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"Professional Ethics and Sanctification of Work" No.38• January - June 2004 • Page 112 • Study "Professional Ethics and Sanctification of Work" by Prof. Carlos Llano Carlos Llano Cifuentes Graduate …More
"Professional Ethics and Sanctification of Work"

No.38• January - June 2004 • Page 112


Study

"Professional Ethics and Sanctification of Work" by Prof. Carlos Llano


Carlos Llano Cifuentes

Graduate School of Business (IPADE)
Panamerican University, Mexico


In this study we will discuss how the message of sanctification of work, spread among persons of all walks of life by St. Josemaría, the founder of Opus Dei, helps clarify many of the central questions of professional ethics in the contemporary world.1

St. Josemaría summed up this message as follows: “Those who want to live their faith fully and do apostolate according to the spirit of Opus Dei, must sanctify themselves with their work, sanctify their work, and sanctify others through their work.”2

1. Sanctifying professional work

Beginning with the second of these three points, work is the primary and permanent material that theordinaryChristian has to sanctify. The founder of Opus Dei speaks of “ordinary work,” but he usually made the term more precise by adding the adjective “professional.”3

Certainly, the ordinary duties of the Christian cannot be reduced to what would today be called professional work by a sociologist. Work is an essential element in the constitution of civil society, but it cannot “be reduced to its professional dimension, but rather transcends this restricted sphere. . .We can think of the work duties of the mother of a family who devotes herself to domestic tasks and the education of her children on a full-time basis.”4

Thus even though “a reduction in the number of hours of work may continue in the future, as history has shown from the beginning of the industrial revolution until today, the message of Opus Dei will continue to exist in a permanent and ever timely way.”5St. Josemaría’s concept of work “places before us a primary anthropological concept, with a permanent philosophical meaning.”6

The term “professional” has acquired progressive importance throughout the past century. In his encyclicalMater et Magistra(part 2), Pope John XXIII, described the professionalization of human tasks as a phenomenon according to which one placed greater confidence in the income and rights obtained through work than in those derived from capital. One might say that if nineteenth century society was centered on owners and the proletariat, the twentieth century was centered on the professional. Along these lines Pierpaolo Donati observes that the kind of work that is emerging in today’s society is to a large extent made up of relationships.7This web of personal relationships in work facilitates the sanctification of tasks, which are thus made more properly human.

The moral codeof every profession includes the obligation to carry out a work that is well done. This basic ethical imperative to work well becomes, for the person trying to sanctify his work, an ideal of perfection, since to sanctify something means in the first place to make of it an offering to God. “It is no good offering to God something that is less perfect than our poor human limitations permit. The work that we offer must be without blemish and it must be done as carefully as possible, even in its smallest details, for God will not accept shoddy workmanship.”8“If you consider the many compliments paid to Jesus by those who witnessed his life, you will find one which in a way embraces all of them. I am thinking of the spontaneous exclamation of wonder and enthusiasm which arose from the crowd at the astonishing sight of his miracles:bene omnia fecit(Mk 7:37), he has done everything exceedingly well: not only the great miracles, but also the little everyday things that didn’t dazzle anyone, but which Christ performed with the accomplishment of one who isperfectus Deus, perfectus homo, perfect God and perfect man.”9Thus our service to God is not true service if “we don’t put as much effort and self-sacrifice as others do into the fulfillment of professional commitments; if we can be called careless, unreliable, frivolous, disorganized, lazy, or useless.”10

The ethical imperative to carry out a work that is well done has, for Josemaría Escrivá, ultimately a divine origin, because “work is a command from God.”11“After two thousand years, we have reminded all humanity that man was created to work:homo nascitur ad laborem, et avis ad volatum(Job 5:7), man was born to work, and the bird to fly.”12

Because of the moral decay that has occurred in our time in many professional practices, it is becoming ever more necessary to clearly explain the basic moral rules that are a conditionsine qua nonfor a particular activity to be qualified as professional. Thereby one can help clarify that immoral behavior, for example, lying, falsifying the evidence supporting a hypothesis, or presenting as one’s own someone else’s ideas, cannot be part of the demands of a profession. These ways of acting are not “professional.” What is more, if they are permitted, one could say that the activity is “de-professionalized.”

Anyone seeking to sanctify his work should consider it indispensable to maintain and strengthen the consistency between his profession and morality. Work, besides being a way of supporting oneself and one’s family, is for St. Josemaría, “an opportunity to develop one’s personality.”13Pope John Paul II gives great importance to this quality of work throughout his encyclicalLaborem Exercens: “Work is a good thing for man—a good thing for his humanity—because through work, man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being, and indeed in a sense becomes ‘more a human being.’”14

This effort entails a great respect for each one’s personal freedom. One should strive to live one’s faith while respecting and trying to understand the points of view and choices of one’s colleagues. In this respect the teaching of the founder of Opus Dei is clear: “Avoid an abuse that seems to be exaggerated in our times...which shows the desire, contrary to the licit freedom of mankind, to try to oblige all men and women to form a single group in regard to matters of opinion, to create as it were dogmas in temporal questions.”15

1)Finishing tasks well

The ethical importance of professional work being well-done is indisputable.16But someone might ask: What do you mean in this context by “work that is well done?” What are the criteria by which one can judge about “professional” goodness in carrying out a task?

It is not enough to consider the opinion of others, although it would be imprudent to ignore this.17First of all, for a task to be well done it has to befinishedand not lefthalf done.As the founder of Opus Dei said: “You asked me what you could offer God. I don’t have to think twice about the answer: offer the same things as before, but do them better, finishing them with love.”18

As the social scientist Peter Drucker has said felicitously,to do goodone first hasto do somethingwell.19This play on words recalls one used much earlier by St. Josemaría:para servir, servir: if you want to be useful, serve. In order to perform a service, to benefit others, one has to serve: to know how to do things, to be useful. “As the motto of your work, I can give you this one: ‘If you want to be useful, serve.’ For, in the first place, in order to do things properly, you must knowhowto do them. I cannot see the integrity of a person who does not strive to attain professional skills and to carry out properly the task entrusted to his care. It’s not enough to want to do good; we must know how to do it.”20

If sanctity is found in the heroic exercise of the virtues, “heroism at work is found infinishingeach task.”21In many of his writings, St. Josemaría emphasized the requirement to finishing tasks well with italics or even exclamation points. Such emphasis is very understandable if one takes into account that the Christian concept of sanctity implies the “fullness of charity.”22This fullness has as its necessary corollary fulfilling as perfectly as possible one’s particular professional duties. It is perhaps here that one can see most graphically the consequences for professional ethics when the person performing a task takes as his goal not merely tofulfillcertain minimal ethical rules, but to achieve thefullnessof Christian life all his actions.23

2)Care in the details

The importance of finishing work well for it to be perfect, and hence suitable material for the attainment of sanctity—“Be perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect24—is closely related to another basic idea in the message of St. Josemaría: putting care into little things, into details. Speaking of his apostolic work in the early years of Opus Dei, he said: “I liked to climb up into the cathedral tower, to look closely at the stonework, a real lacework of stone, the fruit of costly labor.” He would point out that this marvelous craftsmanship could not be seen from below: “That is working for God, the work of God! To fulfill one’s personal task with perfection, with beauty, with the loveliness of that delicate stone tracery.”25

This teaching of Josemaría Escrivá is reflected in our ordinary language when we speak, for example, of putting the finishing touches on a building. In fact, today material objects are appreciated and given greater value precisely on the basis of suchfinishing touches.

3)Ordinary work

St. Josemaria’s emphasis on the importance of details is well suited to those at whom his message is aimed: ordinary Christians called to sanctify theirordinarywork. Sanctity is identified not with extraordinary actions but with a life in which, as the founder of Opus Dei repeatedly said, one doesordinary things extraordinarily well.“It is very much our mission to transform the prose of this life into poetry, into heroic verse.”26

Another quality of work that St. Josemaría emphasizes is the need for cheerfulness. “Msgr. Escrivá, with Gospel in hand, constantly taught: God does not want us simply to be good; he wants us to be …