You're reading: Pope’s Olympic message credits the power of sports

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI says he is praying that the London Olympics promote world peace and friendship — a message the Vatican is increasingly emphasizing as it focuses renewed attention on the positive role that sports can play in society.

But while the message Sunday may be
new, sports have long been a mainstay for the Vatican. The first
soccer game was played in the Apostolic Palace in 1521 and every year
the Swiss Guards face off against the staff of the Vatican Museums in
a tournament.

A new movie — “100 Meters From
Paradise” — about a fictitious Vatican team at the London
Games won a rave review in the Vatican newspaper, but the prospects
of the world’s tiniest sovereign state actually fielding an Olympic
squad are slim.

Oh sure, athletes abound among the
Vatican’s clerics and cardinals: Pope John Paul II was an avid skier,
and Benedict’s personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein has been
known to play a mean game of tennis. The late head of the Vatican
bank, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, took to the links at a Rome golf
club and, in ancient times, many popes were accomplished game
hunters.

Even Vatican guests have shown their
athletic prowess. When foreign diplomats took refuge inside Vatican
City during the World War II-era German occupation of Rome, the
Chinese ambassador to the Holy See practiced his golf swing in the
Vatican gardens, according to photographs in a new book “The
Ears of the Vatican” by longtime Vatican reporter Bruno
Bartoloni.

“Sports have always been
appreciated in the Christian tradition,” said Giovanni Maria
Vian, editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which has
given ample space to Benedict’s renewed message about the good that
sports can bring to society.

He said competitive spirit, physical
fitness and personal achievement are all “positive values”
that the church has emphasized from its beginning.

Just last month, the Vatican’s culture
office opened a new “Culture and Sport” department, saying
the sporting world was in need of a “cathartic” change to
fight from spiraling into a profession dominated by money and drugs.

“Sports has to find its cultural
aspect again, its profound spirit, and again be the educational
reference point for young people,” the Vatican’s sports czar,
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, said at the launch of the new office,
which has a counterpart in the Vatican department for laity.

Benedict himself launched the
London-based John Paul II Foundation for Sport during his 2010 visit
to Britain, creating a charity that aims to “build spiritual
character through excellence in sporting skills and fitness.”
When the CEO of the charity, Monsignor Vladimir Felzman, formally
introduced it a year later, he delivered his speech on the
interconnectedness of physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual
growth while doing 75 pushups.

“If you work at things, you
gradually acquire,” Felzman said of his own improved fitness.
“Virtues are the same. You start by being impatient, but you
learn patience.”

The 85-year-old pope is more scholar
than sportsman, but he is keen to pass the message along.

For the recent European Championships
in Ukraine and Poland, he called for letting the competitive spirit
take the place of antagonism, and how team sports in particular can
help subdue natural tendencies towards individualism and egoism for
the greater good of the whole.

On Sunday, his message was broader and
aimed at all Olympic athletes, taking into account that the games are
beginning as civil war is raging in Syria and as the United States
copes with another outburst of deadly gun violence.

“In a few days from now, the
Olympic Games are due to begin in Great Britain,” he said from
the papal summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo. “The Olympics are
the greatest sporting event in the world, where athletes from any
countries participate, giving it a strong symbolic value.”

He said he was praying that, in the
spirit of the U.N. call for a truce in all countries during the July
27-Aug. 12 games, the “good will generated by this international
sporting event may bear fruit, promoting peace and reconciliation
throughout the world.”