The Pope & the CEO

by Andreas Widmer

  Everyone—whether you’re a pope leading millions, a CEO leading hundreds, or a father leading a few—wears more than one hat in this life. You are an employer or employee, but you’re also a son or daughter, brother or sister, husband or wife, mother or father, community leader or volunteer, citizen or soldier, neighbor or friend. The list goes on and on. All these various roles give you multiple ways to serve others and use your gifts. They also, however, create multiple sets of expectations and goals. Those expectations and goals often conflict.

  To start with, they pull you in opposite directions, each demanding time from the other. They also seem to require opposite virtues. What it takes to get ahead in business can seem a far cry from what it takes to be a good father or Christian disciple. Each role comes with a culture of competing priorities. For example, what the culture of corporate success tells you is important—long hours at the office, cut-throat business instincts, and quarterly benchmarks—is different from what the culture of parenthood says matters most—saving money, being present at home, and modeling responsibility, commitment, and love for your children.

  Most of us at least try to balance our different roles and the priorities that accompany them, working hard to do what’s expected of us at work, home, and in our communities, making every effort to please our boss, our spouse, and our kids. But in trying to please everybody, we can end up feeling like we’re pleasing nobody.

  In order to be successful in competing cultures, we can also start acting like one person at the office and another person at home. We compartmentalize, live a “duality” that allows one set of values and beliefs to guide us in our professional lives and another in our personal lives.

  We often make trade-offs, compromises, negotiated attempts, to navigate through multiple worlds. Those trade-offs can cost us dearly. I can’t count the number of executives I’ve known over the years whose success in business has cost them the affection and respect of their wives and children, and too often their entire relationships. I’ve known others who’ve neglected their real professional passions in pursuit of a higher salary or more prestigious title. Even those who manage to strike a seemingly reasonable balance are often worn out from their efforts. They’re not happy. They’re exhausted. The passion they once felt for their work, hobbies, or volunteer activities first diminishes, then disappears.

  Disappointment, confusion, fragmentation, and ultimately, exhaustion—that’s what you set yourself up for when you don’t have a clear hierarchy of roles and priorities.

  The Way Out of the Chaos

  When you understand all three levels of vocation, however, and the place each one holds in the hierarchy of importance, it becomes much easier to order your life and your priorities, pursuing the virtues you most need, and balancing competing roles without compromise.

  John Paul II was living proof of that.

  While serving in the Swiss Guards, one of my friends who had been there much longer than I had told me a story about John Paul II’s first days as pope. On his first official day “on the job,” with the weight of the world suddenly placed on his shoulders, John Paul made a decision. A friend and fellow Polish bishop was sick and he wanted to see him. But that’s not quite right. He didn’t just want to see him. He believed he was supposed to see him. He thought, on that day, at that moment that seeing his friend was the most important thing for him to do. So, despite the loud objections of his staff, he did just that. The world kept on turning. The most important needs were met, and the less important waited.

  A few days later, at a press conference for two thousand journalists, John Paul again went his own way. After offering the expected few comments, rather then leaving, he plunged into the crowd and began chatting with the press corps. Some poor monsignor, tasked with keeping the pope on schedule, tried to pull John Paul II away. But the pope waved him off and announced into a reporter’s camera, “There are people here telling me it’s time to leave now. I’m the pope. I’ll leave when I want to leave.”

  That’s the difference a clear understanding of all three levels of vocation and their relationship to one another can make. John Paul considered first and foremost what God was asking of him, and then he did it. He put God first, his vocation to the priesthood second, and the many demands of the papal office third. He prayed, said the Mass, then did everything else. He did “everything else” with the same spirit that he prayed and offered Mass. That is to say, he let the duties and values of his universal and primary vocation shape how he fulfilled his secondary vocation. His energies never lagged, his passion never waned.

  Finding Your Balance

  Most of us will never become pope, but each of us will be able to put these priorities of vocations into action, just as the pope did. In his understanding of vocation, John Paul II found the balance between competing roles and priorities. He knew what mattered and why. He lived every day according to that knowledge. There was no confusion, no fragmentation. Everything was ordered rightly. Nothing was compartmentalized. He was the same man in front of millions that he was in front of a single lowly bodyguard.

  You need to strive for the same balance as a layperson and business leader. Knowing your universal, primary, and secondary vocation will do for you what John Paul II’s knowledge of his vocation did for him. It will order your commitments correctly. It will help you live according to the right values and strive for the right virtues. It will help you live an integrated life and work for the things that really matter. Above all, it will help you give yourself passionately and without reserve to what God is calling you to do and be.

  That doesn’t mean that you won’t ever occasionally work late at the office when you’d rather be home, or that you won’t miss saying your usual night prayers from time to time because you’re up with a sick child. There are times when one vocation demands a higher priority, even if, technically speaking, its usual place is somewhat lower on the vocational totem pole. But knowing your vocation does prevent those occasions from becoming a way of life. It also ensures that the right value system, the value system that goes along with your universal vocation, is always shaping the way you live your primary and secondary vocations. In effect, it is your fail-safe when the temptation to compromise your values arises. It’s what you can always rely on to know the right course of action and find inspiration for why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s an unfailing guide when questions or doubts inevitably come.

  ***

  That’s the lesson I should have learned on February 11, 1987. On that day I was looking forward to some time off, when my commanding officer broke the bad news. Due to a change in schedules, I needed to replace another guard and serve at a papal Mass. I was furious, and when I took my place beside the open-air altar in St. Peter’s Square, I was seething with resentment.

  For the next hour and a half, while John Paul II prayed the Mass, I stood beside him, still as a statue, but utterly absorbed in my own anger. When he issued the final blessing, I heaved a sigh of relief. Finally, the Mass was over and I could get on with my day off. But as the pope was preparing to head back into the Vatican, he looked out into the crowds. Then, he reversed course.

  Descending the stairs into St. Peter’s Square, John Paul began walking among the pilgrims. He would stop, greet someone, bless him, then move on to the next person. With each blessing, my anger grew. I felt almost as if he was taking his sweet time simply to make me crazy. My feet hurt, my back ached, and sweat poured down my face. My impatience boiled over.

  Then, for half a second, I glanced over at the person he was blessing. To say the man was disabled would be an understatement. He had no arms, no legs, and was terribly malformed. An interpreter communicated with him by touching him in certain ways and sequences. I then realized this person was also blind and deaf. Despite all that, the look on his face at that moment was one of pure joy. The guy radiated it.

  I then looked at the pilgrims next to him. There were wheelchairs and hospital beds as far as the eye c
ould see, filled with sick souls wanting more than anything to see the pope. Suddenly I was happy to have legs that hurt.

  More time passed. The pope continued down the aisle, blessing every pilgrim he could. I no longer minded. I’d been so caught up in what I wanted, what I thought was important, that I’d been blind to the very real needs right before my eyes. Not John Paul II, who didn’t get days off and probably had far less sleep than I had the night before. He knew what was important. He knew what his vocation called him to do and he did it without question.

  Thanks be to God for that.

  Finding Your Three Vocations

  God made each of us to do something unique, something that nobody else before or after us was made to do and that nobody else can do quite as well. He made us that way both for our own personal benefit and to build up the Body of Christ in the world. How do we know what he made us to do?

  No matter what our calling, our vocation is the way in which we give back to God what he has given to us. It’s a bit like when you give your child art materials—paper, brushes, pencils, colors, glitter, glue, scissors, wiggle eye stickers and pom-poms—and then ask him or her to “use all this material and make something great. Go ahead—be creative!” You then wait excitedly until your daughter or son comes back and proudly presents the latest creation. You of course love it and, just as proudly, display it at your office or in your kitchen.

  What God gives you are not art supplies, but the talents, likes, dislikes, the exact place in space and time that you live, the many specific opportunities and challenges that you encounter… and he’s telling you: “Take all of this and make something good and beautiful—I got all these ingredients especially for you—do something great. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!” We of course go about this in a bit more organized fashion that a child does with paint, but we should not forget to use the same awe-filled and confident approach.

  The process of discernment is an art, not a science, and it takes time and practice to become adept at it, but these two steps are a good place to start.

  Step 1: Read God’s Instruction Manual: The Bible

  In the Bible, we see salvation history unfold. We learn about God the Father’s plan of salvation, Jesus’ mission of redemption, and the Holy Spirit’s work of sanctification. In the Bible, God speaks. If you need help finding your vocation, the help is there. If you need help understanding your vocation, the help is there. If you need help succeeding at the vocation to which you’re already committed, the help is there.

  Step 2: Follow St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Advice

  Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order, was a superb spiritual guide. His book “The Spiritual Exercises” is a must-have for any spiritual seeker. In it, he describes three steps to discernment.

  First, cultivate awareness. That means you have to work on being open to God’s presence in your life, believing he’s there and wanting to communicate with you. One way to do this is at the end of the day ask yourself how you feel spiritually about what’s going on in your life. How are you reacting, at your core, to the circumstances of life?

  Second, cultivate understanding. This comes through reflecting on your reactions. Ask God what feelings are from him and what feelings are not from him. In doing that, you’ll start to realize what makes you truly happy and truly sad. You’ll start to hear God’s voice directing you through both your emotions and your reason.

  Third, take action. Use your will to choose what God wants for you and reject what he doesn’t want.

  Questions for Reflection

  What’s the next step on your path to holiness? Make a plan of how you can grow in holiness tomorrow. Make a plan with goals for the week, the month, and the year.

  What is your primary vocation? What are five specific small or bold ways you can live out this vocation each day?

  What is your secondary vocation? Make a list of the talents, opportunities, and ideas God has given you in support of that vocation. Do you see your job as an expression of that vocation? Do you feel like that child doing artwork or do you feel that your work is burning you out? Why or why not? If so, what needs to change for you? A new career? Different responsibilities? A different attitude on your part?

  Epigraph. Karol Wojtyla, Address to Graduating High School Students and Working Youth (June, 1969), as quoted in Adam Boniecki, MIC, The Making of the Pope of the Millenium: Kalendarium of the Life of Karol Wojtyla, (Stockbridge, MA: Marian Press, 2000), 365]

  Chapter Two

  Know God:

  The Power of Prayer

  Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus.

  1 Thessalonians 5:17–18

  Prayer helps us to rediscover the loving face of God. He never abandons his people but guarantees that, notwithstanding trials and suffering, good triumphs in the end.

  —Blessed John Paul II

  On a winter’s night in 1987, I stood in full dress uniform inside one of the Vatican’s smaller chapels. Gathered there were between fifty and one hundred people. They had come to join John Paul II for a prayer service that would be broadcast around the world via Vatican Radio.

  I was there in my official capacity, to guard the pope, not pray, so while he and the visitors kept their eyes closed and heads bowed in prayer, my eyes remained wide open. John Paul knelt almost directly across from where I stood, and it was on him that I focused. My focus, however, wasn’t purely professional. There was something more behind the intensity with which I watched him. I suppose it was curiosity. I was still new at the Vatican and still trying to figure this pope out, trying to understand who he was and what made him tick.

  That night, I got my answer.

  As I watched him pray, softly speaking the words of the Rosary, he began radiating a sense of peacefulness and calm unlike anything I had ever encountered. The longer he prayed, the more absorbed in the prayer he became, until he seemed completely taken up in it, as if nothing and no one in the room could pull him back from the place where he’d gone. He was obviously still physically present, but his spirit seemed to be someplace else.

  I’d never seen anyone pray like that before. I didn’t know it was possible. Up until that evening, I had always thought of prayer as an act of the imagination, a mental fantasy people cooked up to feel better about something, almost like a child talking to an imaginary friend. But there was nothing imaginary about what I saw that night. This man wasn’t faking his immersion in God. What I saw was profoundly real and exceedingly desirable.

  Over the course of the next two years, I watched John Paul II pray on countless occasions. I learned a great deal about prayer from watching him—what prayer is, how to pray, and what prayer accomplishes. I also learned a great deal about the pope himself through watching him pray. I discovered that prayer was at the heart of everything he did. It shaped him, guided him, and gave him the strength to lead. Prayer is what made John Paul II the man, the pope, and the leader he was. It enabled him to inspire so many so profoundly. Prayer can do the same for you and me.

  The Nature of Prayer

  I once overheard John Paul II say that prayer is a learned ability, something anyone can do if he only try. In other words, prayer is not an activity solely reserved for mystics and saints or priests and nuns. It’s also not something to do just on Sundays or before meals. It’s something for everyone, at any time.

  The reason for that lies in the nature of prayer. You see, prayer isn’t so much about the words you say as it is about whom you say them to. At its heart, prayer is an encounter with a Person. It’s an exchange between you and God. All that goes into an exchange between any two people goes into an exchange between you and the Lord of the universe: listening, talking, or just silently being together.

  When John Paul II prayed, that’s what happened. He talked with God about both his own and the world’s struggles, sorrows, and joys. He listened for what God had to say. He also praised
God, telling him how much he loved him and thanking him for all his good works, great and small. Above all, he just basked in the joy of God’s presence, much like two friends do.

  That’s prayer: an encounter with God to which every human being is called.

  There are different ways of praying—different forms of prayer. There’s vocal prayer, which is reciting specific prayers, like the Our Father or the Hail Mary. There’s also mental prayer, which is more like a conversation with God. Then there’s meditation, where you prayerfully reflect on a passage from Scripture or a truth of the Faith. Finally there’s contemplation, where God brings you into a state of absorption in him, kind of like when two lovers become lost in each other’s eyes.