Heroic Leadership by Chris Lowney

Heroic Leadership by Chris Lowney

Author:Chris Lowney
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Management & management techniques, Leadership, History, Business & Economics, Religion - Catholicism, Business/Economics, Management - General, Inspirational - Catholic, Christianity - Catholicism, Christianity - Catholic, Jesuits
Publisher: Loyola Press


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REFUSE NO TALENT, NOR ANY MAN OF QUALITY

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Ferdinand and Isabella with Columbus’s pioneering voyage to the New World in 1492. But their highnesses took other noteworthy royal initiatives that year. They had finally succeeded in vanquish' ing the Moors in order to unite Spain under their leadership—their Christian leadership. The monarchs lost little time underscoring the point with a 1492 decree expelling Jews from their realm. Faced with the ultimatum of convert or flee, as many as fifty thousand Spanish Jews became at least nominally Catholic, and three times as many fled to North Africa, Italy, or elsewhere.

Loyola had been studying in Paris for five years when Diego Lafnez, the son of wealthy Castilian merchants, arrived. The two met on Lafnez’s first day in Paris. It no doubt relieved the new arrival to find a fellow Spaniard who was comfortable navigating the alleyways of the university quarter. But Lafnez didn’t need help for long. Whether navigating Paris streets or scholastic treatises, Lafnez soon outpaced Loyola and was later hailed by one of the cofounders as “endowed with a singular, almost divine, intellect.”

But there was something far more noteworthy about Lafnez in the particular circumstances of the sixteenth century: he was descended from Jews. His great-grandfather had converted to Christianity, and in the code of the era that made Lafnez a nuevo cristiano (New Christian). It was not intended as a compliment. Still, nuevo cristiano was less offensive than most other labels hung on descendants of Jewish converts to Christianity. Far more popular was a less technical term: marrano (swine).

Loyola’s Paris circle numbered fewer than half a dozen when Lafnez the marrano joined them. Xavier was already part of the group; so was the Portuguese Simao Rodrigues, who was chosen to accompany Xavier to India but never made it past Lisbon. A few years later, Loyola, Lafnez, Xavier, Rodrigues, and a few others founded the Comparn'a de Jesus, setting Lafnez on a most unlikely path. Fie would not even have been allowed through the door at any other major religious order; they excluded New Christians from theirs ranks. Yet somehow Lafnez—together with Loyola and



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