ROME \u2013 Born in 1921 in the Ritz hotel in Paris to Argentine parents, Enrique Shaw was an over-achiever from the beginning. To this day, he remains the youngest graduate of Argentina\u2019s naval school, and, by the time he retired at the age of 24, he was a full lieutenant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He founded Argentina\u2019s Christian Association of Business Executives. Inspired by the formation he received at the Harvard Business School \u2013 where he studied, by the way, upon invitation, since he never applied \u2013 he also helped found his country\u2019s Pontifical University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In between, he became the CEO of his wife\u2019s family industry, Rigolleau Glassworks, fathered nine children, headed the male branch of Argentina\u2019s Catholic Action, and helped found the local Caritas office. At his company, Shaw established a pension fund and a health care system to provide the 3,400 workers, offering medical service, financial support in case of illness, and loans for important life events such as marriage, birth, and death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All this before he died of cancer at the age of 41, after a six-year battle. Some 260 of the laborers of the company he led donated blood to help the man who knew them by name, often asked about their families, and always had a little notebook in hand to write down any specific requests an employee might have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shortly before his death, he said farewell to the workers, thanking them for the blood donations: \u201cI can tell you that now almost all the blood that runs through my veins is workers\u2019 blood. I am thus more than ever identified with you, whom I have always loved and considered, not as mere executors, but also as executives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Saturday, with Pope Francis\u2019 greenlight, the Catholic Church declared Shaw venerable, meaning he\u2019s two miracles away from being declared a saint. Even though the Argentine pontiff avoided interfering with the cause, he did keep a \u201cclose eye\u201d on it, according to fellow Argentine Silvia Correale, a canon lawyer and co-postulator of Shaw\u2019s sainthood cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know that several times he asked about Shaw\u2019s cause,\u201d Correale told Crux<\/em> Saturday evening. \u201cHe didn\u2019t get involved, so that there would be no doubt hanging over the cause, but he asked about it more than once.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though there are those who sotto voce<\/em> claim then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, wasn\u2019t originally convinced that a businessman could be a saint, the truth is that it was at his request that the man he would later handpick to replace him, now Cardinal Mario Poli, opened Shaw\u2019s diocesan cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Correale also said Francis once acknowledged he had asked for Shaw to intervene in a \u201cspecial intention.\u201d Jokingly, but not completely out of the realm of the possible, she ventured that the pope probably wanted the businessman to intervene in cleaning up the Vatican\u2019s finances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2015, in an interview with Mexico\u2019s Televisa<\/em>, Francis spoke about Shaw, saying: \u201cI am carrying forward the cause for the beatification of a wealthy Argentine businessman, Enrique Shaw, who was rich, but who was a saint.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shaw spent most of his childhood in Argentina, but once, together with his brother and father \u2013 Shaw\u2019s mother died when he was 4 \u2013 they spent a year in the United States, where Shaw received confirmation. Though his father was a non-practicing Catholic, he upheld a promise he\u2019d made to his dying wife of raising their children in the faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shaw would go back to the United States in 1945, on an assignment from the Argentine Navy, which wanted him to study meteorology. Upon his arrival in New York, the same day WWII ended, he had a change of heart: According to Correale, during the trip from Buenos Aires to the United States he had several conversations with Monsignor Reynold Hillenbrand of Chicago, who made him see that Shaw would never be seen as \u201cjust another worker,\u201d but could make a difference by becoming a businessman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Together with his wife, Sara Bunge, Shaw headed to Corning, where Bunge was born, and spent a year learning the trade in Corning Glass, partner with Rigolleau. When the family went back to Argentina, he began working in the family business and soon became general director.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sara Critto, one of Shaw\u2019s many grandchildren, told Crux<\/em> that her grandfather \u201cconsidered business as a community of life. It\u2019s an economic reality that presents itself as a system of resources organized in order to produce and sell goods or services in an environment that surpasses it, the market, to satisfy authentic human needs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s a human reality of work that must contribute to unite and develop people and to the common good of the society in which it is inserted,\u201d Critto said of Shaw, a man who more than once made decisions that were perhaps not the best for his company because the opposite one would have been bad for his country. \u201cHe believed that the company\u2019s objective is to maximize positive results in all dimensions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an attempt to explain who her grandfather was, Critto went straight to his writings, including several personal notebooks that made their way into the sainthood cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDo we think more about the people than about the company?\u201d he wrote in the fifth of his notebooks. \u201cIn dealing with our employees, are we, for example, more sympathetic? Have we put aside hatred, even for deeds or persons who, without cause, have harmed us?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cJesus, who had so much to teach us, told us of Himself: Learn from Me, for I am meek and humble of heart,\u201d Shaw wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though Shaw died in Buenos Aires, and, as such, the diocesan case for his sainthood cause originated in Argentina\u2019s capital, it was sent to Rome by the country\u2019s military ordinariate. As the military bishop of Argentina, Santiago Olivera then became the other co-postulator of the sainthood cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking with Crux<\/em>, the prelate began by praising Shaw for the example he set as a father and husband, a particularly needed model this year, when the Catholic Church celebrates the year of the family and of St. Joseph, both at Francis\u2019 request.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe was an exemplary model during his seven years as a member of the Argentine Naval Academy and, obviously, a businessman with a solidarity and an understanding of the economy that led him to think about the dignity and development of his workers,\u201d Olivera said, noting that Shaw\u2019s model today could be defined as \u201csocial economics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bishop said that seeing Shaw as a role model is an invitation to think about living a life in an \u201cGospel key, seeking God\u2019s will and seeing one another as siblings.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn this time of misunderstandings and of so many labor needs, he is a point of reference for fraternity and for strengthening the culture of work,\u201d Olivera said. \u201cHe was a man who was rich for his solidarity and fraternity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Father Juan Miguel Shaw is an Opus Dei priest based in Mombasa, Kenya, and is one of the youngest of the Shaw\u2019s. He told Crux<\/em> via email that his father \u201cshows how Christian holiness, with its array of wonderful human and supernatural virtues, can overcome any conflict of interests at the workplace.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe oppositions labor vs. capital and trade unions vs. management fade away in the light of his holy life,\u201d he said, defining his father\u2019s legacy as a \u201cstrong message for entrepreneurs to be ready to sacrifice. For my father to enter the corporate world he had to sacrifice his career in the Navy \u2013 and I am a witness of his love for it till his death. He entered the family business as a call from God, and his reply was a full \u2018Yes\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The process to declare Shaw a saint could take years. A miracle attributed to his intercession is already being studied in Rome, but a second is needed for a sainthood recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But if it does happen, this Argentine will become the first saint businessman since St. Homobonus, a 12th century Italian merchant who\u2019s the patron of businesspeople, tailors, shoemakers, and cloth workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet this venerable\u2019s life, as Father Shaw argued, is already a \u201cgreat encouragement for the Church, the country, the corporate and trade union world, and for the navy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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