Where Faith Meets the Global Economy

For more than 50 years, Father Oliver F. Williams, C.S.C. (ND ’69, ’61), has taught business ethics at Notre Dame and around the world, urging everyone from undergraduates to corporate executives — and even the secretary-general of the United Nations — to recognize their ability to use the power of commerce to make the world a better place while staying true to their religious values.

The message is so simple that it is easily taken for granted, but Williams, who retired from teaching in June 2025, has modeled it through his own life’s work, even at times and in places where it wasn’t so eagerly received.

One uncomfortable moment came in the mid-1980s when, as an emerging scholar, he joined the Academy of Management, the discipline’s leading professional association. Some suggested he lie low, maybe keep the whole being-a-Catholic-priest thing to himself. “A lot of them are against religion being involved in this ethics stuff,” friends told him at the time. 

What could he do? He was the co-founder and director of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Religious Values in Business (CERV); his scholarship in applied ethics appeared in everything from Catholic education newsletters to the Harvard Business Review.

“I mean, I didn’t hide it,” he recalled, wearing his Roman collar and a knowing smile during an interview in his Corby Hall apartment. But he didn’t flaunt it either.

Times changed, and Williams played a leading role in opening up academic conversations about management ethics, governance and corporate social responsibility to religious insight. “And now, religion in business is a major issue, and people are quite open and encouraged by those who espouse some religious conviction,” he said. Eventually, Williams was elected chair of the academy’s social issues in management division. In 2019, he became the first priest — that he knows of, anyway — to receive its Sumner Marcus Award for notable contributions to the field.

Those contributions are worth recounting at greater length, but among the more prominent are his influential 1986 book, “The Apartheid Crisis: How We Can Do Justice in a Land of Violence”; his subsequent devotion to teaching business ethics at universities in post-apartheid South Africa during summers and sabbatical years; his championing of the Sullivan Principles, a blueprint by which global companies take responsibility for employees’ welfare in places that disregard basic human rights; and his 19 years of uninterrupted service on the five-person board of directors of the United Nations Global Compact Foundation.

“Throughout Ollie’s long career, he has been a symbol and instrument of Catholicism’s engagement with the world,” said Kirk Hanson, the retired executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “He has befriended and counseled corporate leaders, diplomats and university leaders. He has demonstrated great skill in translating the Church’s commitments and social teachings into practical action in the real world.”

Charting an Unlikely Path

Those gifts for friendship, apostolic commitment and academic expertise bespeak Williams’ clear mind and gentle temperament. He’s as comfortable at St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church in the Gugulethu township of Cape Town as he is at the UN headquarters in New York City. That may have something to do with Williams’ upbringing in West Orange, New Jersey, as the second of six children in a Catholic family and a series of events that helped Williams understand his own path in terms of vocation. 

His mother had graduated from a teacher’s college, but his father never finished high school. He went to work to help support the family after his father died and eventually did very well financially running gas stations. 

Williams’ own first real job saw him making coffee and gofering on foot and via subway for E.F. Hutton & Co. in Manhattan. The work left him with plenty of time to read financial books, an interest satisfied by neither his Notre Dame studies in chemical engineering nor his participation in the Navy ROTC. That’s when he formed the idea that “the real power in the world is in the business community. It’s not in the political system.” 

In a plot twist, the United States Navy may take some credit for steering Williams toward the priesthood. As an ensign aboard an amphibious command ship sailing from Naples, Italy, he reluctantly accepted assignment as the crew’s Catholic lay leader on the strength of his having a Notre Dame degree. If he did well, the captain assured him, he’d be trained as an officer of the deck underway. “That means you run the ship, and only a handful of junior officers get educated to do that. And it’s a real thrill,” he said. 

But as a first division officer, Williams mostly managed 60 enlisted men — “troubled” kids, high school dropouts, some of whom accepted military service as a judge’s alternative to jail time. “I did a lot of work with them,” Williams recalled. “And I think I helped.” 

After two years, the ship’s Protestant chaplain encouraged him to enter the Catholic seminary instead of pursuing a graduate business degree. “‘You can always leave,’” Williams said the man advised him. “‘But if you never try it, you might always regret you didn’t.’ And that’s advice I’ve given to many others along the way.” 

After his priestly ordination as a fully professed member of the Congregation of Holy Cross, Williams earned his doctorate in theology and ethics at Vanderbilt University, followed by postdoctoral research in business at Stanford University. Back at Notre Dame, after being told that he would never receive tenure in the theology department for his work in applied ethics, Williams received an offer for a position on the management faculty from Brother Leo Ryan, C.S.V., then the dean of the College of Business Administration. 

Ryan “was absolutely convinced” the College needed a business ethics program, Williams recalled. “Nobody was teaching it in the business school. Now there are nine people” tackling ethics at Mendoza, he noted.

Finding the Common Ground

Whatever notions of irregularity Williams may have harbored at the outset of his career as a messenger boy turned chemical engineer, turned naval officer, turned priest and ethicist in a field where talking religion at the conference dinner table was frowned upon, he charted his course with fervor. John Houck (ND ’55, ’54), a veteran professor of management and the other co-founder of CERV, was a mentor, demonstrating for Williams the value of relatability, storytelling and well-chosen examples in the classroom. 

Finding his way in the field was easier having a bright and relatively simple constellation of intellectual guiding lights. Papal social encyclicals dating to Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum” in 1891, underscored by the Second Vatican Council, had articulated a comprehensive and potent body of principles regarding workers’ rights, management and labor relations, social justice, collective obligations to the poor and the apostolic vocation of the laity. When CERV launched in 1980, Pope John Paul II coincidentally was working on an encyclical letter, “Laborem Exercens,” covering the dignity of human work. 

Williams could also point to the vision of another prominent, business-minded Holy Cross priest, Father John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., founder of the College. He quoted O’Hara during his homily at the Mendoza Centennial Mass in 2021: “The primary function of commerce is to serve humankind. Business has a code of ethics based very largely on divine principles. And when the code is followed, commerce can and does advance civilization.”

Graduates, O’Hara added, “should have a sound conception of business morality based on the seventh commandment” — you shall not steal — “and the eight beatitudes.” Such were the raw materials from which Williams generated his scholarship. Along the way, he traveled the world, teaching, presenting and leading seminars on six continents. His work in South Africa, more than any other country, has propelled and defined his career.

Throughout the 1980s, the ethics of investing in international companies that did business in South Africa was a hot topic at Notre Dame and in the national conversation. One approach, a favorite among the small group of faculty and students who were at one point gathering every Friday to protest this segment of the University’s portfolio, was straight-up disinvestment.

“I thought, there’s something in the middle,” Williams recalled. “If we can get companies to take their leadership power and try to dismantle apartheid, that would be probably the best way to get rid of it.” He received a grant from then College of Business dean Frank Reilly, who was building the College’s research portfolio, to travel to South Africa and spend three months interviewing hundreds of business executives, labor leaders and others.

About two months in, he was introduced to Desmond Tutu, then the Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, who asked Williams what he hoped for. The priest from New Jersey replied that if businesses could take the side of their Black employees and customers in dismantling the wholesale social and economic apartheid policies, they could stay. But if they backed the status quo, they should be pressured to leave.

As a model of good corporate behavior, Williams pointed to Johnson & Johnson. The company, which had employed several thousand South Africans and operated in the country since 1930 — nearly two decades before the first formal apartheid laws — purchased homes in white neighborhoods and resold them to Black employees. It promoted Black workers to supervisory positions in defiance of national law. In the end, Williams said, the New Jersey-based pharmaceuticals manufacturer was among a few dozen companies that remained in the country when the apartheid regime collapsed in 1990. Hundreds of others pulled out or were forced out.

Doing Well by Doing Good

Meanwhile, on campus, Williams was tapped to serve as an associate provost and was occasionally asked to speak about his experiences in South Africa. He continued to travel, often visiting some of the world’s poorest countries, where he witnessed inhumane practices perpetrated at the behest of multinational firms. 

He was struck anew by the preeminent power of commerce to change the world for good or ill. He continued to insist, as in the pages of Notre Dame Magazine, that “the way to efficiency in business is . . . through actions which consciously protect and promote human dignity,” that “it is possible to do well by doing good.”

In 2000, he edited “Global Codes of Conduct,” a collection of essays that sought to establish norms to guide business practice in the emerging global economy. In a later retrospective for this magazine, he wrote that what was needed was “a critical mass of ‘enlightened’ companies” to lead by example and draw others into efforts to dismantle barriers to the global common good, including human rights violations, environmental degradation and systemic corruption.

What Williams and his confreres had called for eventually took shape in the United Nations Global Compact, which today includes more than 22,000 signatories. Each participating organization produces an annual report detailing its progress on the Compact’s 10 principles, which are drawn from international declarations but, Williams argued, find their earliest articulation “in many ways” in Catholic social teaching.

Serving on the board of directors of the Compact’s foundation as its sole academic and lone representative of religion entails monitoring the project’s finances and operations. The conversations provide Williams with access to top diplomats and to leaders of the world’s most successful corporations. Those chats are confidential, but he may speak of them in a general way.

These conversations reveal that executives are far more concerned about social instability than they were 25 years ago. They recognize the threat to democracy posed by the worldwide shrinking of the middle class. Skepticism about global warming has given way to a broad consensus that it is driven by human activity and must be addressed. The current political climate, they said, is not helpful. While Compact signatories will continue their work on these issues, the public may hear little about it until the political tone changes.

One area where Williams does hear executives acknowledge a positive role for government in the near term is artificial intelligence and the strain it may place on job markets. Citing recent comments by Bill Gates, Williams believes AI will ultimately be a net creator of jobs. “But the transition is going to be difficult,” he said. “Companies and governments have to work together so people aren’t in the streets.”

Retirement from teaching does not mean retirement from his cause. He recently attended meetings in New York marking the Global Compact’s 25th anniversary. Williams is also working to shape a consultative role for himself in the Keough School for Global Affairs and, as autumn pressed on, he was preparing to lead a three-week workshop on corruption for business ethics scholars in Bangladesh.

The work continues, and Ollie Williams will be there, his career standing as proof that it’s possible in business to act from conviction while making the world a better place.