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Silver Linings for Never Trumpers

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 09:50:00 -0500

Most of my friends decided very early to join the “Never Trump” ranks. Now that Trump has quite astoundingly been elected president, they must still be haunted by many fears and gloomy prognostications. These may, after all, turn out to be right. Who knows? But I do see a few remarkable silver linings among the dark clouds.

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The Future of Democratic Capitalism

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

In the eighteenth century, a host of thinkers began to use the compound term “political economy” to refer to the traditional subject matter of politics. Both parts are needed to express the complex social system necessary to human liberty and flourishing. For human liberty and human flourishing are fulfilled by neither politics alone nor economics alone. Rather, they require economic activity within a free polity, under the rule of law, and through the daily practice of personal habits of wisdom and self-control. Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and their colleagues referred to the intellectual movement that led to this new conception of social well-being as the new science of politics.

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Trinity As Communio

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 22:42:00 -0500

In the preparatory period before Vatican II, when St. John XXIII asked all the bishops of the world to send in memoranda on the subjects most important for the Council to address, Bishop Karol Wojtyla of Krakow suggested organizing all the materials of the Council around two central topics: person and communio . Behind his logic lay contemplation of the Trinity.

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Constitutionally Catholic

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

The tension between American democracy, capitalism, and culture is acute—more acute, perhaps, than at any time in our history. Even the best human fruits of this nation’s founding principles are in peril. I mean the principles of natural rights and the internal constitution of checks and balances and divided systems that protect them.

There is, of course, more than one tradition of human rights. There is the Anglo-Enlightenment and (some say) atheist tradition worked out by Hobbes and Locke and stressed by Strauss and his followers. The Continental tradition, particularly that of the French Enlightenment, lies behind the French Republic’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and is the source for most European theories of human rights, which now treat rights as “entitlements” demanded by human perfectibility. This seems to be the tradition that popes following the lead of John XXIII in Pacem in Terris have attempted to graft onto the Catholic tradition.

Then there is the original American understanding, defined in brilliant terms by the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Jefferson’s Bill for Religious Liberty and his Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Madison’s Remonstrance. This conception reaches back into the natural law tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, but it is also expressly Judeo-Christian in its conception.

The Virginians laid out their argument in five steps. First, religion is the duty the creature owes to its Creator. Second, we have a right to perform this duty without interference from any person or institution or from civil society itself. This duty is prior to our bond to civil society, both in time and in obligation. To offend against it is an offense against man and, even more, against God.

Third, this duty is unalienable. We cannot push it off on anyone else, because it is a duty we owe directly to our Creator. Fourth, our rights are endowed in us by our Creator, not the state, nor civil society, nor social contract. And finally, we are free both to perform our duty to the Creator and to discern in our own conscience and at our own time the best way to perform it.

I think that the Second Vatican Council, in the declaration Dignitatis Humanae , came to this development of doctrine in part because of the influence of the arguments of the Virginians as worked out by John Courtney Murray, S.J. Note just two consonances between the Virginians and Dignitatis Humanae.

The first is that both parties hold that duty precedes right. Madison wrote that “it is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign.”

Dignitatis Humanae declared: “The highest norm of human life is the divine law—eternal, objective and universal—whereby God orders, directs and governs the entire universe and all the ways of the human community by a plan conceived in wisdom and love . . . . Wherefore every man has the duty, and therefore the right, to seek the truth in matters religious in order that he may with prudence form for himself right and true judgments of conscience, under use of all suitable means.”

The second is the assertion that no one shall compel others in their religious practice. Thomas Jefferson proposed to the General Assembly that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever” and that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

Dignitatis Humanae declared that while “government therefore ought indeed to take account of the religious life of the citizenry and show it favor, since the function of government is to make provision for the common welfare . . . it would clearly transgress the limits set to its power, were it to presume to command or inhibit acts that are religious.”

Nevertheless, today, mainstream American political thinking and practice have reinterpreted the meaning of rights. We no longer clearly ground them in a duty to the Creator, which precedes and trumps all other duties, but have slid into a European way of understanding rights, which holds that rights are grounded in various human “goods” that the progressive state must supply for the betterment of its citizens.

Rights are no longer thought of as based in prior intellectual foundations articulated in the past , most notably in a history-transcending source of rights in the Creator. They are thought of as future achievements of human perfectibility.

In the American tradition, the fulfillment of rights is measured by the realization in history of imperatives founded by the Creator, who in creating humans gave them liberty at the same time he gave them life. This work was not completed until the tradition’s declaration of rights was fully lived up to, with liberty and justice for all. That entailed in due time the abolition of slavery, in keeping with the permanent principles of the nation’s founding, and further progress toward more perfect liberty and justice.

In other words, the Americans “built better than they knew,” as the American bishops declared at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, and built closer to the Catholic tradition than either the Americans at that time or many European churchmen even today have recognized. Still, sadly, the founding of our republic was in greater harmony with our Catholic faith than is the republic we inherit today.

For a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and to the pursuit of liberty and justice for all, will find that its work is never done. Divine Providence expects always more from this nation. Our nation is a nation of both memory and a “not yet.” It is bound to a vision of a mission not yet completed and, in fact, fated never to be completed on earth. That is why the pyramid on the United States’ seal is left unfinished.

Our nation, as a kind of “second Israel” (as some in the founding generation called it), an “almost chosen people” (as Lincoln called it eighty-seven years later), understands itself to have an earthly mission derived from biblical convictions. The founders did not scruple to express them in the classic words of Virgil: Annuit coeptis . He smiled on our beginnings.

But the Lord’s justice should make us tremble with fear: “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; / He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.”

As Jefferson reminded us: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.” And Lincoln, in his second inaugural address: “Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

At present, there is no realistic check on the appetite of progressive government (even on “compassionate conservative” government) for greater tax revenues and the racking up of greater debts. Worse, these debts are without remorse laid upon the backs of future generations. They are now laid up even to a Greece-like breaking point. That alone could destroy our republic. From within. Legally.

At present, there is no practical brake on a court system (and a system of law schools) that believes itself no longer bound to the foundational principles of the Constitution but only to the current ideas of “progressivism.” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently said that even if constitutional reform occurred today, she would not look backward to the original intent of the founders but rather to the new and more advanced constitutions of South Africa and to certain constitutions of the European Union. She is not alone.

Our economic system also has its own structural flaws, in need of severe correction. Let me not enumerate, or even make distinctions among, the complaints on this score that rage daily in our press. They are too well known.

To my mind, however, the greatest of our national weaknesses lies now in the decadence of our moral and cultural institutions, even our religious institutions. Look at our mainline churches, once the bedrock of the nation’s moral solidity and depth. Look at our university faculties. Seldom has so much illusion been packed into the pride of self-superior souls.

Our founders well understood that our sort of republic cannot stand without a foundation in morality–and religion. As both Washington and Benjamin Rush put it in different ways, the framers held quite firmly, from long experience, that our republic cannot stand without liberty; nor liberty without virtue; nor virtue (for most people) without religion. (That is, without a religion of the type that favors and undergirds human liberty. Not all religions are of that type.)

The price of liberty, our founders often said, is eternal vigilance. The ideas on which liberty precariously rests need to be passed along from generation to generation. If they are ever forgotten or minimized, even by one generation, turn out the lights. Institutions of natural rights are inherently fragile, and we must not ask something impossible for this poor human race: an unbetrayable intellectual and institutional tradition.

There is now and always will be tension—a distance, a difference—between what our human natures are prey to in politics, economics, and culture and the vision of friendship with him that our Creator has offered us. It may be much greater today than it has been.

Yet I am still hopeful. With Abraham Lincoln I accept that there is a natural moral decline built into the generations of human life. The heroism of fathers inspires and yet intimidates their sons, but bores their grandsons, who shun it. In Lincoln’s phrase, “the silent artillery of time” beats generation after generation against the hard-built foundations of the great achievements of the past. Not even the Church of Jesus Christ was able to avoid it.

In my view, to put it in the words of Joseph Warren, member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, “our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of.” Everywhere we see the small beginnings of a drive for a “return to the Constitution” and a growing number of thinkers who are supplying fresh arguments for “revolving to first principles,” a policy that the founders advised for every generation.

Strong Catholic minds are offering a fresh articulation of the American founding principles in the new and richer context of the Catholic intellectual tradition. Tocqueville famously hinted at this possibility: that one day Catholics would become the best intellectual defenders of the American way of understanding natural rights.

Catholics bring, for example, a needed understanding of the balanced Augustinian vision of the City of Man. There is enough virtue and grace among the people to make a democratic republic work (by the favor of Providence), even in flawed human history. There is in human beings enough sin and weakness to make it fail, if the people of a society do not maintain the life of virtue necessary to keep it.

It pains me to be so sanguine, coming from an ancestral central European tradition of pessimism. But then what is the point of moving a central European family to America, if one does not learn to trust at least a little in the America our founders gave us?

Michael Novak, a member of First Things' advisory council, recently retired from the George Frederick Jewett Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Goodbye, Judge Bork—Goodbye, My Friend

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:01:00 -0500

As it happened, I was able to spend a couple of hours between flights with Bob Bork just ten days before he died, and I got to tell him of my gratitude for so much friendship and laughter over the past quarter-century, of my admiration for his depth, and”embarrassing him, as I knew this would”of my love for him. Bob was of the strong stock that keeps emotions such as love to himself. That’s one reason I loved him.

On such occasions”his many friends loved him mightily and showed it in many angular ways”one could see him squirm with conflicting emotions. He certainly must not accept that , and yet a smile at the corner of his lips and a rising blush up his very white cheeks betrayed his pleasure. His method of fleeing from admiration and (God forbid) love was normally a scoffing rebuke, behind which came a wee smile.

His friends loved him because he was brilliant, always ready with witticisms and lightning insights, and altogether warm of heart himself. It was a joy to watch him with his children and Mary Ellen. Several of those around him thought his was the most radiant intellect they knew: The most famously bright people in Washington always deferred to him. His mind was radiant on things vast”and also domestic. We smiled at the way he and Mary Ellen joshed each other constantly, in the glow of unmistakable union.

Bob was a serious man about his deepest convictions, uncommonly self-aware down to a very great depth. For years there was no sign that he was even thinking of becoming a Catholic, as Mary Ellen was; he sometimes pretended to be an unshakably severe and reserved Pittsburgh Presbyterian”almost never explicitly religious at all. Of course, when he did seek instruction in the Catholic faith, he did so publicly during one of the worst possible and most humiliating years in the history of the American Church, 2003, just as the painful clergy sexual abuse scandal was at the height of exposure in the media. It was just like Bob’s courage (in his great intellectual courage) to go ahead in that unpropitious period.

It was just like his unfailing wit that it had not escaped his notice that baptism in that advanced year of his life carried a double blessing: It washed away all his prior sins, and arrived just when his seniority rendered unlikely all those that had brought the most pleasure.

Bob and Mary Ellen first met at a party of mine and Karen’s”a book party”and shortly afterwards Karen and Mary Ellen drove many hours together out to Notre Dame. Bob had lost his first and deeply loved wife to cancer some years before, and it had seemed to some unlikely he would remarry. On that car trip, Karen picked up signs that, given some time, it just might happen. We were glad.

We also had the immense privilege of taking Bob and Mary Ellen to dinner on the eve of his much-embattled confirmation vote in the Senate. (I always thought that Senator Ted Kennedy’s demagogic, malicious, and falsehood-ridden assault on Judge Bork, at the very beginning of the confirmation process, was the foulest deed of Kennedy’s leadership in the Senate”it properly won its own disgraceful public epithet.) After this dinner, Karen mentioned to me Bob’s astonishing equanimity.

Late in the dinner, he said something like: “At one time, I would have given my right arm to become a justice of the Supreme Court. But now, if I don’t, I will write more freely”not just in legalese”of ideas necessary to the republic in these years.”

At another point, he said something like: “I know some wanted me to kiss babies, and cut off my beard, and appeal more to public sentiment. But that’s not me. That’s how politicians behave. It is not how justices behave. I couldn’t possibly do that. It would have betrayed everything I believe about the law.”

Concentrating on friendship, we laughed a lot at that dinner. In the car, Karen admitted that she admired the inner spirit of Robert Bork more than ever. She herself was well experienced to the steel of spirit (and humor) needed in dark times.

Others may write better on Judge Bork’s pre-eminence among jurists of his generation, and the capaciousness of his mind in the history of law. Today I mourn, and want to honor a man great of spirit.

Michael Novak, one of the founders of First Things , was for more than two decades a colleague of Judge Bork at the American Enterprise Institute .

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The Holy Spirit Did Preside

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

A newly married layman and graduate student, I found myself in Rome in 1963 covering the second session of the Second Vatican Council, working as a freelance reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, and for any other publications that would run my work, while my wife, Karen, executed prints on Rome’s famous presses.

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Don’t Confuse the Common Good with Statism

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:01:00 -0400

I remember so well the founding days of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. We were such a small and humble organization, so few of us, so lightly funded. Yet we had strong hearts, bold ambitions, and lots and lots of good information. As anyone can guess, Richard John Neuhaus was the leading spirit, the intellectual guide. He was still a Lutheran then and loved to nail manifestoes on Cathedral doors, so he nailed up the founding manifesto of IRD, telling how the key democratic ideas of human dignity, equality, fraternity, and liberty flowed from Christian roots and Christian understandings. And he expressed shock”SHOCK”at how many of our local parishes were using materials that attacked democracy, coming out of the National Council of Churches on Riverside Drive, New York. Anti-Democratic materials: materials siding with the Sandinistas; materials siding with violent Palestinian organizations; materials siding with the anti-democratic effort to bring down the fragile democracy in El Salvador.

This flagrant anti-democratic program did not belong in Christian preaching in the churches, IRD strongly felt, first because it was so overtly and purely political and, second, because its politics were so out of keeping with the Christian inspirations that gave birth to democratic institutions and ideas. Many congregants in the pews did not at all appreciate the national offices of their churches, clustered in New York City around the NCC, expending donations from the pews to promote so violent and so misguided an agenda.

Well, IRD got started with a bang. One of our earliest doggedly documented reports was a description of the actual deeds and practices of the violent forces the church elites in New York were nurturing. Suddenly, before we even had a fully functioning office, one of the great television networks”CBS on 60 Minutes ”reported on IRD’s efforts, using the information on these anti-democratic movements that we had marshaled. A huge explosion went off in various New York offices of the churches.

It struck me in those days”remembering my Horace”“Mountains will tremble in birth pangs, and out will run a ridiculous mouse” ( Parturient montes , nascetur ridiculus mus ). I have always thought that the symbol of IRD ought to be a mischievously grinning mouse, because as an organization we were so tiny, and so squeaky-voiced. Whereas the huge buildings in New York we so squeakily called to account were massive, well funded, and elegantly equipped with all the instruments of propaganda. This little mouse did its best imitation of a roar, and those buildings shook.

Well, not literally. But an awful lot of the nation’s denominations decided rather quickly to pull their national offices out of New York City, and bring them back closer to their members in Louisville, Chicago, and Cleveland.

We hadn’t intended it this way, but at our birth, presidential support for democracy came from a surprising direction. Most of us there at the founding of IRD were lifelong Democrats, but in 1980 a Republican president turned against his party’s traditional isolationism, and pivoted forward with a torchlight of support for universal human rights. In his very first few weeks, President Reagan announced at a White House dinner for Margaret Thatcher that Communism was even then about to be swept into the dustbin of history. Pigeons at the opinion pages of The New York Times fluttered noisily into the air, others in the mainstream media called Reagan an ignorant and dangerous man. But then, within ten short years, the Berlin Wall came down, and a little later the whole Soviet Union crumpled into dust. Russia announced that it was beginning to build democracy and capitalism.

Thus, our little Institute on Religion and Democracy, founded in 1981, hit a note of unexpected international resonance. We watched with joy a decade-long and marvelous blooming of new democracies: from the Philippines to Chile to Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics, and Hungary. Not to mention Russia itself.

Two years later, Diane Knippers, that great woman whom we now honor, became the president of IRD, in 1993. She was the leader who took IRD through its transition from fighting those who were destroying democracy from the outside, to fighting those sickly growths that cling to democracies like barnacles to ships, and steadily spread rot through democratic virtues from within. Even capitalism itself, Diane took from Tocqueville, thrives when it is supported by a culture of virtue, a culture open before the judgment of a transcendent God. Capitalism’s corruption erodes the institutions of democracy.

The necessary condition for the forward thrust of a successful democracy is a thriving, inventive, creative economy. Capitalism is not a sufficient condition for the strength of a democracy, but a necessary one. And so Diane turned IRD in the direction of defending and nourishing a democratic culture, through its religious and public culture. What are the primary supports of a free and creative system of political economy? Diane diagnosed them as the suffusion of Jewish and Christian commitments and virtues within them. Without those, she thought, democracies grow sickly.

In other words, Diane turned IRD toward “cultural ecology,” or an “ecology of the human.” The physical earth itself depends on a favorable ecology. But so does the inner life of the human race. An invisible gas of relativism, the dry gas of nihilism, chokes off the air supply to human morality, incapacitates it, suffocates it. Without a morality suitable to human upward striving, democracy will slowly die.

Even at Diane’s too-early death in 2005, a new attack was already being launched on the free world’s free and inventive economies, even within the United States. Under economic bad times, envy, that most deadly of all the deadly sins, multiplies like a virus. Region is turned against region, class against class, neighbor against neighbor. By contrast, under conditions of prosperity each citizen of a democracy pursues her own happiness, according to whatever path she chooses, without envying those who choose otherwise, or who happen to gain more wealth.

Fighting envy is the IRD’s main task today. Some of our religious rivals wish to replace democratic capitalism with social democracy. And to that end, they badly misconceive of two great ideals: the common good and social justice.

Our rivals claim that Americans must now make “the common good” the central concern of our society. But into this cry they slip a hidden and deadly poison: They mean by “the common good” more new spending by the federal state, more new regulations by the federal state, and the imposition of ever higher taxes by the federal state.

And yet never in the history of this Republic until now has the federal state spent more trillions of dollars, dollars it does not have, dollars that it must borrow from our children and grandchildren. This trend has proceeded under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but it has now reached its worst point. Never before has the federal state dreamed up more intolerable, irrational, and corrupt regulations”paying off this group by tying that group down with silken regulatory ropes. Attacking Boeing for opening a badly needed plant in South Carolina, for example, in order to pay off labor unions who object to that state’s right-to-work laws.

Overwhelming evidence shows that the pursuit of the common good does not entail statism. It entails a liberated and booming private sector: initiative, invention, and creativity among all our citizens. That is way toward the common good, the common prosperity, the common growth, and common happiness. It is also the way to defeat envy.

The state can be a very good tool of the common good. It was so when Abraham Lincoln put his powerful moral weight behind the Homestead Act and the Land-Grant College Act. By these laws, the federal government gave a title to so many acres of public land to private citizens”but on condition that they work that land for five or more years. And thus improve it, and multiply its value, by their own individual creativity, in their own unique circumstances. Not according to a federal plan.

In addition, the federal government insisted that no new territory could join the federal union unless it set aside a prescribed number of acres for the founding of state universities, as well as of agricultural and mining universities. Lincoln’s insight was that wealth is generated by ideas, by experimentation, by intellectual creativity. (See his address at the Wisconsin State Fair in 1858.) If America were to become a developed nation, Lincoln saw with early genius, it would do so by way of intellect and invention. Not as a slave culture, but as a free culture, becoming prosperous by the creative minds of free individuals. Neither in the Homestead Act nor in the Land-grant College Act did the federal government set out to manage the decisions of the recipients. On the contrary, the federal government set American citizens free , and trusted their creativity, the creativity of ordinary American people. In the old days, our government trusted the American people.

Those who insist that the best way to achieve the common good, and to attain social justice, is to give more resources (and control) to the federal state, had better go looking for some evidence somewhere that undergirds their self-righteousness. They insist that others of us, who do not support the expenditure of more state money, are immoral . Yet the first moral obligation, Blaise Pascal wrote, is “To think clearly.” And with evidence.

The defense of the common-sense ideas that make our Republic work is still the raison d’etre of this humble but amazingly successful organization, IRD. For IRD’s focus even today, we owe so much to Diane Knippers. With IRD’s tiny budget of about $1 million per year, Diane rocked the religious world. She also helped to rock a good many decayed dictatorships, some of which are still tumbling to the dust, by the month. The social ideas of Judaism and Christianity (liberty, fraternity, equality, for instance, and mercy, justice, love, and second chances), once suffused through the liberties of a genuine democratic republic, are today even more potent forces in the larger world, even more so than in earlier times.

Michael Novak has recently retired from the George Frederick Jewett chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute and is a member of the editorial board of First Things .

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As Two Years Arrive

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:24:29 -0400

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The Myth of Romantic Love

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:01:00 -0500

A young Catholic today inherits a long, long tradition of reflection on love that is unmatched in any other culture in the world, beginning with the sublime “Song of Songs” of the Jewish Testament, and the many sections of the Christian Testament dedicated to the theme. In more recent times, if I may include that great writer in the English Catholic tradition, The Allegory of Love (1936) by C.S. Lewis. In that dazzling history Lewis traces the invention of the story of romantic love—now the most standard of all loves recognized in the Western world. Romantic love is a Western invention, a near-obsession, supposedly the key to all happiness. For Lewis, the invention of romantic love in the age of the troubadours (the age of the Crusades) was far more momentous for the development of the West, and far more broadly influential than, say, the Protestant Reformation. Lewis compares the Reformation to a ripple on the vast ocean of romantic love.

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“I Row, God Steers”

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Andreas Widmer doesn’t know what God has in store for the future, but he sees the marks of God’s providence all over his past. “God is constantly giving us a surprise party,” he muses, “and He’s saying, ‘Just wait and see what wonders I have in store for you next!’”

Andreas is a cradle Catholic, but he really did not make the faith his own until early adulthood. The post-Vatican II religious instruction he received growing up in the 1970s was not very rigorous. By the time he finished school, Andreas jokes, “I probably knew more about Buddhism than Catholicism.” But he does recall his First Communion as a significant event in his early life”the moment when he first sensed the palpable impact of the sacraments.

Through adolescence into early adulthood, Andreas was never hostile toward the faith. It just wasn’t a big deal to him one way or the other. At 18 he applied to be a member of the Swiss Guard, the elite group charged since the sixteenth century with the duty of protecting the pope. Anyone who has been to the Vatican knows their colorful striped uniforms and distinctive headgear. Andreas was accepted by the Guard and moved to Rome at age 20.

He describes the decision to join the Swiss Guard as “providential in hindsight.” At home in Switzerland he had been having trouble finding his niche. He was restless. Trying to figure out what he was going to do with his life, he just couldn’t find the right “fit” anywhere. With all the enthusiasm and bravado of a strapping, six-foot-nine young man, Andreas thought being a bodyguard was “the coolest thing in the world.” A glamorous, exciting job. Andreas was searching for his identity when he decided to apply to the Guard. “But,” he recalls, “what I found there, when I was looking for myself, was God.”

While in Rome Andreas had what he calls a conversion. One of the duties he had to carry out as a guard may have helped prepare him for that experience. Every guard has to learn to stand still, silently on watch at his post, for two to three hours a stretch, up to three times a day. Each guard on duty in this manner is accompanied by an older guard companion, who is permitted to move about and talk. Sometimes the older guard will pose thoughtful, probing questions: Have you ever thought about your life? What is your earliest memory? Think of each year . . . How have you experienced God? Andreas found that he really benefited from this opportunity to pause, both physically and mentally, for introspection. It may be a difficult discipline to master, but an invaluable one for spiritual growth.

As one of Pope John Paul II’s bodyguards, Andreas was in the privileged position to observe on a daily basis the private life of the real man, not the iconic public figure who routinely drew crowds of hundreds of thousands. And what he saw in the pope was so shockingly genuine”the depth and sincerity of his prayer, his words, his feelings, his peace. It did not take long for Andreas to conclude: “Whatever he has, I want it.”

Andreas was amazed by the pope’s very earthly connection to God, his ability to “read” God in the people and circumstances all around him. John Paul II was acutely sensitive to the situations of those in his presence, and he even reached out to Andreas personally. The pope, whom Andreas considers his “spiritual father,” encouraged him to pray the rosary and develop other “Godly habits,” including receiving the sacraments frequently.

Thinking back on his time with John Paul II, Andreas notices that this was his first experience of God’s providence at work in his life. “God really does take care of things; we just need to relax a bit,” Andreas reflects. We try to script our lives carefully, to plan, deliberate, and decide what we will do and when we will do it. But then we see things take a different turn. God intervenes. He calls us to be holy as he made us, not as we wish to be. So we need to be a little more naïve, a little more childlike. We need to stop trying to coax God to give us what we want. We need to start trusting in his benevolence, and cooperating with his will. Andreas uses a metaphor: “God and I are two people in a boat. I row, and he steers. he’s not going to row; I have to do that. But when I row, I have to trust him to steer.”

The pope’s spirituality was refreshing and uplifting, and it awakened Andreas to his first understanding of his vocation. In contrast to the downward-looking, authoritarian sense of God Andreas knew from his Germanic heritage, the God John Paul II showed him was more like a good coach”someone who wants you to be the very best you can be, someone who believes in your potential, has great goals for you and wants to help you achieve them.

From the pope Andreas discerned that God creates each of us the way he does for a reason: to be happy. We need to trust that, and to pursue our happiness by using our God-given gifts and talents. For each of us our vocation is something very real, very here and now, not something faraway or exotic. It’s not doing the most difficult thing you can think of. “God made me a hammer,” says Andreas, “so I have to look for nails!” Each of us is on a daily mission from God, and recognizing this fact underlines the dignity of our ordinary lives. Vocation is all about using what we have and acting in the circumstances right in front of us. That’s all God is asking of us, and that’s how we find our fulfillment and happiness.

With the encouragement of John Paul II, Andreas grew more serious in his prayer life, which led to a deepening, profound sense of the presence of God. Andreas began considering the priesthood. Perhaps he would try to become an Augustinian. His constant prayer was: “Lord, what would you have me do?” Then one day he met a young American student, Michelle, who was studying in Rome. Within moments, Andreas recalls, he knew he had met his wife-to-be. But he didn’t speak English, and she lived in America. No matter. Andreas had learned from John Paul II to be more open to God’s will. “God has speaks to me through the events in my life right now. He put this person in front of me and I have sincere feelings and peace about it,” he reasoned. “This is what he is calling me to do now.”

So he left Swiss Guard in order to pursue Michelle. He moved to Boston, and he matriculated at Merrimack College. There he learned English and got a degree in business. Michelle finished college. The two married shortly thereafter.

Andreas was cooperating with God’s plan for his vocation. Along the way he discerned a new “Godly desire””a good desire, implanted in him by God”to provide for his wife and the family they might have together. He also heard God’s providential voice speaking to him through Michelle. In the months before they married, she counseled Andreas to take an unpaid internship. “Don’t worry about money,” she said. “If you do good work you’ll get paid in due time.”

Andreas followed her advice and took an unpaid internship at a high-tech firm in the Boston area. He didn’t have much expertise on the tech side of things, but his language skills made him invaluable to the firm. (Andreas speaks German, English, Italian, French, and some Spanish.) Here he was applying the lesson on vocation he had learned from John Paul II: “All I need to do is to pursue excellence at work”at what I know and can do well.” Just trust in God, who made me this way for a reason, and who made me to be happy. This gave him confidence and a sense of peace.

Over the next several years Andreas found enormous success at a handful of other tech companies. His vocation in business was wonderfully fulfilling. He loved the creative process of building and growing a company. But he found out the hard way that business can be very powerful and very dangerous. It’s an environment all too hospitable to the deadly sin of pride. “When you’re successful, it’s so easy to start thinking it’s all you”you’re the man,” says Andreas. He didn’t stop going to church, but his spirituality waned. Other things became more important to him.

In business there is always the risk of being subsumed by profit. Short-term goals and the bottom line take precedence over the company’s original vision. “When that happens, you cut the soul out of the thing,” Andreas reflects. It turns out that’s not good for business, either.

One of Andreas’s firms achieved great success”75 percent of the market share worldwide”developing and marketing a new speech recognition interface for computers. When Andreas and his colleagues decided to sell the company, they went with the highest bidder, a competitor they had always thought of as unethical. “For money, you get blinded,” he explained. The deal was executed, and Andreas and his colleagues were paid not in cash but in the purchaser’s stock. With that deal, Andreas had made more money than he could ever have imagined.

As is common in such transactions, Andreas and his colleagues were subject to “golden handcuff” rules”certain time restrictions on how soon they can cash out the stock that’s been paid. When a short window opened up, and Andreas had a day or two to cash out, Michelle encouraged him not to hold on to the stock in hopes that its value might rise even higher, but to sell it right away. “How much money do you need? Sell it!” was her reasoning. Andreas brushed off her advice. The value of this stock could skyrocket, and they’d be even better off! When Michelle persisted, Andreas sold “just enough to have a nest egg.”

Not long afterward, odd reports began appearing in the news. Something fishy was up. Criminal violations”the purchasing company was pulled from NASDAQ! Andreas’ company had been sold, the stock he got in exchange was worthless, and the money they could have had”all gone.

A dark, depressive period followed for Andreas. How could he ever recover? It was hard on Michelle, and on their marriage, too. But Andreas now sees the episode as a “tap on the shoulder” from God. It was a crash course in humility. “It’s not all you; you’re not the man””that message came through loud and clear. “You cannot hear God unless you are humble,” Andreas reflects. Maybe God humbles us to make us ready to listen.

Later Andreas and Michelle went to confession, as they try to do every three months. Andreas entered the confessional first, told his sins and in the process spoke about the awful preceding months, the unkindness toward his wife, and all the rest. The priest gave him absolution and a run-of-the-mill penance. Then it was Michelle’s turn. Not surprisingly, the details of her confession overlapped quite a bit with the one Father had just heard. It didn’t take long for him to figure out the situation. He gave Michelle absolution, and then considered her penance. “Did you come here by car today?” he asked. They had. “As part of your penance, you must talk to your husband about all this “ before you get out of the car on your way home today.” The graces of the sacraments, both penance and marriage, were poured out to Andreas and Michelle that day.

Since they married Andreas and Michelle had always been open to having children. For years their attitude was, “if it happens, it happens””but it hadn’t happened. Doctors were recommending various infertility treatments, but Andreas and Michelle weren’t game. They left the matter in God’s hands.

Then they had what Andreas calls a “Road to Emmaus epiphany.” They had driven out to Albany to attend the wake of a woman who had died far too young. They were deeply moved by the young woman’s mother, so upset and grieving by the casket. Afterward, on the long and somber drive back to Boston, Andreas and Michelle had been silent for a while. Then one of them broke the silence. Should they adopt? In the past, they discussed the idea but decided against it”they had too many concerns about it. But now, as if by direct revelation, they both realized this was what they were meant to do. It was one of those situations where suddenly you “just know,” according to Andreas. Shortly thereafter, the couple began the process and about a year later they welcomed a six-month-old son into their home.

Following a series of professional ups and downs, Andreas took a six-month sabbatical at age 40. Drawing on the economic thought of John Paul II, he spent some time writing about creativity and entrepreneurship as vital solutions to poverty. But after six months he was itching to get back into the high-tech world.

While he was busy trying to get a new firm off the ground, the Templeton Foundation approached him. They were interested in his ideas on entrepreneurship and poverty. They asked him to write a business plan for them, which he did. His mind and efforts then focused on his own start-up, until it became clear that his new firm wasn’t going anywhere. Looking back, Andreas sees the disappointment in a positive light”it was another needed dose of humility, helping him to hear God’s voice and cooperate with his will.

As it turns out, Templeton was keen on Andreas’s plan, but unwilling to move forward on their own. Today he and Michael Fairbanks are the co-founders of the SEVEN (Social Equity Venture) Fund, a non-profit promoting research and models of enterprise-based approaches to wealth creation and poverty reduction.

“When we work, we don’t just make more”we become more,” Andreas reflects, echoing a key element of the economic thought of John Paul II. In this regard, he sees his work in business as intimately bound up with his vocation, his calling from God. Enabling people to be creative and to work, Andreas points out, both underscores their dignity as persons and opens up seemingly limitless possibilities for human development.

In addition to his work at SEVEN, Andreas writes on the intersection of faith and entrepreneurship at his blog, Faith & Prosperity Nexus. He also lectures, and has contributed to a volume titled In the River They Swim: Essays from Around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty . His book on what he learned from John Paul II during his two years as a Swiss Guard and how it applies to business life is due out in the fall of 2011 from Emmaus Road Publishing.

Looking back on his first 45 years of life, Andreas sees his vocation as a lay person as “a process with many stages.” Swiss Guard, entrepreneur, husband, father, writer, lecturer. Vocation is all about meeting God in the twists and turns of our lives. And trusting in his will along the way. As Andreas puts it: “The older I get the more I realize how little I know. But one thing I am more and more certain of is that God exists and that he cares. God is accompanying each one of us on the marvelous journey that leads to him.”

Michael Novak has recently retired from the George Frederick Jewett chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute and is a member of the editorial board of First Things . Elizabeth Shaw is a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and research assistant to Michael Novak.

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