A Dominican Friar to Lead Colombia's National Training Service

Colombia's president-elect, Abelardo de la Espriella, announced on July 21 that he had chosen a Dominican friar, Ricardo Torres Castro, to run one of the country's largest public institutions when the new government takes office August 7.[^1] SENA (the National Learning Service) trains millions of Colombians in technical and vocational skills each year and connects graduates to jobs. Torres Castro's formation is unusual for the post: a philosophy degree focused on political and economic thought, a theology degree from the Pontifical Bolivarian University, two graduate degrees in administration and international business from the University of Barcelona, six years as rector of Santo Tomás University's Medellín campus, and a doctorate now underway at the University of Medellín.[^1] De la Espriella's charge to him is direct: rebuild employers' confidence in the institution, modernize its infrastructure, and stop treating technical education as a consolation prize for students who could not get into a university.[^1]

The appointment will be read, in many quarters, as a curiosity: a friar running a national workforce agency. The more precise reading is that it represents a very old claim about what public leadership actually requires.

The philosopher-king argument, restated for a workforce institution

Plato's argument in the Republic is that the ruler of any institution oriented toward the common good must be someone whose education and character orient him toward truth rather than personal advantage: what Karl Popper, examining the argument critically, called the demand for rule by "learnedness," a sophocracy in which the qualified administrator is the one who loves and possesses wisdom rather than the one who merely accumulates power.[^2] Plato's philosopher-king is, before anything else, someone for whom governance is not a transaction.

The vow of poverty that Torres Castro took as a Dominican friar makes this disinterestedness structural rather than aspirational. He cannot accumulate wealth from his directorship. The monetary motive, the one most corrosive to institutional integrity, is simply absent from his decision architecture. This is the specific condition Plato thought necessary for sound governance, now instantiated in a concrete appointment to a concrete post.

The Dominican tradition deepens the argument further. Pope Francis, in Lumen Fidei, wrote that faith "transforms the whole person precisely to the extent that he or she becomes open to love" and that the question of truth is "a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us."[^3] The Order of Preachers was founded on this integration: freedom from material goods so that the friars could pursue and teach truth without distortion from self-interest. As Pope Leo XIV wrote in his 2025 apostolic exhortation Dilexi te, "Free from the weight of earthly goods, the Dominican Friars were better able to dedicate themselves to their principal work of preaching. They went to the cities, especially the universities, in order to teach the truth about God," and "in their dependence on others, they showed that faith is not imposed but offered."[^4] Torres Castro's formation within that tradition means his orientation toward truth and service is not a personal quirk but a charism institutionally transmitted across eight centuries.

Prudence as the governing virtue

The philosophical case does not rest on Plato alone. Aquinas, building directly on Aristotle, argued that the governing virtue for anyone in an administrative or legislative role is prudence, specifically ruling prudence, the intellectual virtue by which an administrator recognizes the principles of a just order and shapes institutions accordingly. Ruling prudence, on Aquinas's account, cannot function without a prior moral orientation of the will toward the common good: the regime is just when every official decision is directed toward the promotion of the common good of the society, and deviant when the ruling class aims at securing its own interests. The will must want the right end before the intellect can find the right means.

Torres Castro's mandate tests this sequence. De la Espriella has charged him with reversing the perception that technical and technological education is a consolation prize, a task requiring a genuine vision of what education is for, held firmly enough to resist the institutional inertia that protects existing arrangements. Rebuilding trust between SENA and the productive sector, improving training quality, and ensuring that graduates obtain properly remunerated work are not managerial problems soluble by reorganization alone. They require a director who can subordinate the institution's habitual self-understanding to a clearer account of its actual purpose. That is a description of ruling prudence at work.

The personalist distinction

There is a further dimension, one that Catholic Christian anthropology has pressed with particular force. The question of leadership is not only a question of competence or even of virtue in the classical sense. It is a question of what kind of self is doing the governing. Jacques Maritain distinguished the individual, who operates from a logic of private advantage, from the person, who is ordered toward the common good by the very structure of his or her nature. Genuine public service, on this account, requires a personalist orientation, one in which the administrator's welfare is genuinely bound to the welfare of those served, rather than a contractual one in which the administrator performs services in exchange for a salary, status, or future political capital.

A Dominican friar vowed to poverty and to the pursuit of truth is, by formation, constituted as a person in Maritain's sense rather than as an individual in that technical meaning. His directorship of SENA is therefore congruent with his identity in a way that a purely careerist appointment would not be. The congruence matters because institutional trust — the very thing De la Espriella says Torres Castro must rebuild — depends on followers' perception that the leader's interests and their interests genuinely converge. When they do, trust is not a communication strategy. It is a structural consequence of who the leader is.

What the appointment says about social mobility and faith

SENA's mission is social mobility for people who cannot afford university. Its students are workers, the underemployed, people whose formation capital is thin and whose economic margin is narrow. The institution exists, in other words, for precisely the population that Catholic social thought identifies as the primary beneficiary of the common good: those whose personal flourishing depends most directly on whether public institutions function with integrity.

Placing at the head of such an institution someone already vowed to the welfare of the poor, and already formed in the pursuit of truth over the accumulation of advantage, is not an experiment in governance by religious outsiders. It is a return to a principle that predates the secular state: the best candidate for a role oriented toward the common good is the candidate whose character is already ordered there. Colombia's incoming administration, whether or not it frames its decision in these terms, has acted on a logic that Plato articulated, that Aquinas refined, and that the Dominican tradition has embodied since the thirteenth century.

For those who follow how faith and human flourishing intersect in public life, the Torres Castro appointment is worth watching not as a novelty but as a data point in an argument that has always been about the same thing: whether institutional leadership can be grounded in something more durable than self-interest. The answer, according to one of the oldest accounts of governance available to the Western tradition, is yes — and it requires exactly the kind of person who has already chosen, by vow and by vocation, to want the right things.

References

[^1]: Villegas, E. (2026, July 23). Colombia's President-elect Appoints a Dominican Friar as Director of the National Learning Service. ZENIT — English. https://zenit.org/2026/07/23/colombias-president-elect-appoints-a-dominican-friar-as-director-of-the-national-learning-service/

[^2]: Popper, K. R. (1945). The open society and its enemies (Vol. 1). Routledge. Chapter on the philosopher-king and the argument for sophocracy.

[^3]: Francis (Pope). (2013). Lumen fidei [Encyclical letter]. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. §26.

[^4]: Leo XIV (Pope). (2025, October 4). Dilexi te: Apostolic exhortation on love for the poor. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. §66.