I was anxious weeks ago to discover the ins and outs of Fagor's collapse. For those who don't know, Fagor is one of the four legs of the impressive Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa (MCC), a project created around 1955 by the Basque priest José María Arizmendiarrieta. MCC is also the world's largest cooperative business group .

I have curiously returned to the phenomenal biography of Arizmendiarrieta, written by Fernando Molina (2005). It is worth reading this book, which describes the edifying life of this priest, a pioneer of the social apostolate, from his ordination to the priesthood in 1941 until his death in 1976. This priest was determined to raise the economic level and the spiritual life of his parish and, to achieve this, in 1943 he created a vocational school there. Then came the factories, the consumer cooperatives (now Eroski), the Caja Laboral and finally the transformation of the vocational school into a university and many other things. Don José María intended a moral and structural reform of the capitalist business , according to the ideal of cooperation, union and equality. And all this, in the midst of the secularizing crisis of the Basque Country and during the years of leaden terrorism.

While I was considering these things, I was able to visit attend to hear Alfredo Pastor (IESE) speak at the "Jornades de Qüestions Pastorals de Castelldaura" (Facultat de Teologia de Catalunya). Pastor opened his speech with a surprising sentence, taken from Stefano Zamagni: "A society based only on solidarity is a society from which everyone wants to escape. And what to do when we reach this impasse? We can only avoid it by appealing to Christian fraternity, which never disappoints, Pastor concluded. And this can only be achieved when the values of the Christian family are also transferred to business and to public life. "Without fraternity, a society is unsustainable".

Have the limits of solidarity been crossed in the Fagor case? It seems so, since some companies of the group MCC have not wanted to rescue others in difficulties. But, not everything has been a case of lack of solidarity. There is also another cause to consider: that without innovation and new products there is no progress.