With Enrique Shaw on path to sainthood, Vatican confirms you can be a holy businessman

ROSARIO, Argentina (OSV News) — In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” The words have echoed for centuries as both warning and challenge — not because salvation is impossible for the wealthy, but because it is demanding.

On Dec. 18, the Vatican confirmed that one Argentine layman met that challenge, announcing that Pope Leo XIV has approved a miracle attributed to the intercession of Venerable Enrique Ernesto Shaw, clearing the way for his beatification.

Shaw, who died in 1962 at age 41, was neither a priest nor religious. He was a husband, a father of nine, a naval officer and a businessman who died wealthy. Yet his life — lived with rare coherence between faith and action — has made him one of Argentina’s next halo-hopefuls.

Born in 1921 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris to an Argentine family, Shaw grew up amid privilege but chose a path marked by discipline, service and prayer. He spent most of his childhood in Argentina, but lived for one year in the United States with his father and brother after his mother died when he was 4. It was there that Shaw received the sacrament of confirmation. 

Though his father was a non-practicing Catholic, he honored a promise made to his dying wife to raise their children in the faith.

Shaw remains the youngest graduate of Argentina’s naval school, entering at age 14. By the time he retired at 24, he had reached the rank of lieutenant.

Shaw traveled back to the United States several times, but a defining trip came in 1945, when the Argentine Navy sent him to study meteorology. He arrived in New York on Sept. 2, 1945 — the day World War II ended — already undergoing a change of heart. During the trip, Shaw held several conversations with Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand, a Chicago priest known for forming Catholic leaders through social engagement and labor ministry.

Msgr. Hillenbrand convinced Shaw that he would never be “just another worker,” but could make a difference as a businessman.

Under Hillenbrand’s guidance, Shaw left the Navy and entered the business world, convinced that economic life was not separate from the Gospel, but one of its most demanding arenas. That connection has drawn the attention of Pope Leo XIV, himself from Chicago. In a message to Argentina’s XXXI Industrial Conference, the pope wrote that Shaw’s life demonstrates it is “possible to be both a businessman and a saint, that economic efficiency and fidelity to the Gospel are not mutually exclusive, and that charity can penetrate even industrial and financial structures.”

Shaw founded Argentina’s Christian Association of Business Executives. Inspired by the formation he received at Harvard Business School — where he studied by invitation despite never applying — he also helped found his country’s Pontifical University.

At the same time, he became CEO of his wife’s family business, Rigolleau Glassworks, fathered nine children, headed the men’s branch of Catholic Action in Argentina and helped found the local Caritas office. At Rigolleau, Shaw established a pension fund and health care system for the company’s 3,400 workers, providing medical care, financial support in case of illness and loans for major life events.

All this took place before Shaw died of cancer at 41, after a six-year battle. Some 260 workers donated blood to help the man who knew them by name, regularly asked about their families and carried a small notebook to record their needs.

Shortly before his death, Shaw thanked them: “I can tell you that now almost all the blood that runs through my veins is workers’ blood. I am thus more than ever identified with you, whom I have always loved and considered, not as mere executors, but also as executives.”

Shaw understood business not as a profit machine, but as a community of persons. Convinced that work must serve human dignity, he promoted labor relations grounded in dialogue, justice and respect — even amid Argentina’s intense social and political conflicts of the 1950s.

His convictions led to concrete decisions. Shaw was a driving force behind the concept of the family wage in Argentina, a pioneering effort to ensure salaries reflected not only productivity, but the real needs of supporting a family. For Shaw, wages could never be abstract numbers; they had to make a dignified life possible.

His public fidelity to the faith came at a cost. In 1955, during severe religious persecution following the burning of churches and confrontation between the state — led by President Juan Domingo Perón — and the church, Shaw was arrested twice for his involvement in Catholic Action. He endured opposition with serenity, never separating personal piety from public responsibility.

With the support of fellow Argentine Pope Francis, Shaw’s cause advanced slowly but steadily. What ultimately opened the final door, however, was a healing that medicine could not explain.

On June 21, 2015, a 5-year-old boy suffered a devastating head injury after being kicked by a horse near Suipacha, outside Buenos Aires. Doctors warned the family that his condition was so severe that surgery might not even be advisable. Faced with a grim prognosis, the parents entrusted their son to Shaw’s intercession.

The boy survived and today, now a teenager, lives a normal life with no lasting effects. The church formally recognized the healing as miraculous, publishing the decree Dec. 18, with Pope Leo XIV’s approval.

Fernán de Elizalde, administrator of the cause, told Infobae that at the critical moment, the child’s father prayed: “I exchange your holiness for the health of my son.”

The approval marks a significant moment not only for Argentina, but for a global church increasingly focused on the vocation of the laity. Shaw’s life offers a concrete answer to one of Christianity’s enduring tensions: how wealth, power and responsibility can be lived without losing one’s soul.

Ines San Martin is the VP of Marketing and Communications for The Pontifical Mission Societies USA. She writes for OSV News from Rosario, Argentina. 

The post With Enrique Shaw on path to sainthood, Vatican confirms you can be a holy businessman first appeared on OSV News.