There are coincidences that are not accidental. In the same year that Argentina deeply discusses its economic model (ideas about zero deficit, opening up to the world, the role of the State, what it means to produce wealth and for what purpose), Rome paved the way to beatify the first businessman in the modern history of the Church. His name was Enrique Shaw, he was Argentine, and he died more than sixty years ago convinced that economics and morality are not two separate or opposing discussions.

Shaw's life speaks not only to Catholics. It speaks to anyone who has understood that work dignifies, that well-managed wealth is not a sin but a responsibility, and that no people can free themselves from poverty if they do not first free their capacity to create.

Who was Enrique Shaw?

He was born in Paris in 1921, at the Ritz hotel, the son of Alejandro Shaw (founder of the bank that bore his name) and Sara Tornquist. Enrique lost his mother when he was just a child. He was educated at La Salle School in Buenos Aires and entered the Naval School, where he graduated as the youngest officer in the Argentine Navy, with one of the best averages of his generation. Upon falling in love, he requested a discharge to prioritize his family: he married Cecilia Bunge and together they had nine children.

He was the general manager of Cristalerías Rigolleau for sixteen years. And there he built what made him different: he did not manage the company as a machine for generating profit at any cost, but as a community of people. He also founded and presided over the Christian Association of Business Leaders and helped establish the Universidad Católica Argentina. In 1955, during the religious persecution unleashed during Peronism, he was arrested for publicly expressing his faith. He died of cancer in 1962, at the age of 41.

Pope Francis himself mentioned him as an example time and again. “He was rich, but he was a saint,” he said.

In December 2025, the Vatican joyfully informed us that a miracle had occurred allowing for the initiation of his beatification: the inexplicable healing of a boy struck by a horse. He will then be the first blessed in history fully identified as a modern businessman.

Three parallels that are not forced

Enrique could have chosen to live off rents, or his surname, or his father's bank. But instead, he chose to get his hands dirty, like a true man, in a glass factory. He lived with the conviction that producing, generating value, creating jobs, is a vocation.

Shaw did not separate productivity from dignity. He viewed salary, work hours, and the relationship between employer and employee as part of the same project: that the company should help people grow, not just the accounting balance.

Towards the end of his life, already with advanced cancer, he needed an urgent transfusion. Without anyone asking him, hundreds of workers from Cristalerías Rigolleau left their jobs and lined up at the Buenos Aires clinic where he was hospitalized to donate blood for him.

When he recovered from that transfusion, he went to the plant to thank them and said the phrase that became his essence: "Now I am happy, as worker's blood runs through my veins." As we see, the workers, his employees, were his family, viewed by Enrique in some way as God sees them.

Shaw maintained that reducing a country's problems solely to numbers is to stay on the surface. He understood that behind every figure there is an idea of what man is and what we must do as a country for each one. Every person, every worker, every child, is a possibility and not a burden.

Why this matters to Argentina in 2026

For decades, we were taught that being successful in business and being a good person were two separate or even opposing things. Enrique Shaw demonstrated with his life the opposite: wealth can be generated without losing one's soul, and one can live a Christian life in the business world. In a country that needs to regain trust in its entrepreneurs, its investors, in those who risk capital and create jobs, Shaw's figure shows us that the union between "those who generate" and "those who receive" is possible, good, and desirable.

It is not necessary to share Enrique Shaw's faith to recognize what he represents: the proof that a well-understood entrepreneurial vocation is a form of service. That is the Argentina that, between economic reform and cultural battle, we still have pending to build.