"Football is not a matter of life and death, it is more important than that."
Catholics and Sport
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An Historical and Theological Overview and Contemporary Implications, Patrick Kelly, SJ, Seattle University
This unpublished paper was circulated by the Vatican Pontifical Council for the Laity, Church and Sport section, December 2014
Patrick Kelly is well known in this field as author of Catholic perspectives on sports (2012). In this paper he argues that “The Catholic heritage is distinctive in its acceptance of play and tendency to take it seriously intellectually and even to understand it in relation to the spiritual life”.
He refers to how medieval Christians engaged in a variety of bodily activities as part of their spiritual lives, thereby challenging any suggestion of a dualism between the physical and the spiritual. He challenges some of the stereotypes: “Contrary to a recurring narrative in the writing of the history of sport, Christians prior to the Reformation did not have an unremittingly negative attitude toward the body. On the contrary they emphasized the goodness of the material world as it had been created by God and that the body was constitutive of human personhood”.
He suggests that the early Jesuits drew inspiration for their own schools from ancient Greek schools, in which physical exercises and sports went hand in hand with intellectual exercises.
He sees the apostle Paul’s – and early Christian writers like Ignatius’s references to sport as a consequence of the gospel being preached to the Gentiles, which need to a need for an evaluation of the faith “in dialogue with, and sometimes in opposition to, Greek philosophical thought” adding “The opening of the church to the Greeks also provided a precedent for accepting the customs and other aspects of non-Christian cultures into the life of the faith community”.
He cites the example of John Cassian in the fourth century, not only using athletic imagery in his writings about the monastic life but arguing that it was important for Christians to understand the games in order to interpret Paul’s references to them.
Kelly quotes Thomas Aquinas who cautions that the enjoyment of play should not be sought in ways that are harmful to persons, or indecent. Also, one needs to take into account the persons, time and place Thomas also wrote that it was possible to sin by having a lack of play in one’s life. He contrasts Thomas’s view that “playing has no purpose beyond itself; what we do in play is done for its own sake” with the modern” tendency for sport to be viewed merely instrumentally”.
This short paper raises a number of useful and challenging ideas.