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  The Pope's Pr Coup
Commentary: Business, Government Leaders Can Learn from This Humble Man

By Marshall Loeb
MarketWatch
April 21, 2008

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/popes-brilliant-pr-coup/story.aspx?guid=%7BE6EA5058-C5A1-4A8D-A0E5-E9988C87D583%7D

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Pope Benedict XVI is safely back in the security and serenity of the Vatican now, and all of those souls who prayed for him and protected him during his six-day stay in the U.S. can offer a sigh of relief.

But for years to come, leaders of business, government, academe, the military and our other basic institutions will be, or at least should be, studying what he said and did.

They will find much that is familiar, but is too rarely put into practice by our leaders:

  • Don't try to dodge the truth, no matter how awful it may be or whom it may implicate.

  • Do open a dialogue with those whom you may disagree.

  • Do apologize for past misdeeds and beg forgiveness.

The pope wasted no time in doing all that. He spoke up in the most forceful terms against the Roman Catholic Church's performance in dealing with sexual abusers. He admitted that some elements in the church had not acted nearly strongly enough to weed out the sinners and to punish them. He expressed deep shame.

Now compare his words and deeds with those of our leaders of government or business when asked about their own institutional misdeeds.

Consider, for example, how the chiefs of America's tobacco industry famously dissembled a few years ago before a congressional inquiry and insisted that tobacco is nonaddictive.

Or consider how the top Enron leaders denied all error in the many investigations of the worst corporate scandal of our time.

Would they not have fared better, for themselves and their industry, if they had spoken the truth from the outset?

In New York, the pope also grasped a rare opportunity to reach out in friendship to non-Christians. He had known Rabbi Arthur Schneier, of Manhattan's Park East Synagogue, from earlier engagements, and the rabbi invited the pontiff to visit his congregation early in the trip.

Quicker than you can say Joseph Ratzinger, the pope accepted. The page one photos of him in a sea of yarmulke-wearing, applauding Jews, some of them Holocaust survivors, appeared to overwhelm the pope and set a warm tone to the whole proceeding.

Everywhere the pope went, he appeared to make friends, whether it was President Bush traveling out of the White House to the airport for the first time to greet up a foreign leader, or New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg saying of the pope that they were buddies now.

Small wonder that when the pope left, his parting words were, "May God Bless America."

  
 
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