Thu, Oct 24, 2013 page18

• Vatican launches cricket club as sport, faith merge

  • AP, VATICAN CITY
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  The Vatican served tea and cucumber sandwiches on Tuesday as it launched its first cricket club, an initiative aimed at forging ties with teams of other faiths.

  No, Pope Francis is not taking up the sport long associated with manicured grounds and English nobility; the soccer-mad “slum pope” still prefers the lower-brow sport of his beloved CA San Lorenzo de Almagro, but he and the Vatican have long championed sports as good for the mind, body and soul, and the cricket club is the latest initiative of the Vatican’s culture ministry to use sports to engage in dialogue with the contemporary world.

  Australian ambassador to the Holy See John McCarthy was the brainchild behind the initiative and said he hopes that St Peter’s Cricket Club will field a team to play the Church of England at Lord’s sometime next fall.

  

  A player from a team of priests and seminarians plays a shot during a training session at the Maria Mater Ecclesiae’s Catholic College in Rome, Italy, on Tuesday.

  Photo: Reuters

  He said the aim is to boost interfaith dialogue, given cricket’s immense popularity in largely non-Catholic India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It would be a “very special occasion” if seminarians from Rome’s pontifical universities might one day play students at Muslim or Hindu religious schools on the subcontinent, he said.

  The initiative is also aimed at educating Italy, the Vatican and even Pope Francis that “there is some sport other than football,” McCarthy said, before passing around a tray of cucumber sandwiches, a mainstay of cricket events.

  The club is expected to count on some 250 to 300 students and priests at the Vatican, and various pontifical universities around Rome, where cricket is already being played informally — from these individual teams a Vatican side is to be selected and fielded as early as the spring.

  Rome’s Capannelle Cricket Club is letting the Vatican use its pitch and McCarthy said anonymous donors would cover equipment, organizational and other related costs.

  Adam Chadwick, curator of collections at Lord’s in London, which prides itself as the home of the sport, welcomed the initiative and seemed open to a Vatican-Church of England match played on one of its pitches in the upscale St Johns Wood section of the capital.

  In a telephone interview, Chadwick said the image of cricket — of men in white playing on country estates with ideas of chivalry and gentlemanly behavior dictating their play — dates from the Victorian era of the late 19th century, but that cricket’s origins are very different and far more popular.

  “The first mentions that we found in this country are just an ordinary man [playing] when he would have been at church on Sunday — which is a bit ironic, actually,” he said with a laugh.

  Cricket’s enormous appeal in places such as India, once part of the British empire, is actually much more in line with the game’s more popular origins, he said.

  Indeed, in keeping with Pope Francis’ aim for the Catholic Church to reach out to the poorest, the Vatican made it clear that its cricket club was not thinking of English high society, but rather the sport’s appeal with the masses.

  “This represents the desire of the council to be in the peripheries, the outskirts of the world,” said Monsignor Melchor Sanchez de Toca, who runs the sports department in the Vatican’s culture ministry.

  The Vatican already has its Clericus Cup soccer tournament, which pitches the Swiss Guards against seminarians from the North American College and other teams.

  On Sunday, in another sporting initiative, the culture ministry organized a “Race of Faith,” laying down a 100m track along the main boulevard leading to St Peter’s Square to emphasize sports’ positive spiritual and educational values.
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