If I had to choose between my wife and my putter... well, I’d miss her.
The Catholic Ideal
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Exercise and sport, Robert Feeney, Aquinas Press, 2005 ISBN0-9622347-8-8
The book includes 10 chapters including: “The Rosary – the athlete’s prayer”, “Teachings of Pope Pius XII”, “John Paul II, the athlete Pope”. The aim of the book is “to help the reader understand why the Holy Catholic Church so highly values physical exercise and sport”.
The book contains several statements that could have been - and I wish they had been - written by evangelicals, such as: “There is a great need for the sports world to be evangelised and this requires theological reflection on the Christian message as it applies to sporting activity” or the reference to initiatives that “assist in proclaiming the gospel to the world of sport, especially through the fostering of authentic Christian witnesses among professional athletes”.
The book implicitly develops a Catholic (or Christian) theology of sport with statements like:
“The Catholic Church is interested in exercise and sports because the human body is, the temple of the Holy Spirit”. There is a statement that any view of sport must be based on the principle that the dignity of the human person is the goal and criterion of all sporting activity. Pope John Paul II said that sport could be summed up under headings “positive values, sincere fraternity, temple of the spirit, gospel of love”. The book also quotes Cardinal George Pell, Who participated much in sport in his youth, “while others promote winning at any cost, the church teaches the great virtues such as temperance, courage, justice, hope, faith and speaks up for human character that is based upon these qualities”.