“The symbol of the heart is often used to express the love of Jesus Christ. Some people wonder if it has a valid meaning today. But when we are tempted to surf the surface, to live in a hurry without knowing what it is for, to become insatiable consumers enslaved by the gears of a market that is not interested in the meaning of our existence, we need to recover the importance of the heart” (Dilexit nos, 2).
With these words, Pope Francis reflects in his recent encyclical on the importance of the heart, whose symbolism and centrality must permeate all dimensions of the human being, including the professional. Businessmen and women are called to reorient the gears of economic action. Businessmen and women are invited to bring about an almost Copernican turn in a market that has forgotten the meaning of our existence, even the meaning of the market itself as a human activity and, therefore, humanizing.
Business schools have masterfully developed strategies to highlight the “core”, that is the main activity, the central focus of operations. Since reading the recent encyclical of Pope Francis, Christian managers and entrepreneurs have sensed the possibility of leaping the “core” to the “cuore” or, better yet, of giving meaning to the essential core of the activity that our company develops from the symbolic depth of the heart of Jesus, the Lord.
Caritas Spain coined the expression “Companies with heart” years ago to invite economic agents to accept the challenge of being, from their very economic activity, agents of transformation of reality. The question is simple: what can my company do? How can I involve stakeholders to build sustainable development and social well-being?
The proposals are only clues that are called to be implemented from the different sectors that make up our activity: facilitating the incorporation into the labour market of especially vulnerable people, promoting volunteering actions in the company, donating financial or in-kind contributions in favour of specific solidarity projects, …
But action is also nourished by training, reading, meditation, looking at the heart:
“In this liquid world it is necessary to speak again of the heart, to point towards there where each person, of all kinds and conditions, makes his synthesis; there where concrete beings have the source and the root of all their other powers, convictions, passions, choices. But we move in societies of serial consumers who live from day to day and dominated by the rhythms and noises of technology, without much patience to carry out the processes that interiority requires. In today’s society, the human being “runs the risk of losing his centre, the centre of himself”. “Contemporary man often finds himself upset, divided, almost deprived of an inner principle that generates unity and harmony in his being and in his actions. Unfortunately, widespread patterns of behaviour exacerbate the rational-technological dimension or, on the contrary, the instinctive dimension. There is a lack of heart” (Dilexit nos, 9).
And these words of Francis suggest that we rethink the company, rethink personal relationships in the company, from another paradigm: that of the heart of Jesus, that of the profound love with which we have been loved. It is then that our company resists being liquid in a liquid world.
Reading and meditating on Dilexit nos will surely give Christian managers and businessmen clues to make our companies “Companies with heart”.
Dionisio Blasco España is Territorial Delegate in the Diocese of Malaga and member of the Executive Committee of Corporate Social Action
