The Strange Case of Enrique Shaw: Can a Businessman Become a Saint?

The sentence is hard to forget. And maybe already unverifiable, but this is an argentinian pope and returns to a discussion of the time of Christ. Those who promote the canonization of Enrique Shaw, director of the Rigolleau glassworks who died in 1962 and who would be 100 years old on the 26th of this month, claim that there were times when Bergoglio, then cardinal, was not so convinced of the cause. And that, on the contrary, he appeased the enthusiasm of Shaw’s admirers with an irony: it is impossible, he says, for an entrepreneur to be a saint.

Literally or not, there is no doubt that the pontiff’s thought has changed. In 2015, in an interview with Mexican Televisa, he anticipated: “I realize the cause of beatification of a wealthy Argentinian businessman, Enrique Shaw, that he was rich, but he was holy. “Behind Bergoglio” but “there are centuries of debates on the relationship between Catholicism and wealth, the celestial and the earthly, that of God and that of Caesar. Elevation to the altars of this ruler considered exemplary not only by his family and friends, but also by his employees, who flocked to donate blood before dying of cancer at age 41?

The process must go through several checks in Rome. First, the Ordinary Commission of Bishops and Cardinals of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints must vote and decide whether Shaw has heroically exercised the virtues entrusted to her and, if it resolves, issue a decree to consider her “venerable.” . The next step is to find a miracle attributable to his intercession, which will be analyzed by doctors and theologians. Argentinian clergy are optimistic. They say the commission could be issued before the middle of the year and that the alleged miracle, details of which they are keeping in reserve, has already been sent to Rome: it is the healing of a boy victim of an accident .

What is proven is how excited the Shaw figure is to those who knew him. “A man of enormous consistency between what he said and did – he remembers THE NATION trade unionist Carlos Custer, from the ATE, who worked in Rigolleau between 1956 and 1963 and became a section delegate. Although we may not have agreed at one point, he tried to listen and understand the other. He went through the ovens, questioned each employee about the family and walked around smiling: he certainly had a thousand difficulties, but he never lost his smile. It is likely that Custer, 81, former provincial deputy and ambassador to the Vatican between 2004 and 2007, he may have finished convincing Bergoglio, whom he has known for years. He denies it. “From what I have said, he has never hesitated to advance the cause,” he says.

Shaw also disputes, on the other hand, this moment in Argentina. He must have lived through a period of union boiling that did not undermine investment, higher than the current one in terms of GDP. Those who cared for him also emphasize his ingenuity in crises. In his book The company, community of life and human relations: the exemplary case of Enrique Shaw, Mónica Aranda Baulero remembers when the shareholders of Rigolleau decided to close the carpentry workshop, which made pallets and crates for the bottles and increased costs: it was cheaper to buy from external suppliers. Shaw didn’t hesitate to make this decision, but found a way around it: organized the layoff with the employees, but gave them a loan to start a cooperative and helped them buy land in front of the factory. It would be them, through an exclusive contract, who would sell crates and pallets to Rigolleau at market prices. The idea was a success: the factory reduced costs and the workers, already owners, improved their income.

It is true that the vigilance of these entrepreneurs for costs it did not include factors that over the years have added to the Argentine discussion. Gustavo Lazzari, economist and owner of the Cárdenas refrigerator, pointed out this difference last year: “The problem is not the unions. taxes. “.

But Shaw seems to have anticipated this debate. In 1958, in Mendoza, according to the book And rule the earth., Words and writings of Enrique Shaw, a compilation by Fernán Elizalde, spoke of unions like this: “You don’t have to disturb them, but understand. If you want freedom in the economic realm – and you have to want it – you have to accept the conditions that make freedom possible … Business problems must be solved by the parties concerned – employers and unions – by mutual agreement. Otherwise, they will be solved by the state and the great problem of the present moment, seen as a whole, is not how to defend against the unions, but how to defend against the state. […] Free enterprise can only find the security of its development in a democracy and democracy does not exist where there are no unions, because its absence causes such state interventionism that it kills economic freedom and, with it, political freedom ”.

It was a conception more than ideological. Because Shaw saw in work the opportunity for every employee to achieve transcendence.. And, unlike many believers today, even priests and bishops, he did not disguise his faith in philanthropy in the manner of NGOs: he spoke in his conferences of Christ, of the Virgin, of the Eucharist. Nor has he avoided words that are now being resisted in labor justice, such as productivity. On the contrary: he quoted the Belgian industrialist Léon Antoine Beckaert, who said that the concept of productivity was already recorded in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, in the parable of the talents. “Everyone has a duty to make them happen,” Shaw paraphrased.

These are notions which, if canonized, will surely influence the discourse of Argentinian leaders, for the moment inclined to solicit the applause of sympathizers with phrases from Bergoglio. Regardless of what you think of capitalism or the role of an entrepreneur, There is one characteristic of Shaw that may appeal to the Pope: austerity.

“The manager of our building was struck by the fact that dad had an Estancia and not a better car – recalls Sarah, the second of his nine children – he told us:” What is necessary, yes, but not superfluous things. “Sarah says Shaw came from the factory every night whistling and walked through the beds to ask each child how their day was. And that she only remembers three big tantrums. of his father, the worst when she, a teenage girl, pushed him dressed in the pool and almost knocked him over another of his brothers. “I think he was already sick. He yelled at me and I was so offended that after a while he came to apologize for the way I had reacted, “he says. In the life of any leader, the rectification of a domestic error appears as an irrelevant detail; in Shaw, he exposes the paradox that founds it: the most resounding he built in silence.

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