Dean's Letter

November 2007
From The Very Reverend David Bird, Ph.D., Dean and Rector

Faith in the Whole of Our Lives

As a child, and to a lesser extent even today, I have tended to read books on sports and sports figures. The closing quotation of a cricketer's autobiography has been one of the driving “texts” of my
life:
"And when the one Great Scorer comes along
To write against your name,
It matters not who one or lost,
But how you played the game."
(The Scorer in cricket is the official who keeps careful account of how
many runs a team has scored in each innings; sometimes as many as four
to six hundred!)

 It seems that the Vatican (the worldwide center of the Roman Catholic
Church) is taking these sentiments very seriously. The Church Times, an
English newspaper, reports that the Roman Catholic Church in Italy has
promised to help find new sponsors for a lower ranking soccer team, AC
Ancona—on condition that they set new standards of sportsmanship.

 AC Ancona has struggled since 2004, when its president was jailed for
accounting fraud. According to The Church Times, “Catholic Action’s
sports arm, the Italian Sports Centre, will offer the team ‘a new
model’ based on strong ethics and a good business sense . . . Players
will have to do mandatory ‘voluntary service’ and accept a limit on
their salaries. The club must ensure more family- friendly games by
outlawing abusive or racist fans and banners, and will have to be open
and transparent about its finances.”

The problem in Italian soccer is serious. Again, according to The
Church Times, “An Italian police investigation into the sport in 2006
exposed game-fixing, fraud, corruption, and illegal betting. Guilty
teams were thrown out or relegated to the minor leagues in what became
known as the ‘soccer-gate scandal’.”

To us in the United States, with our strong sense of the separation of
church and state (should it be religions and state?), this all seems
very incongruous. Indeed the caption to an accompanying cartoon of a
player being banished from the field by a referee brings it home
forcibly: “It was a nasty tackle, but I think excommunication is a bit
harsh.”

 Yet there is a deep spiritual message in both the article and the
underlying premise of the Roman Catholic Church’s potential involvement
in a soccer team: the Christian faith is to permeate the whole of our
lives. It is not a Sunday extra.

 Christianity is not just for our relations with the family, but our
relations with everyone. It is more than a personal relationship with
God. It is about the whole of our lives—even sport.

— David

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