José María Arizmendiarrieta

Bust of José María Arizmendiarrieta in the main building of the Universidad de Mondragón in Arrasate

Father José María Arizmendiarrieta Madariaga (born April 22, 1915 in Markina , Bizkaia , † November 29, 1976 in Arrasate ) was a Basque Roman Catholic priest . In the Basque Country he founded several cooperatives and schools as well as the Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa .

Life

José María Arizmendiarrieta was born the eldest son of a small farmer family and grew up in the country. At the age of twelve he entered the boys' seminary of the diocese of Vitoria in Castillo y Elejabeitia and then studied at the seminary in Vitoria .

During the Spanish Civil War , in which, as a seminarian, he was naturally not one of the supporters of the republic, he was not drafted into the military because he was missing an eye after a childhood accident. Instead, he devoted himself to journalism and was briefly imprisoned for working with two Basque nationalist magazines. In 1940 he received the sacrament of ordination through the Apostolic Administrator of the Diocese of Vitoria, Auxiliary Bishop Francisco Javier Lauzurica y Torralba . In 1941 he became vicar in Mondragón and pastor of the Catholic Action and later of the Falange youth movement there.

In 1943 he founded the first vocational school in Mondragón. Four years later he recommended eleven young people to study in Saragossa in order to acquire industrial know-how. This school and the group of young students later became the Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa . He was in contact with personalities who dealt with these topics about social issues that shaped his work in pastoral care, in Catholic Action and in vocational school. These included the Bishop of Málaga , Ángel Herrera Oria or Archbishop Vicente Enrique y Tarancón . He also turned to British social politicians such as William Henry Beveridge and Labor leader Clement Attlee , but also to thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier . His attitude was mainly based on the ideas of the social encyclical Quadragesimo anno Pope Pius XI. embossed.

Following the establishment of the vocational school, Arizmendiarrieta and his colleagues initiated the establishment of a number of cooperatives. Three years after the founding of the first cooperative by five graduates from the technical school founded by Arizmendiarrieta, the Caja Laboral was launched, a credit union that financed cooperatives and the start-up of cooperatives. The special aspect here was the role serving the real cooperatives due to the low interest rates for debt capital for start-ups. By the beginning of the 1960s, more than 20 democratically organized cooperative companies were established that are active within the Mondragón network in a wide variety of industries. One of them was the Ulgor cooperative, which was founded in 1956 and the household appliance manufacturer Fagor existed until 2013 . Other companies are the Eroski retail chain , the Laboral Kutxa bank and the Lagun Aro social fund .

Heart disease required multiple surgeries in the early 1970s. Before his death, however, the cooperative system he had initiated and supported proved to be successful in the economic crisis triggered by the oil price crisis in 1974. Although the crisis also affected the cooperative companies and one cooperative had to be given up, the employees retained them by switching to other cooperatives their work and were saved from ruin by the social fund and social security protection.

Arizmendiarrieta's initiative for self-governing economic activity and the principles of Catholic social teaching he represents continue to shape the Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa. Decades after Arizmendiarrieta's death, the cooperative association is the largest cooperative and one of the ten largest companies in Spain. More than 100,000 employees are 80% members of the cooperative. The income differences between employees and top managers are far below those of other companies, and sick employees and those in need of care are cared for by continued wages. From the educational initiatives he founded in the early 1940s with the later Mondragon Goi Eskola Politeknikoa "Jose Mª Arizmendiarrieta" , the Universidad de Mondragón emerged in 1997 through the merger of three cooperative technical schools. The university with courses in engineering, business studies, nutritional, human and educational sciences belongs to the Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa and emphasizes its social and environmental self-image.

Beatification process

The diocese of San Sebastián opened a process for the beatification of Arizmendiarrietas. Bishop Juan María Uriarte Goiricelaya declared the diocesan information process to be completed in May 2009 and forwarded the files to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome for further proceedings .

On December 14, 2015, Pope Francis awarded him the heroic degree of virtue , which, apart from the recognition of a miracle attributed to his intercession, fulfills all requirements for beatification.

In November 2016, his remains were raised in accordance with the rules of canon law and reburied in the Juan Bautista parish church in Mondragón. For a future beatification, a place of worship was created in the church, where Arizmendiarrieta was in pastoral service throughout his priestly life.

Web links

• José María Arizmendiarrieta: archive, works, photographs (Euskomedia)
• Joxe Azurmendi : El hombre cooperativo (PDF; 8.1 MB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Biografía de D. Jose Mª Arizmendiarrieta (1915-1976). canonizacionarizmendiarrieta.com, accessed August 22, 2018 (Spanish). 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Pit Wuhrer: Solidarity, rebellious, crisis-proof . In: kontextwochenzeitung.de. March 1, 2017, accessed August 23, 2018 . 
3. ↑ Where everyone is boss ( Memento from December 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
4. ^ Cooperative University. Mondragon University is a young university. mondragon.edu, accessed on August 23, 2018 . 
5. ↑ Juanma Velasco: Arizmendiarrieta camina hacia Roma. El Diario Vasco , May 7, 2009, accessed August 20, 2018 (Spanish). 
6. ^ Promulgazione di Decreti della Congregazione delle Cause dei Santi. In: Daily Bulletin. Holy See Press Office , December 15, 2015, accessed August 23, 2018 (Italian). 
7. ↑ Arizmendiarrieta reposa en la parroquia. noticiasdegipuzkoa.eus, November 25, 2016, accessed August 23, 2018 (Spanish).