Vatican Sporting Scene

Published on by D. G. Hart

While Jason is knee-deep in Eucharist studies and Bryan is trying to wrap his mind around Vatican II, officials in Rome are engaged in various competitions. First, a story about cricket as the new evangelism:

The Holy See has plans to finally beat the Church of England at its own game: not in a theological debate, but on the cricket field. The Vatican has a new cricket club that aims to encourage dialogue between cultures, as well as growing virtue among the athletes, both on and off the field.

“The idea was if we start a cricket club, cricket being so popular in the whole of the East, especially in the Indian subcontinent, we could start a dialogue through cricket,” said Father Theodore Mascarenas.
Father Mascarenas is a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture, overseeing the departments for Asia, Africa and Ushuaia (capital city of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina). He is also the new chairman for the Vatican cricket team, called St. Peter’s Cricket Club.

St. Peter’s Cricket Club currently has several different objectives. The first is to organize a tournament among the various colleges in Rome, which, according to a survey done earlier this year, will be able to count on roughly 300 players and supporters from the city.

Eventually, the club hopes to challenge the Church of England to a match and aims in the future to play teams from Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist educational institutions in order to fortify relationships and dialogue with various cultural communities.

Of course, no one would really see much of a contest in theological debates with the Anglicans. What is of interest is the emerging debate between Pope Francis and Archbishop Gerhard Muller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:

Given that Pope Francis has himself spoken of the need to take a new look at the situation of divorced and remarried, and has convened a Synod of Bishops for 2014 to discuss this and other issues, it’s legitimate to wonder where the church is really headed: substantial change or another dead-end debate.

The archbishop makes several important points:

— He underlines that, in his view, this is not simply a pastoral question but a doctrinal issue that involves the church’s theological understanding of the sacrament of marriage. He states categorically that the Orthodox practice of allowing second or third marriages under certain circumstances “cannot be reconciled with God’s will” – which is interesting, considering that Pope Francis himself has referred to the Orthodox practice without explicitly repudiating or endorsing it.

— Muller pointedly rejects the argument that the individual conscience can be the final arbiter on whether a divorced and civilly remarried Catholic can receive Communion. Again, there seems to be a contrast in tone with Pope Francis’ own recent remarks on the duty to follow one’s conscience.

— In what appears to be a remarkably direct response to Pope Francis’ call for “mercy” as the framework for dealing with divorced and remarried Catholics, Archbishop Muller says that “an objectively false appeal to mercy also runs the risk of trivializing the image of God, by implying that God cannot do other than forgive.”

Do Jason and the Callers have an opinion about any of this? Would any of this matter to their projection of Rome as savior from error? Perhaps they are playing a different game.

31 thoughts on “Vatican Sporting Scene”

  1. Ok, never mind the theology or coherence or lack thereof, this is where the uninitiated need to take of their dogma caps and put on their political hats;

    “To gain a better understanding of the Pope’s mind, we sat down recently with German Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Joseph Ratzinger’s successor at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for an extended conversation.

    Müller knows Benedict well. The Pope chose Müller to be the editor of the collected edition of all his writings, his Opera Omnia. The 7th volume of this massive undertaking contains Ratzinger’s writing on the Second Vatican Council (“The Theology of the Council: Texts on the Second Vatican Council” (Theologie des Konzils Texte über das II. Vatikanische Konzil).”

    Muller is at the CDF, Ratzinger is in the abbey, they’re buds by ancestry, mentorship, and appointment(Muller owes Ratzinger, big). Francis’ reform started by replacing administrative posts with his own people, the battle over Vat II interpretation will eventually come down to Francis putting his own guys in at the CDF and collegial levels. He needs to live long enough to do it and Ratzinger needs to die, literally. Always watch out for the pope emeritus ensconced at the abbey with his red dossier and personal secretary serving double duty as Pope Francis’ and being liason between the two. Now, tie that with what you know about Germans anyway, and particularly German bishops and clergy in RC. Francis is smart and he’s making headway in ways Ratzinger never could or would, he’s effectively labeled Ratzinger as part of the problem without actually saying it with his ascetic approach and they both have a distaste for the Italian Curia, but now, how Francis negotiates Ratzinger’s henchmen will be interesting.

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  4. C-dubs, that’s brilliant. Particularly the sisters of mercy vs. the greek orthodox, where not much mercy was being shown.

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  7. Bryan – Here in this post I address this objection briefly first by presenting the relevant Church documents, and then by explaining why there is no contradiction between the doctrines they contain.

    Erik – Can you imagine a post from Bryan where he did find contradiction?

    Pope Francis may severely test him before it’s all said and done, though.

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  8. If the Vatican’s cricket team looks like the Catholic High School football team in Des Moines, all of the best inner-city cricket players will soon be playing for them.

    There is actually an interesting documentary about the Caribbean cricket team that dominated back in the 1980’s.

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  9. Presumably Francis will tell the Archbishop “thanks for sharing”, will say what he wants, and Jason & the Callers will tie themselves in knots reconciling what Francis says to what previous Popes have said. Business as usual, in other words.

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  10. Erik, their whole polemic is silly. It’s drawing circles on a chalkboard which have no relevance or explanatory ability, but it sure is round.

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  12. Wouldn’t it be edifying to have your spiritual life consist of having to constantly interpret and apologize for the words and actions of other men? The job must be kind of like this:

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  14. CD,

    How’s the Obamacare rollout working for ya? As a liberal who loves the welfare state AND as someone with a background in tech consulting (if I remember right) I am wondering what you’re thinking. Will liberal good intentions get that website fixed and defy fundamental laws of economics to make the program a smashing success as liberals are predicting?

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  15. Good luck getting those coveted young, uninsured premium-payers to fill out that paper application and mail it in. First you’ll have to explain the concept of a postage stamp to them.

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  17. Vatican cricket? Thats as wierd as a protestant converting to Rome. Hmmm?

    Everyone knows the Italians can’t play cricket.

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  20. Redeeming “every square inch” now seems to extend to the Cricket Pitch, at least for Rome. Do they pay cricket on Manhattan?

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  21. @Erik —

    How’s the Obamacare rollout working for ya? As a liberal who loves the welfare state AND as someone with a background in tech consulting (if I remember right) I am wondering what you’re thinking. Will liberal good intentions get that website fixed and defy fundamental laws of economics to make the program a smashing success as liberals are predicting?

    What I’m thinking is designing a website not to scale properly is a mistake that others have made, businesses have failed. I can understand how people in HHS who probably never designed a system that needed to scale would have made this mistake. I’m furious they didn’t read the literature or consult with people who had done similar work to avoid it. I think the architects and the IT management at HHS deserve to get fired for this. I think this can be fixed there are some really top people associated with Obama (for example the big data people from Obama for American would never have made these scale mistakes). There are rules about this kind of cross over but now that the President has appointed a Tzar he’s effectively bypassed normal process and so….

    As for the data conversion issues those are more detailed. They can be solved by throwing bodies at the problem. That’s just quantity of labor and testing not really hard or complex work.

    Liberals BTW don’t think this will be a smashing success. My attitude is fairly typical. On a scale from 1-10 American healthcare used to be a 2 under Obamacare it will be a 3. Liberals would much rather do something more like a European system and have had real healthcare reform.

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  22. The real plan always was that ACA would fail and the single payer system – or the total socialization of the medical system – would be touted non stop by the administration, the dims and the media as a solution to the problem. The same will then be implemented with only minimal resistance by the repugs – who are into big guberment, but not mind you, dim big guberment – and we will then all live happily ever after.

    Just remember you heard this soon to be realized conspiracy theory here first.

    IOW bookmark OLTS before you forget.

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  23. Chortles, you far and away have the best link on this pretty wacky webpage of our world wide interweb (when you think about all the views represented (even CD provides an essay for all us to read)). I’m nowhere near coming to finding things like that. My hat’s off!

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  25. CD – . I’m furious they didn’t read the literature or consult with people who had done similar work to avoid it.

    Erik – Yeah, the Atari manual didn’t cut it.

    I’m just pulling your chain. Thanks for the straightforward response, as always.

    We’ll probably end up with single payer, which is a more honest approach. If you want to provide people with free or low-cost health care just provide it and tax people to pay for it. Good luck making the books balance and keeping waiting times reasonable, though.

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  26. @Jack —

    I don’t buy 500m lines of code. That’s an off the record comment by some contractor to the NYTimes. Unless some sort of executable data structure is being considered “code” (Javascript and XML can be languages with homoiconicity so while that practice is uncommon in web programming it isn’t unknown) I don’t believe it. I’d be shocked if a government site is doing better than 20 lines per programmer per day of actual code unless they are wholesale pulling in other stuff which means 500m lines = 2.5m man years of work. They just didn’t have that kind of budget for 2.5k man years much less 2.5m. Something is wrong with those reports.

    ____

    Erik —

    Me might end up with single payer. I kinda like the British model of a public inexpensive system with private add ons as a good model for the USA. Sort of like public and private transportation. I certainly think Obamacare is extra messy because of needing to pretend it is less redistributive than it is.

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  29. CD,

    I don’t know how we got into talking about Obamacare, but how is the British system inexpensive? I mean, it’s generally free at the point of service, but there’s the whole VAT tax plus income taxes plus various other levies that go to pay for it.

    Personally I just wish the government would be more up front (both sides). Democrats, generally, want to extend healthcare to all (not a bad goal, necessarily) but then pretend that we can pay for it just by taxing the fat cats. The Republicans, generally, want to keep the existing Medicare system and pretend that we won’t need higher taxes to pay for it.

    Nobody is honest about the cost.

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  30. @Robert —

    The liberals talk this way because it is true. Let’s take the UK
    UK 9.8% of GDP on healthcare
    USA 17.4% of GDP on healthcare

    At $3287 per person vs. the USA’s $7960 per person. The problem the with USA system is that it is dreadful. For about 1/3rd more than the cost of the best systems in the world (like France’s) we have a system around 40th best; on par with systems that cost about $1k per year per person. We really can restructure American care to provide a better quality of care at a lower cost. We just have to stop with many of the cultural distinctives that make USA care expensive.

    If congress would have just put us on the British system entirely we could have given universal care and given every man, woman and child in the USA a $2500 rebate with the savings. We are doing a fraction of that. So for example one of the expensive things we are doing away with is non-universality of inexpensive preventative medicine. Another one is having a complex billing process. Those sorts of things Obamacare does start to fix and we are starting to see savings, “bending the cost curve” from it already.

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