Beer and Holiness (Part II)

Beer and Holiness Converge in the Life of This Young Entrepreneur

A Profile of Luis Gordon

This is the second part of a post that began here.

A successful entrepreneur by his late 20s, Luis paid himself a high but not outrageous salary, enjoyed wearing good clothes, drove a flashy, yellow car and was actively engaged in politics promoting his view of the world in the rough and tumble politics of Spain in the late ‘20s.

The Gordon’s had been Catholic all the way back to Scotland which most likely contributed to Arthur’s decision to move to Spain 200 years earlier. Luis himself was a devout Catholic with an authentic piety. His reputation at home was "A treasure of a man… serious and formal, yet friendly and affectionate…Everyone in the family regarded him as a saint."

He was well formed in the doctrine and morals of his faith, especially the social teaching as shown in his relationship with his employees. Ciempozuelos was an agricultural town and the occupants had little education or prospects of employment. Luis taught the farmers the best practices for growing barley, until then unknown to them. He taught each of the factory workers the steps of the malting process and the importance of each one’s work to produce a malt of which everyone could be proud. He arbitrated very difficult problems in the operation of the company in the presence of God, with a serene joy and without ever losing his composure. Despite his young age, his employees regarded him as a father.

The material benefits of the malt factory were not limited to new factory and administrative jobs but radiated out to the farmers, the shopkeepers and every villager through improvements in healthcare and education thanks to Luis’ generous contributions to local institutions. In all of this he was a model of a man of business intent on putting the social teaching of the Church into practice.

One order of nuns, a recipient of some of his donations, wrote:

It would be difficult to find a soul as great as his among those who live in the hustle and bustle of the world and immersed in business. You only had to deal with him once to realize the elevated sentiments which flowed from his beautiful soul. His principal concerns were the spiritual interests of those around him, sanctifying his work, being an affectionate father to the poor, and an outstanding example of a business owner who looks after the workers of his factory.

However, Luis sensed that God was asking something more than being an honest and just entrepreneur. He did not see himself leaving the company in order to be a priest but neither did he look for a wife. Something held him back. He explored a number of pious associations but nothing fit. Eventually, sometime in 1931, his restless generosity lead him to the Congregation of St. Philip Neri which was enlisting university students and young professionals to care for the sick in the General Hospital of Madrid. This was the hospital where those went who could not afford anything else. The medical care was low and the attention to the patients was abysmal.

The Philippians pledged themselves to visit the hospital on Sundays and do what they could to console the patients and provide for the spiritual and physical well-being of these poor sick, many dying, people, not omitting anything, no matter how repugnant; volunteering, when necessary, to scrub the floor and clean the bedpans. The young fellows also pledged to obey the one who was designated the leader in order to please and serve God in the poor.

José Romeo, one of the student volunteers, recalled “It was a very hard and humiliating work. We combed their hair, shaved them, trimmed their nails, bathed them and cleaned their bedpans.” It was also a thankless work: “The anti-Catholic atmosphere permeated everything and many of the sick people insulted us.”

Many of the young men came from upper class backgrounds and were not used to such work. They would leave the hospital with upset stomachs, vile odors in their clothes and vivid memories of pus, ulcers, and all kinds of disgusting things.

Meanwhile, a young priest, Fr. Josemaría Escrivá, was trying to carry forward Opus Dei, the task which God had entrusted to him on October 2, 1928.

Without human resources, he sought the help of the poor.

I went to seek strength in the poorest neighborhoods of Madrid. I spent hours and hours, every day, walking from one place to the other all over Madrid, visiting shamefully poor, miserably poor people who had absolutely nothing; among dirty children with runny noses, but children for all that, and therefore, souls pleasing to God… I spent many hours in that work. And in the hospitals, and in the houses where sick people were, if those shacks can be called houses. They were people who were forsaken and sick, some with a sickness that was then incurable, tuberculosis… (St. Josemaría, notes from a family gathering, March 19, 1975)

Already overloaded with work, Fr. Josemaría accepted immediately when he was asked, in early 1932, to take a pastoral role in the initiative of the Philippians. Being a priest, the young men assumed their pledge of obedience extended to him.

Luis’ premonition that God had something in mind for him was confirmed when he met Fr. Josemaría. He might have been introduced by José Romeo, a Philippian who had already joined Opus Dei, or they might have just bumped into each other.

In 1969, St. Josemaría was reminiscing:

One day we were attending a tuberculosis patient, and while I was cleaning and washing the patient, I said to Luis: “Clean the bed pan.” It was full of revolting sputum. I noticed that he could not hold back from making a face, and seemed to have turned a little pale, but I saw him go out, holding the bed pan. Bearing in mind Luis’s gesture, I reacted immediately and followed him, intending to do this job myself. I found him in the bathroom, a tiny room in the hospital, where there was a tap and some brushes to clean these things. I followed him, I repeat, thinking he might faint, but I found him with a countenance radiating joy.  Instead of using the brush, he had rolled up his sleeves and put his hand in to clean it properly. I was very pleased and let him continue. Later, speaking with him, he confirmed  that he had felt a great repugnance, but had forced himself to obey freely and joyfully.

In this conversation, Luis admitted that he had been asking Jesus to “Keep me smiling,”an incident memorialized in Fr. Josemaría’s spiritual classic “The Way” (No. 626).

Needless to say, Fr. Josemaría was extremely impressed with Luis. Besides his industriousness and generosity he noted “A good model: obedient, most discreet, charitable to the point of extravagance, humble, mortified, and penitent. A man of the Eucharist and of prayer, most devoted to the Blessed Virgin and to Saint Thérèse.“

In the following months Luis learned of Opus Dei, the Work of God, with its message that God calls everyone to holiness, the majority in the midst of their work and ordinary life. It was just what Luis had been looking for. From Fr. Josemaría’s own lips he heard what the priest had written just a few months before:

Our Lord has raised up his Work in these years because he never again wants it unknown or forgotten that all are called to strive for sanctity and that the majority of Christians are called to do this in the world, in ordinary work.  For that reason, as long as there are people on this earth, the Work will exist.  There will always be persons of every profession and position who seek sanctity within their state of life, within that profession or position of theirs; contemplative souls in the midst of the world. (9 Jan, 1932)

Luis asked for admission to Opus Dei on May 22, 1932.

Opus Dei was not yet four years old and there were only a handful of laymen and a few priests who had committed themselves to it. Among these were José Romeo, Isidoro Zorzano, who joined in 1930, and a young priest named José María Somoano, the chaplain of King’s Hospital who was doing heroic work there with the dying. He had joined Opus Dei almost on the day he first met Fr. Josemaría a few months earlier.

Not all those who had committed to follow this new path were able to help Fr. Josemaría in the early growth of Opus Dei when so much had to be done. Isidoro had demanding professional responsibilities in far off Malaga and could only come to Madrid a few weekends each month. José Romeo got himself into trouble for his political activities and had to flee Spain. The others were just college students. With the addition of Luis Gordon and Fr. José María Somoano, Fr. Josemaría must have felt that Opus Dei was finally getting off the ground. Here, at last, were two who profoundly understood the vocation to sanctity in the middle of the world and could help him get things going; Fr. José María with his daring pastoral commitment and Luis with his industriousness and extraordinary generosity of time and money.

God, of course, had other plans. Fr. José María was poisoned in July, 1932, due to his heroic work with the dying. Some found no room for Christ-like figures in the emerging secular Spain. Fr. Josemaría gathered the remaining members of Opus Dei, including Luis, to console each other. With Fr. Josemaría they agreed “If God called you or me, what would we do, from heaven or from purgatory, except cry out again and again, many times and always: ‘My God! Help them, those brothers of mine fighting on earth, that they may do your will. Smooth out the path, hasten the hours, remove the obstacles. Sanctify them!’?” Fr. Josemaría later wrote: “Our brother Luis concurred in that idea, because it is a necessary consequence of the real and very strong spiritual fraternity that unites us, a fraternity that he knew how to live in such a practical way.”

It was Luis’s turn next. He contracted pneumonia. On his death bed he suggested that he pass the malt company to Opus Dei but Fr. Josemaría followed an “interior impulse” and turned down the proposal. He died on November 5, 1932, a member of Opus Dei for less than six months.

Years later, Pedro Casciaro, who joined Opus Dei in 1935, learned of Luis Gordon from Fr. Josemaría. “The Lord wished to take him, so that the Work would be poor, without our own economic means, which we will never have. He had … a good fortune that he wanted to leave to the Work, but I dissuaded him from doing so.” In his memoirs, Pedro commented that if Fr. Josemaría had not opposed Luis’ wishes, “we would not have suffered the economic problems we had in Ferraz [the first residence of Opus Dei], nor those that came later, but we would not have known the extreme poverty that was for us a rich school of virtues.”

Shortly after Luis’ death, Fr. Josemaría wrote: “Let us love the cross, the holy cross which is falling on the Work of God. Our great King Jesus Christ chose to take away the two best prepared ones so that we would not put our trust in anything earthly, not even someone’s personal virtues, but only and exclusively in his most loving Providence."