Fr Seamus Finn was attracted to missionary work by the sense of adventure - but the experience attuned him to the need for ethical investment and social responsibility. Now an expert in the field, he tells Catherine Reilly how he helps companies and investors alike to clean up their act
WE’VE heard a lot recently about the morally decrepit white-collar workers who’ve spun the financial planet out of its orbit – so it’s somewhat fitting to encounter a black-collar worker who’s trying to restore some universal order.
Fr Seamus Finn is a US-based priest with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, but aside from his routine faith-based tasks, he is a consultant in socially responsible investing. The term may seem a misnomer, but as Fr Finn later suggests, some battles can be won.
The priest is of Irish stock: born in Kenturk, Co Cork, he moved to Lowell, Massachusetts as a teenager with his family in 1964. Even now, as he casts his mind back, Fr Finn still appreciates what a gigantic upheaval it was – from rural, Catholic Ireland to urban, multi-faith America.
The move was an economic one, but was also linked to the fact that two sisters and a brother had already emigrated. They spoke of the great opportunities that lay Stateside, and his parents didn’t want a family divided by the Atlantic. So the Finns packed their suitcases and left.
“It was unbelievable, is the only way I can describe it,” remembers Fr Finn, who still has a trace of an Irish accent. “Moving from a very small town and a very local and familiar community to a city of more than 100,000 in the States, with its history of great diversity… it was a shock.”
Settling in wasn’t easy. “It struck people in my family in different ways, I think some adapted quite well, but some like my father, who died a number of years ago, never really adapted. My mother, on the other hand, adapted quite well.”
But special occasions were an opportunity to remember home. “I think we’re a pretty close family and always celebrated our Irishness. Irish food, and singing, and music were always an important part of any family gatherings and celebrations, and still are.
“Seven or eight different ethnic groups make up the city of Lowell, a fairly good nucleus of an Irish community is there as well, which gave us a kind of a safe haven,” he says.
As his siblings ventured off into different careers – as engineers, flight attendants, grocery store owners, printers – Fr Finn found himself drawn to the Oblates, a missionary order that staffed around half of Lowell’s 16 parishes at the time.
“I joined a missionary order because I was attracted by the sense of adventure, and I think faith was an important part of our family’s life growing up, even though we experienced a lot of different churches in the United States.”
Listening to missionaries “coming back and talking about strange places they’d been to like Brazil and Japan” had the young Irishman hooked, and he entered the Oblates upon finishing high school. In fact, he was among two Finns to go into the priesthood – a brother is now serving the archdiocese of Boston.
It was while training, in the mid-1970s, that Fr Finn’s mind became attuned to ethical investment, social responsibility and its absence in the corporate world.
“We’d have a number of missionaries coming back who’d sit in on a class or give a lecture, and they’d continue to raise the question of the power of multinational corporations, and what they were doing specifically in the countries they were working, the amount of influence they had,” he recalls.
“This was at a time when many of these countries had unelected governments. They had either military dictatorships or some kind of coups, so the concern was about these companies obviously getting some kind of permission with the governments to operate – that was one piece.
“And the second piece was that many of these companies were going overseas for cheaper labour, so that always brings questions about abuse of the workforce and payment of living wages, and things like that.”
It made him think more deeply about corporations – ultimately they needed investors. And these people and organisations could be influenced.
Fr Finn became involved with the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, a New-York based leader of the corporate social responsibility movement and presently comprising around 300 faith-based institutional investors, including national denominations, religious communities, pension funds, hospital corporations, economic development funds, asset management companies, colleges, and unions, accounting for over $100bn in invested capital.
In simple terms, the centre advises faith organisations on where best to ethically invest, and liaises with companies on how to clean up their act and, in essence, ultimately attract capital from more righteously-minded investors.
“The core [membership] of the interfaith centre is faith-based institutional investors but the second tier of members are quite often what we would call ‘socially responsible investors’,” explains Fr Finn. “They might have some specific probations or concerns coming out of their values, not necessarily out of their beliefs, and those would be around things like climate change, the environment, child labour.
“And then another group that’s part of that are public pension funds – the pension funds of pretty progressive states like New York, California and Massachusetts. These would be the pension funds of, for instance, fire fighters, teachers, policemen and state workers. They quite often would have ethical screens on their funds, so we would collaborate with them.”
For the cynically minded, though, the term ‘ethical investment’ rankles. Where money is involved, smoke and mirrors seem to pop up from nowhere.
“Well it depends on one’s view of doing business,” says Fr Finn. “I mean, can business be ethically done? And I think previous to this we maybe had a sense that this is the world of business and you do things there that you might not normally do in a more familial setting or in a setting of a community where people are trying to help each other.”
But Fr Finn believes that the ‘cut throat’ mentality has, to some extent, receded among some businesses in terms of accepting greater social responsibility. He cites footwear giant Nike as a company that has made significant progress within the past 10 years, and says retail colossus Wal-Mart is one particular corporation that the interfaith centre has trained its eye on.
“Wal-Mart has at least 1.5 million employees, it is the largest retailer in the world,” says Fr Finn. “We’ve been working with them to push them to do some things in terms of their supply chain and workers’ rights, benefits to their employees and footprint on the environment – and certainly on the environment they have made some good strides. And we’re continuing to talk to them about the other areas and it’s a constructive conversation, and I think we’ve made some progress.”
But what, one wonders, is in it for Wal-Mart? “I think the incentive for them is maybe it’s going to get the critics off their back, they won’t get loads of people saying ‘I will never to shop in Wal-Mart in my entire life.’ I think it’s improving their reputation, it’s improving their image, diminishing the resistance to some of their stores, and I think the larger benefit is that it’s building a sustainable business model,” he says.
Closer to home, one wonders if for all its talk the Catholic Church itself may have dirtied its hands when it comes to investment. Is it possible that the church could be investing in unethical companies right now?
“You know, it’s hard to tell,” says Fr Finn. “I think it’s improved significantly. There are clear guidelines in terms of issues around abortions, around stem cells, and those kinds of questions. There are guidelines, I guess, or principles that maybe aren’t as strenuously in place around other issues, around unjust treatment of workers, exploitation or abuse of the environment – we’re beginning to grow in that.
“Our own order has principles, for instance, that don’t allow us to invest in companies that produce nuclear weapons – we believe strongly that they don’t make a contribution to more security in the world. We’d also be looking at companies that have serious human rights violations; the ones that come to mind today at the moment are questions related to companies doing business in the Sudan or Burma.
“So I think there are some core principles, and depending on the mission of the different congregations, a whole other set of principles, it may vary a little bit. Modern technology and communications have made it much easier for those that want to be investing consistent with their beliefs, their ethics and their values.”
And for Fr Finn, the present financial crisis must be a wake-up call. Dirty systems have dirty results; it’s as simple as that.
“There has been something soured or seriously flawed in the system, and I think the only way we’re going to get it fixed and reformed is that people are going to pay attention to it. I mean this across the board, not just public officials and economists but we have to be much more demanding of the banking system, of what we want from them,” he says.
“Access to credit is important whether it’s $10 you are borrowing or $10 million, and so we need a system that’s of service, that allows people to buy homes, or buy cars, or send money back to their families. I think public officials and bankers need to be seriously engaged in the issue and hear from people on it.”
