"It matters a great deal who is going to win, but not at all who won"
Catholic perspectives on sports (From medieval to modern times),
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Longer Review (1300 words)
The author’s opening gambit is that in the past twenty-five years a great deal has been written about the influence that Protestant Christians on modern sport in England and the United States but very on the relationship between Catholic theological and spiritual traditions and sport. The author suggests that theologians and church leaders are “not paying attention to cultural developments, including those taking place in the realm of sport”. The book makes an excellent effort to redress that balance.
The basis thesis of the book is that, contrary to what many people think, the Catholic church has had a positive attitude to sport for a thousand years or more. Catholics have engaged in play and sport “routinely and without anxiety and incorporated them in their schools as a matter of course”. The view that the material world was good and that the human person was a unity of body and soul was part of what led Catholics to accept play and sport.
The author argues that the Puritan emphasis on work and suspicion of play and the Cartesian dualism of body and soul have had extremely negative effects on the Christian view of sport on the USA. And having worked six days in the week, there was the issue of whether or now it was permissible to play sport on Sunday.
An analysis of the early church writings shows that negative views of sport based on dualism are not supported by early fathers. Irenaeus, Augustine, Dionysus, John of Damascus and John Chrysostom, for example, are quoted in support of this view. The book challenges Sage and Eitzen’s claim that Christianity was built on a foundation of asceticism, suggesting rather, that “Christians in the early church and in the medieval period repeatedly insisted on the importance of the material world and the human body in the Christian life over against views held by Gnostics and Manicheans and others”.
Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1142) is quoted writing positively about entertainments as did William Fitzstephen in the same century describing London as “happy in its observance of Christian practice” and “cheerful in its sports.”
Christians in the medieval period participated in games and sports as a matter of course on the feast days and holy days of the church year and on Sundays. As evidence the author points to depictions of “artists and sculptors of this period and the ordinary churchgoers, games and sports—of both men and women—were not viewed as problematic from a religious point of view. On the contrary, people seemed to understand activities of daily life of this kind to be worthy of a place in the prayer and worship of the community”.
Thomas Aquinas is credited with making a significant contribution to shaping thinking about play. Thomas believed it was possible to sin by having too little play in one’s life. In his Summa Theologica, he posed the question “Whether there can be a virtue about games?,” and answered in the affirmative. For him, it was immoderate to be working all the time. And so play was necessary for a virtuous life.
For Nicholas of Cusa, that human beings are able to invent games and sports was evidence of two powers of the soul, intelligence and freedom, which he saw as having a close relationship to the spiritual dimension of life.
The Jesuits picked up the baton and ran with it – literally perhaps. Having played games and sports during their own training, it was perhaps not surprising that they should introduce them into the schools that they ran. They were also pioneers in Christian sports ethics, objecting to games associated with gambling or superstition. Instructions for sport in a Jesuit run school in California banned the use of any nicknames which were “contrary to charity”. The document gave the following rules: “Avoid all disputing. Contested points are to be settled by the Captains of the teams with the umpire”.
Moving into the modern era, Kelly finds Pope Pius XII ambivalent in his attitude to sport, seeing it as attractive to young people but also as “as an instance of a broader modern preoccupation with the material world that tends to neglect spiritual values”.
It was John Paul II who really gave the momentum to the Catholic engagement with sport. “Pope John Paul II drew on St. Paul’s approach in encouraging Catholics in our own context to pay attention to sport and regard it with respect and esteem. John Paul II also emphasized the importance of working to correct and elevate sport, so that it serves the human person and his or her integral development, including in the area of spirituality”.
This trend has been endorsed by Benedict XVI who saw the value of sport in providing a suitable environment for young people’s human and spiritual growth.”
Examples are given from modern America of Fordham University and Immaculata College where a strong commitment to sport is integrated seamlessly into the religious life of the institution. The successful women’s basketball programme at Immaculata was built on a foundation of prayer - “not to win but to put them under protection.”
Kelly quotes Julia Byrne, who has written the definitive book on Immaculata, to the effect that “the way the sisters thought about basketball and other sports at their school was rooted in a holistic vision of life inspired by the theology of Thomas Aquinas. The sisters themselves were formed in Thomas’s holistic vision during their own theology studies, and they passed it on to their students”.
The Immaculata story is significant as it is a grass roots story of sport and faith. As Byrne says: “We are not used to watching basketball games to shed light on Catholicism.” Kelly adds the comment that there was “very little, if any, reflection on what these sports contests were all about, however, or how they were related to Catholic beliefs or values”.
Having traced the history, Kelly now attempts to draw out some principles for modern sport. He suggests that the play element has largely disappeared from youth sport and that the church cannot sit idly by at let it happen. He writes “An important part of the task of Catholic theologians in the contemporary context is to safeguard the play element in sport and particularly in youth sport”
He picks up Thomas Aquinas’s message of moderation, saying that many of the problems in modern American sport arise from the “lack of moderation around the desire to win” – scandals in recruitment, violations of NCAA rules, drugs etc are among the examples.
Play too can help us worship God better. Thomas Aquinas saw similarities between play and contemplation.
Catholic liturgical theologian Romano Guardini takes it a stage further seeing the liturgy itself is a kind of play with a didactic aim of teaching the soul “not to see purposes everywhere.” On the contrary “The soul must learn to abandon, at least in prayer, the restlessness of purposeful activity; it must learn to waste time for the sake of God, and to be prepared for the sacred game with sayings and thoughts and gestures, without always immediately asking “why?” and “wherefore?” We are to “play the divinely ordained game of the liturgy in liberty and beauty and holy joy before God”.
In 1866, Washington Gladden wrote: “Amusement is therefore as much a part of the divine economy as prayer, and one can glorify God by play, as well as by work or by worship.”
There was much in this book that I had not come across before. The author documents the past painstakingly but more importantly draws from it lessons for the modern age. It is a very significant book which makes a great contribution to out quest for a theology of sport.