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Pope Sets Up Vatican Sports Department
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Posted:
Tuesday Aug 3, 2004 2:03 PM
VATICAN CITY (AP) -- He made saves
as a soccer goalkeeper during high
 school
in Poland, skied and kayaked in
Europe and swam laps in the papal
pool. Now Pope John Paul II has set
up a sports department to give the
Vatican a kind of new playing field
in its drive to spread Christian
values around the world.
The Vatican announced the initiative
Tuesday, pointing to the millions of
people who will follow this month's
Athens Olympics as proof of the
important role sports plays in
today's world.
"The Holy Father has always been
interested in sports, and as a means
of evangelization and a great way to
form youth,'' said the Rev. Kevin
Lixey, an American priest involved
in establishing the department in
the Pontifical Council for Lay
People.
With doping scandals and fan
violence marring cycling, soccer and
other sports, the pope's initiative
is aimed in part at countering
negative images, said Lixey, a
member of the Legionaries of Christ,
a conservative religious institute
with headquarters in Rome.
There is a need to "let people know
that there are sportsmen who are
also virtuous,'' Lixey said by
telephone.
While the 84-year-old pope has given
Roman Catholics a record number of
saints as fresh role models, the
sports initiative will see the
Vatican promoting what it calls
"testimony of Christian life'' from
the sporting world.
"The church, which has always shown
particular attention to various and
important sectors of human
coexistence, is called upon without
doubt to pay attention to sports,
which certainly can be considered
one of the nerve centers of
contemporary culture and one of the
frontiers for new evangelization,''
the Vatican said.
However, the Vatican said that
"tendencies that have distanced more
and more the practice of various
disciplines from the original ideals
of sports pose with urgency the need
to appeal to fundamental values in
this field.''
The Vatican didn't say what
disturbed it, but stadium violence,
athletes' failing drug tests and
game-fixing inquiries have grabbed
many sports headlines recently.
John Paul wants to make "the Holy
See's solicitude felt in the world
of sports,'' the Vatican said.
The pontiff has given the weeks-old
department its marching orders.
Among the directives, the Vatican
said, is fostering a "sports culture
which promotes a vision of sports
activity as a means of integral
personal growth and as an instrument
in the service of peace and
brotherhood among peoples.''
Lixey said the Church and Sports
department was in its fledgling
stages, but he indicated it would
have a broad sweep, ranging from
contacts with institutions like the
international soccer federation and
Olympic committees to local
parishes.
Many Catholic schools and parish
worldwide long have had teams and
playing fields for young faithful,
but the pope's initiative is aimed
at imbuing such efforts with a more
formal purpose, Lixey indicated.
Sports have played a prominent part
in many of the public activities of
the pope, who early in his papacy
was dubbed "God's athlete'' in the
media. Two summers ago, he gave his
blessing to Real Madrid, the Spanish
soccer power, when the players paid
a call on the papal vacation
residence in Castel Gandolfo.
During the church's Holy Year in
2000 to mark the new millennium,
John Paul celebrated Mass in Rome's
Olympic Stadium for the world of
sports and presided over an
unprecedented all-star soccer game.
Those who thought Krakow's bishop,
Karol Wojtyla, might renounce
athletic passions when he was
elected pope in 1978 were wrong.
Until hip and knee problems that
developed in the last decade and the
onset of Parkinson's disease slowed
him, John Paul would set out on long
mountain excursions during summer
vacations in the Alps. In his first
years as pope, he occasionally
slipped away from the Vatican to ski
in the Appennines of central Italy.
Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All
rights reserved.
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