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CNN Live Saturday

Benedictine Monks Offer Spiritual Counseling to Businessmen

Aired July 27, 2002 - 12:36   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
RENAY SAN MIGUEL, CNN ANCHOR: A group of English monks is challenging current notions about business and the market. The Benedictine brothers say in light of recent big business scandals in the U.S., companies could use a healthy dose of spirituality. CNN's Richard Quest has the story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What is the meaning of work in our lives? What part does it play? How significant is success, and how do we measure it?

RICHARD QUEST, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): From prayer to profit, morality to markets. This Benedictine abbey is now involved in a new calling: Talking to business about how they conduct their temporal affairs. Father Dermot is asking these questions, because as well as praying five times a day, he is running weekend courses encouraging spirituality in the workplace.

FATHER DERMOT TREDGET, BENEDICTINE MONK: If we just take the recent collapse of some of the large companies. First, the Enron incident, and then more recently WorldCom, where the stockholders have lost their savings completely. I mean, for many people, these would be anonymous people, but for the people themselves, this is a very real issue.

QUEST (on camera): There's a silence in the abbey gardens that lets you think. It's the sort of silence where the only noise you hear are the birds in the trees and the bees in the flowers. The sort of silence that lets you think about the big issues of the day, success versus failure, right versus wrong.

(voice-over): Michael Dolan is over 40 and enjoying the peace and quiet. He is soon to start his own business. He believes he is either having a mid-life crisis, or he's found morality.

MICHAEL DOLAN, ENTREPRENEUR: I plan to set a business, it's got values that will care about the individual that works in the company. The company will have a core value, a mission, and we will be able to drive -- to build the company up with people.

QUEST: There will be those who'll bristle at all of this, believing that God doesn't belong in the workplace. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This isn't a program about God as such. It's a program about spirituality, and it's not about a particular faith or a particular belief system, some of which contain an entity that you'd call God and some of which don't.

QUEST: The whole six-week course can be summed in a phrase "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you," in business as in life.

Richard Quest, CNN, with the Benedictine monks in England.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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