Social and political criticisms
This is to comment on MVPs parting ways with AdeMU and SJ.
I would say that he just got too close with them. SJ and the church represents the sky; businessmen the earth.
The proper position for businessmen like MVP as, the graduation song of AdeMU suggests, is to stay between the earth and sky.
Granting millions and all out support for SJ/AdeMU will not affect the stand of SJ on social and religious issues. That is their job. Fr. Magadia, the SJ superior, said discernment (Jesuit Paper)
is needed for them to have independence in their thinking. The same discernment I think, is demanded of the businessmen, though how close they are to the clerics.
And the businessman can not accept all the idealism of the religious. There are issues that require pragmatism: profits, efficiency cost, expediency. At some point in time, east and west can not meet; if they do there will be friction and fire.
This split between MVP and the SJ, I predicted, would come sooner or later; the split came 20 years after.
That is one abject lesson of this experience. Businessmen can not pretend to be scholastics or be generous or be be compassionate. They are businessmen. They have to be viable. They have to survive. And sometimes at all costs. They can not be holy despite all the donations/CSR, for somewhere, their business practices will fall short of the ideals. And that is where the clerics discernment is clearly needed.
Really, ever since 20 years ago, MVP and the SJ did not share anything in common; that is the brutal fact. MVP is graduate of SJ; but that does not make him an SJ as a tycoon. He has his own place in the world of power and wealth.
Businessment, tycoons must just find their place between the earth and sky.
Sorry for pontificating even though I am not pontiff, nor a sage nor a cleric.
