Sports, the Coronavirus and Pope Francis
“Sport is a catalyst for experiences of community, of the human family. . . . We reach great results, in sports as in life, together, as a team.” Pope Francis
A time of pause such as the coronavirus pandemic has brought about can be helpful for reflecting on our own lives individually. But it can also afford us an opportunity to reflect on our life together as Americans.
I realize we each may come up with different insights or conclusions when engaged in such a process. Here are some thoughts that have occurred to me lately.
Generally speaking, we are very good at action and getting things done. Related to this, we excel at individual achievement and innovation. We value excellence and success. We also prize our individual freedoms and rights.
We aren’t as good at reflecting on the meaning of our activities, however. Nor are we very good when it comes to attending to the common good. And we really struggle when dealing with vulnerability or loss.
In this context, it occurred to me that perhaps we could take advantage of this pause in our sports to reflect on their meaning, especially in relation to the common good and attending to vulnerability and loss. I think they have something to teach us that can help us in a broader sense.
The historian Allen Guttmann points out that, given that America has a well deserved reputation for being “individualist,” it is significant that the most popular sports in the country are team sports. He mentions baseball, football and basketball in this regard. I think we can now add soccer to the list.
In the United States, many young people first learn how to be part of a community while playing on teams. For participants and fans, the local high school teams, or the university or professional teams also serve to remind us of place and our connection to other people in our community or region. Pope Francis commented on the way team sports can counter individualism in a talk to the Italian Sports Centre in 2014:
“I also hope you can taste the beauty of teamwork, which is so important in life. No individualism! No to playing for yourselves. In my homeland, when a player does this, we say: ‘This guy wants to devour the ball all by himself!’ No, this is individualism: don’t devour the ball, be team players. To belong to a sports club means to reject every form of selfishness and isolation, it is an opportunity to encounter and be with others, to help one another, to compete in mutual esteem and to grow in brother and sisterhood.”
The new Vatican document about sport “Giving the very best of yourself” discusses the experiences of playing on a team in terms of solidarity. But it points out that solidarity in the Christian sense, “goes beyond the members of one’s own team,” to include one’s opponents and extends to all members of society. According to the document,
“Athletes, especially those who are most renowned, have an unavoidable social responsibility. It is important that they have more and more awareness of their role with respect to solidarity and that this be noticed in society. As Pope Francis put it: ‘You, the players, are exponents of a sports activity, which every weekend brings together so many people in the stadiums and to which social media devotes large spaces. For that reason, you have a special responsibility.’”
Mention is made in the document, in particular, of how “many popular sports have campaigned against racism and have promoted peace, solidarity and inclusion.”
Lee Siegel recently gave one concrete example of how the values learned playing team sports are related to concern for the common good in a wider sense.
“In youth sports, players take a knee when another player is hurt. It is an acknowledgment of the vulnerable humanity that, for the moment, has been obscured by the intense competition of the game. Taking a knee in that context is, like a religious genuflection, a gesture of self-surrender before the greater reality of human suffering.
Likewise, when black players take a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence against African-Americans, they are making a gesture of pain and distress.” (NY Times Sept 25, 2017)
The players who kneel during the national anthem surely learned from playing sports about the importance of playing together and respecting each member of the team. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that that this human formation was a part of what led them to be concerned about every member of our society being treated with dignity and respect. That is, that it was an introduction to the notion of the common good, which has to do with the conditions that allow for each person to reach his or her full potential. The players who initiated the kneeling have also cited their Christian faith and love in this context as central to their motivation.
Rather than rushing to restart our sports, maybe this is an opportunity to pause and reflect on their meaning. It is good to be reminded that we are part of something larger than ourselves and that we are called to care for one another. These values are part of our heritage. As Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop put it: “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and our community as members of the same body.” And according to Martin Luther King Jr., we are all “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
With the coronavirus we are faced with a new and unprecedented challenge. We are being invited to think beyond our own individual life projects about who we are as a people and who we want to be. Whether we are conservative or liberal or Republican or Democrat, we now have a common project. This is undeniable. And we are experiencing vulnerability and loss in unprecedented ways. As of today, 5.3 million Americans have had the coronavirus and 168,696 have died from it.
Pope Francis reflected at his audience last week on the coronavirus pandemic, and his words work well to close out this article:
The pandemic has highlighted how vulnerable and interconnected everyone is. If we do not take care of one another, starting with the least, with those who are most impacted, including creation, we cannot heal the world.
Therefore, let us ask the Lord to give us eyes attentive to our brothers and sisters, especially those who are suffering. As Jesus’s disciples we do not want to be indifferent or individualistic. . . . Indifferent: I look the other way. Individualist: looking out only for one’s own interest. The harmony created by God asks that we look at others, the needs of others, the problems of others, in communion. We want to recognize the human dignity in every person, whatever his or her race, language or condition might be.
Faith always requires that we let ourselves be healed and converted from our individualism, whether personal or collective; party individualism, for example.
May the Lord “restore our sight” so as to rediscover what it means to be members of the human family.
