he admired while serving as ambassador in England. The Jesuits became a convenient target in Carvalho's struggle to assert state power, and the Guarani War was the perfect opportunity to smear the Jesuits as obstructionist enemies of Portugal. A propaganda pamphlet sponsored by the Portuguese foreign minister summed up the state of affairs across Europe: "The Jesuits are on the brink of being driven from this Kingdom. Other Powers may well follow the example of Portugal. These Gentlemen have carried their ambition and their dissembling spirit too far. They wished to dominate all consciences and invade the Empire of the Universe."5

  Yet where "Julius Caesar" Cordara would have counseled fellow Jesuits to use "uncommon means" and "exceptional daring" to ensure that "not an inch of ground" be yielded, Jesuit generals backed away from confrontation and hoped for the best. It was an uncharacteristic strategy for a company so accustomed to its wellplaced members engineering high-level coups on an as-needed basis. Something seemed wrong with the previous chapter's snapshot of Paraguay Jesuits standing by as the Guaranf republic was dismantled, but the picture now falls into focus within the larger European context. Paraguay Jesuits had expected their general and colleagues in Madrid and Lisbon to lobby on their behalf. Instead, they were ordered to stand down: "I impose on every member of the Province a precept in virtue of holy obedience and under pain of mortal sin that [no Jesuit] impedes or resists directly or indirectly the transfer of the seven Reductions-.-.-. and [to use] influence and efforts to get the Indians to obey without resistance, contradiction or excuse."6 Appeasement rarely proves an effective strategy; risk-averse Jesuit managers only emboldened their enemies to probe for further vulnerability.

  The dismantling of the Jesuits occurred in slow motion. First expelled from Portugal in 1759, the Jesuits were later eradicated from France and Spain, and what happened in Loyola's own homeland illustrates what later took place all over Europe. Jesuits across Spain were summoned to their community meeting rooms by military troops at midnight on April 3, 1767. By the end of that day, with only the clothes they were wearing and the personal possessions they could carry, Jesuits from dozens of houses were herded under armed guard to designated deportation sites. Like exiles anywhere else in the world in any other era, six hundred Jesuits were forced onto a thirteen-ship flotilla to travel the world in search of a willing host country. The pope's backyard might have seemed a reasonable destination for the pope's own shock troops, but the flotilla was rebuffed by the papal states with the kind of logic that only a logician could love: by permitting the Jesuits to disembark, the papal office would be implicitly acknowledging the Spanish government's authority to expel them. There was another, more practical reason to refuse entry to the Spanish Jesuits. Rome was already overrun with hundreds of Jesuits who had been expelled from Portugal eight years earlier, and the problem was taxing Jesuit and Vatican resources. The outcasts anchored off the Corsican coast, some cooped up on stinking ships for months before they were able to secure government permission to settle there. But they didn't stay long. They were on the move again within a year when the French government finalized its purchase of Corsica and Jesuits fell subject to the same expulsion edict already in effect in France. The Jesuit refugee population more than doubled as hundreds expelled from the Guarani missions and all over Latin America joined their Spanish colleagues. Some filtered into Genoa, Ferrara, and other Italian cities. Hundreds gave up, straggling back to Spain to take up teaching jobs or enter other professions. Hundreds more died.

  A COMPANY IS DISSOLVED-AND NEW FIELDS ARE OPENED

  Pope Clement XIV didn't think it in his or his church's best interest to stand up to Portuguese, Spanish, and French states intent on global Jesuit eradication. His 1773 brief had a "they made me do it" quality that is more seemly in repentant teenagers than in a pontiff:

  But these same Kings [i.e., of France, Spain, Portugal, and Sicily], our most dear sons in Jesus Christ, believed that this remedy [i.e., expelling the Jesuits only from their own countries] could not have a lasting effect and be sufficient to establish tranquility in the Christian world unless the Society itself were wholly suppressed and abolished.-.-.-. After ripe reflection-.-.-. we suppress and we abolish the Society of Jesus; we liquidate and abrogate each and every one of its offices.?

  Jesuit trainees were dismissed from religious life and sent home. Jesuit priests were allowed to join other religious orders. In a cinematic if wholly unnecessary touch, the Jesuit general was jailed in Rome until his death. Jesuit possessions were carved up country by country. Contrary to rumor, there were no gold mines, fortune, or global trading empire. Still, looters contented themselves with what riches there were, and remnants from Jesuit libraries turned up in the British Museum, in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, on the auction block at Sotheby's, and in countless personal collections.

  Jesuit possessions were carved up country by country. Contrary to rumor, there were no gold mines, fortune, or global trading empire.

  Twenty-first-century Enron-just like the eighteenth-century Jesuits-had long been the class of its industry. Both organizations-attracted individuals committed to performance excellence in a creative, visionary environment. Somewhere along the line both companies' managements lost sight of principles that spurred their greatness: Jesuit managers lost the appetite for risktaking heroism that had invigorated Loyola and his cofounders; Enron managers lost sight of more fundamental principles of honesty and fair dealing. In both cases the "employees," talented individuals still committed to core company principles, were left holding the bag. Paraguay reduction Jesuits wondered why their managers in Rome left them stranded while diplomats negotiated over their heads; Enron's rank and file were left suddenly impoverished and jobless when the company collapsed. Thus the weightier mantle of the ma
nager-leader: steward not only of vital company principles but also of the trust of team members attempting to live by those principles.

  Whatever the next chapter in Enron's odyssey may be, it is unlikely to parallel the odd turn of Jesuit fortunes not long after the company was disbanded. Only a year before their company's suppression, two hundred Jesuits had gone to sleep one night in Poland and had awakened the next morning in Russia. They hadn't gone anywhere, but the political ground had shifted beneath them. Prussia, Austria, and Russia had each helped themselves to a chunk of what had been Poland (needless to say, Polish diplomats had not been invited to the negotiations that carved up their state). Two hundred Jesuits and their four colleges came with the slice that Catherine the Great took for Russia, not that Catherine knew or much cared at the time.

  But the Russian Orthodox Catherine took an interest when the Roman Catholic pope's brief on the suppression of the Jesuits found its way to St. Petersburg little more than a year later. Not that she preoccupied herself with debates over supposedly unfair Jesuit trading practices, the rights of indigenous people in Latin America, alleged Jesuit wealth, conflicts between Jesuits and Jansenists over grace and free will, nonstandard baptismal rites administered by Jesuits in China and India, or the proper authority of the Roman Catholic Church in the modern European states. Catherine's interests were simpler and more provincial: Jesuits were running four great schools in her empire. There were few schools like them in Russia. She wanted them to continue. She did not allow the papal edict suppressing the Jesuits to be promulgated within her empire.

  Paraguay reduction Jesuits wondered why their managers in Rome left them stranded while diplomats negotiated over their heads; Enron's rank and file were left suddenly impoverished and jobless when the company collapsed.

  Catherine was an unlikely defender in an unlikely locale. The two hundred Jesuits were the first to work in Russia in decades, but they weren't the first ever. Jesuits had worked in Russia intermittently over the years and had been kicked out of the country on two separate occasions. Peter the Great had expelled a small Jesuit team in 1689, incited by advisers who accused the Jesuits of subverting Russian Orthodoxy in order to implant Roman Catholicism. A few months later, Peter expelled the Jesuits again, in anger over their role as translators supporting Chinese negotiators in a China-Russia border dispute; Peter blamed the Jesuits when his ambassadors were bested at the negotiating table.

  Now, almost a century later, two hundred Jesuits, most of them ethnic Poles stripped of their national identity by the First Partition of Poland, ended up through the strangest combination of circumstances safely sheltered in a Russia well-known for expelling Jesuits long before the rest of the world caught on to the craze. Had the monarchs of Russia, Austria, and Prussia not carved up Poland, the extermination of the Jesuit company would have been entirely completed. As it was, although the two hundred could no longer formally call themselves Poles, only they could formally call themselves Jesuits. After a while, they elected a general. With Catherine's blessing, they constructed a novitiate so they could replenish their ranks with new recruits. Outraged European ambassadors protested to the Vatican. Catherine was amused and had good schools.

  A decade after the pope's suppression of the Jesuits, John Carroll, an ex-Jesuit living in Maryland, wrote to his British friend and exJesuit Charles Plowden: "An immense field is opened to the zeal of apostolic men. Universal toleration throughout this immense country, and innumerable Roman Catholics going and ready to go into the new regions bordering on the Mississippi Valley, perhaps the finest in the world, and impatiently clamorous for clergymen to attend them."8

  Too bad the magis-driven Jesuit company no longer existed, when the newly independent United States offered such enormous opportunities for their leadership. But news of the several hundred Jesuits tucked away in Catherine's Russia traveled fast. John Carroll wrote Plowden again in 1800, wondering whether the Englishman had accurate intelligence concerning a fantastic rumor that had found its way to the United States: "[Have] heard tidings relative to a revival of the Society. I beg you to send me, as early as possible, all the authentic information on this subject."9 As it turned out, Carroll himself was by then bishop of Baltimore, one of forty-six ex-Jesuits named bishops throughout the world following the suppression edict. Curiously enough, the same Vatican authorities who had deemed the Jesuit company unfit to exist hadn't been shy to scoop up ex-Jesuit talent for their own purposes.

  Communications between St. Petersburg, Russia, and Baltimore, Maryland, left something to be desired. Leonard Neale, yet another ex-Jesuit turned bishop, contacted his own sources to track down information, adding that he and his ex-Jesuit colleagues had started a small college on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., and were desperately in need of faculty reinforcements: "If we could get members of the Society, they would be objects of our wishes. Anything genuine from our ancient body would be highly gratifying-.-.-. assistance to our poor George Town college. "10

  The Jesuit general Gabriel Gruber posted a letter from his St.-Petersburg headquarters in March 1804 confirming both the company's continued existence and his authority to enlist former and new members in the United States and elsewhere: "This viva voce concession [from the pope] empowers us to affiliate members to the Society in any place whatsoever, provided it be done quietly and without ostentation."'1 He later dispatched three missionaries from his Russia team to assist the recently reaffiliated U.S. Jesuits struggling to keep George Town college afloat.

  Quietly and without ostentation were the key words. Papal authorities and no few state princes had begun to regret the Jesuit suppression. It may not have bothered them when Jesuit missions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas went dark, but the loss hit home when they looked around their own backyards and saw empty or poorly managed schools, church pulpits that once featured talented Jesuit preachers, and academic circles absent once powerful scholarly voices. Some rulers decided to jump on the opportunity presented by the spared Jesuits in Russia. The duke of Parma went looking for Jesuit help from Russia. Pope Pius VI approved it, distancing himself from his predecessor's suppression edict: "We have never said nor thought that it was a good thing to disband a body of men which served the Church well-.-.-. and whose absence today has led to the disastrous consequences which we can plainly see."12 Still, it wasn't as if Pius VI could be counted on to take any heat should European potentates bridle at the Jesuits' creeping reemergence: "But if some of the great Catholic princes take umbrage,-.-.-. we will be forced to disapprove the determination of Your Highness [i.e., the duke of Parma], which we are pleased to ignore at the moment although we are quite well aware of it."13

  Politics are politics, in whatever era. And thus the pope allowed the reemergence of the Jesuits by ignoring it officially.

  A COMPANY IS REBORN: THE JESUITS' PHOENIXLIKE RESURGENCE

  Handfuls of Jesuits continued to crawl out of the woodwork a good thirty years after the company's dissolution, perhaps emboldened by the same "nothing to lose" spirit that energized the company's founders. The next pontiff, Pope Pius VII, might have caught a touch of that spirit as well. Pope Clement XIV had caved in to bullying from Portugal, France, and Spain, perhaps reasoning that sacrificing the Jesuits could buy some papal breathing room. But the humiliations later suffered by Pope Pius VII made plain the weak hand the Vatican was playing. Summoned ignominiously to Paris to crown Napoleon emperor, Pius VII later found himself imprisoned at Fontainebleau after Napoleon seized the Papal States. Upon his release and return to Rome, and perhaps driven by that "nothing to lose" attitude, Pius composed Sollicitudo Omnium Ecclesiarum:

  With one voice the Catholic world demands the reestablishment of the Company of Jesus. We would believe ourselves guilty before God of great error if,-.-.-. rocked and assailed by continual storms, we refused to make use of vigorous and tested branches which offer themselves up spontaneously to break the force of a sea that threatens us at every moment with shipwreck and death.... We have
decided to do today what we would have wished to do at the beginning of our Pontificate.14

  Within a year of restoration, there were a thousand Jesuits. Within a generation, more than five thousand Jesuits were working all over the world. Over time, the company easily surpassed its presuppression scale.

  Few people can even name a company that went out of business forty years ago. What other company ever reemerged after forty years of suspended animation-with its leadership principles intact?

  Few people can even name a company that went out of business forty years ago. What other company ever reemerged after forty years of suspended animation, with its leadership principles intact, no less?

  HEROIC LEADERSHIP IS A DAILY PERSONAL PURSUIT

  Most people wonder about their capacity to act heroically should a momentous opportunity suddenly present itself. Loyola's Spiritual Exercises forced recruits to consider instead their capacity for heroism on a daily basis. Jesuit heroism is not just a response to a crisis but a consciously chosen approach to life; it is judged not by the scale of the opportunity but by the quality of the response to the opportunity at hand. For the Jesuit teacher, every day pre sented a choice, summed up by Ribadeneira: either another day spent with brats, "so frivolous, so restless, so talkative, and so unwilling to work, that even their parents cannot keep them at home" or another day devoted to a business so vital that "all the well-being of Christianity and of the whole world" depended on it. Every pursuit offers its own version of the same choice. How one chooses profoundly affects personal satisfaction and performance quality; after all, how can you not be motivated when the "wellbeing of the whole world" depends on what you do?