Governor: Business is a fellowship that can better society

Funny, faith-filled and forthright, Gov. Mitch Daniels mixed humor, Scripture and ethical advice in his keynote address to Catholic Business Exchange members on Nov. 16 at the St. Pius X Council’s Northside Knights of Columbus Hall in Indianapolis.

By Mary Ann Wyand

Funny, faith-filled and forthright, Gov. Mitch Daniels mixed humor, Scripture and ethical advice in his keynote address to Catholic Business Exchange members on Nov. 16 at the St. Pius X Council’s Northside Knights of Columbus Hall in Indianapolis.

“You’re very kind to share this opportunity with a misguided Protestant,” Indiana’s 49th governor, who is an elder for Tabernacle Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, told more than 220 Catholic business men and women attending the organization’s monthly breakfast meeting.

“I think that we were given free will and … the charge to try to change things—change them for the betterment of all our fellow man,” he said. “That is what I see organizations like this doing, [and] … each of you individually in your own business is doing.”

Praising Lucious Newsom for his community ministry to the poor as founder of The Lord’s Pantry 19 years ago in Indianapolis, Daniels said, “I come as a member of a slightly different faith, although I must say if Roman Catholicism brought Lucious Newsom to its fold then maybe I need to start thinking about it myself.”

Newsom, a former Baptist minister who is now a member of Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ Parish in Indianapolis, sang “Amazing Grace” for the gathering before the program then later accepted offerings for his poverty-relief efforts in Marion County.

“If you want to feel small and inadequate in your [faith] walk,” Daniels said of Newsom, “if you want to be reminded of how far all the fallen people have to go, you will not find, anywhere around here that I know of, a better example of someone who lives the Christian life—and I mean lives it every waking moment—than that man right there.”

The governor also offered praise for the goals of the Catholic Business Exchange, which was founded three years ago by St. Thomas Aquinas parishioner Jim Liston of Indianapolis to bring business people together for friendship, faith-sharing and networking.

Daniels said business is a fellowship of people who are organized to provide some goods or services to citizens who freely choose to purchase it because it will make their life better in some way.

Goodwill is the most important asset on the balance sheet, the governor said. “It’s the reputation that is established by fair, honest and moral dealing, so I am very cheered up to see an organization like this, … and I just want to say how much I appreciate it and how much I would love to see it replicated very widely.”

Mitchell Daniels Jr. served in top leadership positions in business and government before running for public office for the first time and being elected governor in 2004.

One of his first acts as governor was to establish an Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives in 2005.

He also was the president of Eli Lilly and Company’s North American pharmaceutical operations and the chief executive officer of the Hudson Institute, an international public policy think tank.

In federal government, Daniels served as the chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan and was the director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush.

“Business, when practiced under institutions of freedom, is an entirely ethical and moral and noble thing to do,” Daniels said. “It’s been written and proven so often that the more commerce [that happens] between people, the more peaceful their relationships. It has to be that way. … Peace between people and nations is enhanced when commerce is allowed to happen. … Business is the best hope we have [to provide help] for the disadvantaged of this Earth.

“… Government, at its worst, drives out jobs and growth and income and wealth,” he said. “At its best, it simply sets the table and creates the conditions whereby free men and women pursuing their dreams create wealth for each other.”

When business is properly practiced, he said, it provides opportunities for people.

“The greatest act of corporate citizenship in my eyes that you can perform is to make money,” the governor said. “I don’t mean that to sound as crass as it does. … But the first thing that business does—and it’s fundamental to our progress as a people—is to create new wealth, new hope, new jobs, new opportunities, so that free men and women living, as I believe God intended us to, try to fulfill their own human potential, care for their families [and] help the next generation to step further forward than they do.”

Daniels said he is “always very reticent to talk about faith personally, particularly in a crowd like this. I know how far I have fallen and how far short I come of the life that God and Christ want me to live.”

He said his Presbyterian pastor once preached that “we’re all walking [on our faith journey] every day and that the best epitaph on one’s tombstone is that of a mountaineer who died climbing.”

Humility is “the central instruction of our faith,” Daniels said, and it is important “to recognize our smallness, our common shortcomings and the need always to remember the greatness—the overwhelming, transcendent greatness—of the God who made us.”

Along with humility comes perspective, he said, about doing secular work.

“What I’m doing is trivial and temporary,” he said, while clergy “deal in the important and the permanent.

“Trying to keep that in mind, I hope, improves one in one’s own work,” Daniels said. “It doesn’t mean that you’re less committed. I hope it means that you’re reminded to strive your very, very hardest to achieve what you can, knowing that it will always only have a modest place in God’s plan. … In coming together as people of business who are people of faith in a way like this, I just do not doubt that we truly are furthering God’s work.”

After his speech, the governor told The Criterion that he appreciates the amount and variety of humanitarian work that the Catholic Church and its members provide to help people in need.

Praising “the effect it has on lives in this country and all over the world,” Daniels said, “The scale of it is not known to many people, … the enormous scale of compassionate work that Catholics in both organized and individual ways do all over the world. This would be so much less a world without it.”

Liston said the governor, who frequently referred to Scripture, was “so passionate about his own faith and just really seemed to be excited about being at this program with the emphasis on faith and business.”

St. Joan of Arc parishioner Barbara Jones of Indianapolis said, “It was wonderful to hear the governor share his feeling that ethics in business is always a positive thing and will lead to growth within the economy and in our personal lives. I particularly enjoyed that the governor … shared his faith and the way in which his faith impacts his own daily business life.” †