The Bench: The Iacocca Standard | thomasroman.com/
He spread his arms wide before the rifles and did not close his eyes.
Mexico City. November 23, 1927. A courtyard. Government soldiers. An execution designed to be a public spectacle demonstrating the power of the state over the Church it had been systematically dismantling for years.
Miguel Pro, thirty-six years old, Jesuit priest, stood against the wall and spread his arms in the shape of a cross and said three words.
Viva Cristo Rey.
Long live Christ the King.
The government had invited photographers. The photographs circulated worldwide within days. The spectacle designed to demonstrate the power of the state became instead a permanent image of what formation looks like under its maximum load. The state got exactly what it wanted from the day. It got the opposite of what it intended.
The Return He Chose
Pro had been ordained in Belgium in 1925 and returned to Mexico in 1926. He knew what he was returning to.
The Mexican government had been systematically suppressing the Catholic Church since the mid-1920s. The Calles Laws banned public worship. Priests were prohibited from wearing clerical clothing in public. Masses were illegal. Churches were seized and repurposed. Priests who continued to minister were subject to arrest, imprisonment, and execution.
Pro returned anyway.
That decision is the formation speaking before the story has fully begun. The person who returns to a country where returning means operating in conditions designed to eliminate you has already answered the central formation question. Not in the dramatic moment. In the decision made before the dramatic moment existed.
He went underground immediately. He dressed as a mechanic. A beggar. A businessman. He celebrated Mass in private homes. He brought the sacraments to people who had no other access. He moved through a system designed to catch him with the specific confidence of a man who was not outrunning the system but operating in a register the system’s logic could not fully reach.
He did this for a year.
The Formation That Made the Year Possible
The formation that made the underground year possible was not built in Mexico City.
It was built across a life that had been practicing the same thing in less extreme conditions for as long as Pro had been a Jesuit.
He had entered the Society of Jesus in 1911. The formation of a Jesuit is designed specifically to produce a person capable of operating without institutional support, in conditions of hostility or indifference, for sustained periods, without losing either the interior structure or the practical effectiveness of the mission.
Pro went through that formation across years of study in Mexico, then Spain, then Nicaragua, then Spain again, then Belgium. He was sick with stomach problems throughout much of his formation period. He kept going. He built the specific interior discipline of a person who has learned not to require comfortable conditions as a prerequisite for functioning.
That is the formation principle the underground year would require. And it had been installed across years of ordinary formation work before Pro set foot back in Mexico.
He was not improvising in the disguises and the hidden Masses and the movements through a system trying to catch him. He was expressing what the formation had already made him.
What the Courtyard Found
The government arrested him in November 1927 on a false charge. There was no trial. He was offered a chance to speak before the execution. He said he forgave his persecutors. He asked to pray. He knelt. He stood. He spread his arms.
Viva Cristo Rey.
The photographers got their photographs. The photographs did not produce the spectacle the government intended. What they produced was an image of a formation that the execution could not touch. A man who had been practicing the interior discipline of going beneath in hiddenness for years, who had operated in danger for a year without the formation showing any sign of dissolving, who arrived at the moment of maximum pressure with the same structure intact that he had carried into every hidden Mass in every private home across twelve months of underground ministry.
The crisis did not call forth something extraordinary. It found something already there.
What the Courtyard Is Teaching
Your organization will face its version of the courtyard. Not an execution. The moment when the pressure is maximum and the audience is present and what the formation is made of becomes visible to everyone in the room.
The leaders who hold in that moment are not the ones who found something extraordinary when the moment arrived. They are the ones who had been practicing the ordinary formation across the years before the moment existed.
In the meetings that went long and they stayed. In the standards held when breaking them would have been easier and no one would have noticed. In the going beneath before anyone required it. In the discipline maintained when the conditions were difficult and maintaining it was costly.
That is what the courtyard finds waiting in a formed leader.
Not a performance of courage. The expression of what was already there.
He spread his arms wide before the rifles and did not close his eyes.
The formation had been practicing that posture for years in rooms no one was watching.
What is your formation practicing right now?
In the rooms no one is watching.
In the ordinary conditions that are difficult enough to cost something and not dramatic enough to be noticed.
What is being installed?