Management

For the Greater Glory?

Three Jesuit priests, centered on spirituality but focused on solving worldly problems, use their MBA degrees to push the Church’s envelope. 

By CHERIAN GEORGE

Jesuits Tom Smolich (left) and Dan Lahart at the Sacred Heart Center in Los Gatos, Calif.  Photograph by Peter Stember

A FEW EYEBROWS TUGGED HEAVENWARD when Tom Smolich was asked to head one of the Jesuit religious order’s 85 provinces. “One of the concerns heard when I was named Provincial was, was I going to turn this into a business?” he says. “No, I’m not turning it into a business.” There is a hint of exasperation in his answer, but it is not difficult to see why such questions pop up. After all, a Stanford MBA is hardly the typical postgraduate qualification for someone who has taken a vow of poverty. But, as improbable as that career track may seem, Smolich was not the first Jesuit priest to come study at the Business School. The Class of ’83 had Albert DiUlio, who has just taken up a leading position in one of the country’s largest school systems. Smolich’s own Class of ’96 included Daniel Lahart, recently appointed president of a Houston preparatory school.

Stanford’s three Jesuit MBAs are part of a centuries-old experiment in engaging the world for the greater glory of God—ad majorem Dei gloriam, as their motto puts it. “The Jesuits try to take advantage of people’s individual talents,” Lahart says. “There are Jesuits who are physicians, lawyers, artists, architects.” With about 22,000 men around the globe, they form the largest missionary order of the Roman Catholic Church.

The 461-year-old organization, formally called the Society of Jesus, is noted as much for its energy as its longevity. In the United States, Jesuits have been active in the civil rights movement and are especially well known for their role in education. Beginning with Georgetown University, founded in 1789, they have set up a network of 46 high schools and 28 colleges and universities around the country. Centered on spirituality but geared toward direct service, Jesuits form a pool of skilled and flexible human capital at the disposal of the Pope.

Getting the most out of that pool is one of Smolich’s key responsibilities. He was appointed California Provincial Superior in 1999, putting him in charge of more than 400 men from Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Hawaii, as well as the Golden State. “In some ways it’s a human resources job, but 24-7 rather than five days a week,” he says. In contrast to the strongly hierarchical Catholic Church it serves, the Jesuit order has a flat structure. The men report to Provincials like Smolich, who in turn answer to the number one Jesuit, the General Superior in Rome, who is immediately accountable to the Pope. “I have a personal conversation called the ‘account of conscience’ with 460 guys every year. We talk about how the Spirit is moving in their lives, what their current mission is, and what their next mission should be,” Smolich says. His Business School training in risk management has turned out to be especially useful when making personnel decisions. “As an order, we have a tradition of trying new things. But if we’re going to take risks, the returns must be commensurate.”

For DiUlio, that tradition of innovation meant being dispatched in 1999 to Ethiopia to set up the poverty-stricken country’s first Catholic university. He had by then served as president of Xavier University in Cincinnati and of Marquette University in Milwaukee. But his two years in Addis Ababa were “something totally different,” he says. DiUlio’s reminiscences include being confronted by hundreds of sheep and cattle outside his front door on market days; learning to direct taxis in a city where the streets have no name; and inching through the government’s slow-moving bureaucracy. With preliminary funding for the university put up by the Italian Bishops’ Conference, DiUlio entered into talks with the Ethiopian government. It took more than three months to obtain a meeting with officials to discuss the first draft of the university charter. “Most of my time was spent waiting,” he recalls. “It’s easy to underestimate the amount of time it takes to get things done in a different culture. And it is a very different culture. But it really was an exciting project, with a lot of potential. It still is.”

“Los Angeles has a very large population of newly arrived peoples, and helping them become fully integrated remains a major challenge.” —Reverend Albert DiUlio, S.J.

DiUlio completed a feasibility study and identified a suitable plot of land, but he estimates that it will be another three to five years before the institution opens. It will be tough to find teachers, he says. Much of the indigenous professional class has emigrated, and it is hard to draw expatriates into the country. Having done some of the groundwork for the university, DiUlio moved on this year to a new assignment half a world away. When the Archbishop of Los Angeles created the position of president of schools, DiUlio was picked for the job. The L.A. Archdiocese runs one of the largest school systems in the country, with 300 high schools and elementary schools serving about 100,000 students. As their head, DiUlio’s responsibilities include strategic planning, financial management, and finding solutions for reaching underserved and minority communities in the metropolis. “Los Angeles has a very large population of newly arrived peoples, and helping them and their children become fully integrated into American culture remains a major challenge,” he says.

The year 2001 was a milestone—both professionally and spiritually—for Lahart as well. In August, he took up the presidency of Strake Jesuit College Preparatory School in Houston. He had spent the previous five years as vice president for finance and administration at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C. There, he masterminded a $21.5 million bond issue to finance a major campus renovation by relying heavily on his MBA experience. “Without it, I wouldn’t have known where to begin, and I probably would have been too scared to do it,” Lahart says. “There were times I could pick up the phone and ask a classmate for advice.”

Before moving to Houston, Lahart embarked on his Tertianship—the final stage of his Jesuit training. This brought him back to the San Francisco Bay Area, but this time it was to the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center, high on a hill in Los Gatos. Downtown San Jose is clearly visible in the distance, but it is the serene religious statues and free-roaming deer in the garden that set the tone here, not the Silicon Valley bustle below. Lahart’s Tertianship included a 30-day silent retreat, in which solitary contemplation is interrupted only by brief daily meetings with an adviser. “It’s our belief that an immediate experience of God is possible,” he explains. “The retreat is a kind of withdrawal from all the distractions of the world to be able to hear God’s call.”

The number of men willing to respond to that call—with its long years of training and its perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—has been falling steadily since the 1960s. The U.S. provinces have benefited from some immigration of Jesuits from Asia and Africa, where the order is still growing. Nevertheless, numbers have fallen from over 8,000 in the mid-sixties to about 4,000 today. “Manpower, manpower, manpower,” DiUlio replies, when asked to identify the main challenges facing the order. He notes that when he studied at Marquette University in the 1960s, it was “extremely rare” for a student not to be taught by several Jesuits in the course of a year. Nowadays, students may not have any contact at all with the Pope’s Men in Jesuit schools. “It’s harder and harder to maintain their identifiable religious character,” DiUlio acknowledges. Doing so requires greater reliance on lay people, which the three priests agree has been working well.

But some within the church allege that the Jesuits have bitten off more than they can chew—building a large school system on the assumption that the order would continue to grow. Smolich counters: “Our founder, Ignatius, was not a circle-the-wagons kind of guy. We’re going to try things. Yes, we set up this frankly phenomenal private Catholic school network. Is it perfect? No, it’s not perfect. So what? Is there a lot of good going on? Yes.” He notes that Jesuits in the United States continue to build and innovate. For example, they have set up a string of “Nativity” schools across the country in which students from poor families are given intensive academic and spiritual training in a year-round program that includes extracurricular activities and summer classes. “Historically, we’ve gone where needs are greatest. By nature, we’re people who push the envelope, and the church needs people who push the envelope,” says Smolich.

Some critics are unimpressed, and they argue that in its eagerness to address the practical problems of the world, the Society of Jesus has distracted the church from its proper, spiritual purpose. In the conspiracy-theory version of this argument, Jesuits have even been portrayed as Trojan horses who have smuggled Marxist liberation theology into the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, with some far-reaching geopolitical consequences.

The MBA priests sweep aside such criticism. They perceive no such wall between spiritual and temporal worlds. Says Smolich: “Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit poet, said, ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ I really believe that. There are opportunities out there and things we can do.” Their spiritual gift, or charism, is to get their hands dirty, adds Lahart: “There are some religious orders whose charism is to sit on a mountaintop and pray for the world. Our charism is to get involved, to try to make a contribution to a situation, and in the midst of that, recognize our God is present in what’s going on.” Jesuits are “contemplatives in action,” he says.

With everything that’s on their plate, the three say their MBAs have come in handy. Their jobs involve reading balance sheets, communicating with lay board members who use the language of business, and managing men and assets. But while they see parallels between their order and any other large corporation, they are also quick to point out the limits to the analogy. After all, their bottom line is fundamentally different from that of the typical Fortune 500 outfit. “The key difference is that governance is based on an account of conscience,” says Smolich. The California Provincial adds: “Am I the CEO? Yes, I’m the CEO. Would I ever use that title? Not on your life.”

Cherian George is a Stanford PhD candidate in communications and a former reporter for the Singapore Straits Times.