Lack of belief spills over into business

Like the church, our economic institutions also face a crisis of faith

It’s Dublin airport late Monday morning. There are a few stragglers making their way home after the pope’s party. The mood is subdued, partly because the party is over and they’re on their way home and partly because, despite the fanfare, it was a bit of a disappointment. It was rather like bumping into Sharks’ supporters in Cape Town airport on a Monday morning after their team has been thrashed by the Stormers. They stoically look to the bigger picture, lessons learnt to enhance future performance.

A few bishops who had travelled from the Caribbean told me the crowds were bigger than the media portrayed and the mood was great. A journalist travelling with the pilgrims said he’d noticed some hostile glances towards the bishops as they made their way through the streets of

Dublin. Among the home crowd it was all about how many had attended the various gatherings. Not that many, as it happened. It could have been the cold, wet weather that trimmed the flock at the open-air mass to about 120,000, far from the 500,000 that was expected. The numbers weren’t much bigger than the crowd who turned out for a Red Bull event a few miles down the road the same day.

In the past the added discomfort of cold, wet weather could have been relied upon to pull an even bigger crowd in search of the suffering deemed an important part of religion. But discomfort, let alone suffering, is passé when it comes to religion. “Why would you bother when the whole thing is televised?” asked my areligious nephew, who is happy to spend a small fortune to attend day-long music events in cold, soggy fields.

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of what happened in Dublin over the weekend. Whether practising or not, in the past being Catholic was an important part of being Irish. The pope’s visit demonstrated this was no longer the case.

That is both good and bad. Good because the often-associated intolerance and violence are also consigned to the past. Bad, because under Pope Francis the Catholic church looked as though it could provide some pushback to the growing dominance of all things business in our life.

After the weekend events in Dublin there may now be a question over his ability to play that role. For someone who has always been able to hit the right note, Pope Francis seemed a little tone deaf in Dublin.

It was uncomfortably reminiscent of KPMG’S new chief attempting to persuade South Africans in September 2017 that despite a few challenges the business model was fundamentally good and all would be well. Or, more recently, like the long-serving chair of Naspers’s audit committee trying to reassure sceptical shareholders at the AGM that long-serving PWC is not only the best auditor for the job but is utterly independent. As are all the very long-serving directors on the audit committee. There is a crisis of faith everywhere you look.

It’s difficult to venture out these days without an icon falling on top of you. Across the globe the past few years have been about the selfdestruction of institutions we created in a bid to hold our society and economic systems together. Now they are collapsing around us and no-one seems to know quite what to replace them with.

For someone who has always been able to hit the right note, Pope Francis seemed a little tone deaf in Dublin