Scholar Q&A: Rev. Patrick Kelly, S.J., Ph.D.

The World Cup is here and much of the world’s attention is focused on Qatar, which has attracted 1.5 million travelers and billions of viewers from across the globe. To be sure, this edition of the World Cup has been mired in controversy and faced intense scrutiny, with the Middle East nation’s human rights record, treatment of migrant workers and the LGBTQ community, and allegations of widespread corruption receiving as much attention in the news as the results in the stadiums.

Yet for many, the highly-anticipated competition is an opportunity to put the globe’s most popular sport on a pedestal.

This year’s tournament, being held for the first time in the Middle East and in the late fall, is mostly taking place during Advent, the start of Christianity’s liturgical calendar and one of the holiest periods of the year.

Pope Francis — an avid fan of the beautiful game — sent his greetings to World Cup spectators and participants, writing in a tweet: “May this important event be an occasion for encounter, fostering fraternity and peace among peoples.”

The pope is an outspoken promoter of sports and athletic activity among the globe’s 1.3 billion Catholics. Vatican City has long had a national soccer squad and, this year, sent a road cyclist to the sport’s World Championships.

IACS discussed the intersection of sports and Catholicism with Rev. Patrick Kelly, S.J., Ph.D., an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Detroit Mercy, who frequently writes and lectures about sports, theology and spirituality. His books include “Catholic Perspectives on Sports: From Medieval to Modern Times“ (Paulist Press, 2012) and the forthcoming “Play, Sport, and Spirit” (Paulist Press, 2023). He teaches courses on sports, theology and spirituality.

IACS: How did you get involved in working in the area of sports and spirituality?

Rev. Kelly: I always enjoyed sports when I was young. I used to play basketball and football for hours on end at the school yard and then later on teams at my Catholic grade school and high school. I also played free safety and returned punts at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. I made many friends while playing, some of whom are close friends to this day.

After having some important experiences while in college and wanting to learn more about my Catholic faith, I thought for some time in my twenties that I should “put behind me childish things” as St. Paul says. That is, I thought that perhaps I should leave behind my life in sports. But this didn’t work for me. I had been too profoundly shaped by my participation in sports, both for good and for ill, and this human formation was impacting my attempts to live the Christian life in my twenties. When I made the Spiritual Exercises retreat as a Jesuit novice I was invited to pray over how God has been present in the whole of my life, and this brought me back into touch with my experiences participating in sports when I was younger. As the retreat continued, there even seemed to be an invitation to walk with others with respect to this domain of culture. Since then, most of my assignments in the Jesuits have involved working in relation to this area of culture in one way or another.

IACS: How did these developments impact your academic pursuits?

Rev. Kelly: Rather than ‘putting sport behind me’ I began to think about how my own experiences participating in sport were life-giving, related to my personal growth and even opened out onto transcendence or were diminishing, leading to desolation with respect to the meaning of life. Eventually, I began to explore these kinds of questions with the help of various academic disciplines. I found the flow theory of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi particularly helpful in understanding how play and sport could be enjoyable and also lead to personal growth and self-transcendence. Some of the elements of a flow experience, such as centering of attention, egolessness, effortlessness preceded by discipline, and union with one’s surroundings, are also evident in descriptions of religious and spiritual experiences in many traditions. I am very grateful to have done my doctoral studies with “Mike.”  He was a very important mentor, colleague and friend to me until his death last year.

The more general question that I came to my doctoral studies with was “What would a Catholic ‘take’ on sport as an aspect of culture be?” At that point, scholars had written a fair amount about Protestant engagement with modern sport, including muscular Christianity in England and the U.S., and the influence of evangelical Christians and of the Protestant work ethic on sport and recreation. But neither religious scholars or theologians had paid much attention to Catholic engagement with sport. In my dissertation I looked at what Catholics had done in this area of culture, such as playing games and sports on feast days during the high and later medieval periods, and incorporating them into the humanist and early Jesuit schools and then later in Catholic schools in the U.S. Then I considered how what Catholics were doing was related to how they understood the human person and the Christian life.

IACS: Historically, what role has sports played in the lives of Catholics? 

Rev. Kelly: A common narrative in the writing of the history of sport characterizes Christian attitudes to body prior to the Reformation in thoroughly negative terms. And therefore, the reasoning goes, play and sport were not encouraged in these earlier periods and not much of importance was happening. The problem is that this cannot account for what we now know — due in large part to the emergence of ‘social history’—about the daily lives of ordinary people in the high and later medieval and early modern periods. We know that lay Catholics played games and sports on feast days and on Sundays. There could be as many as 130 feast days per year (depending on the time period and region) which meant they were playing sports an awful lot. These sports were also depicted at times in religious art and in prayer books.

The Renaissance humanists and early Jesuits also made time and space available for play and sport in their schools. So this presented a different question: How is it that a religious culture emerged in which play and sport were so easily and naturally accepted?

The first point to make is that the characterization of Christians as having a thoroughly negative view of the material world and the body is an exaggeration, at the very least. The most consequential and public controversies in the early Church and medieval period had to do precisely with how to understand the material world and the human body. And prominent Christian theologians such as Irenaeus, Augustine, John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas criticized the Gnostics and Manicheans for their view that the material world was somehow the result of a ‘fall’ and so linked with evil. As well as for their dualistic understanding of the spiritual journey, which involved extricating oneself from the material world and the human body. Irenaeus and the others insisted repeatedly that the material world is good as created by God (see Gen. 1) and that the human person is a unity of body, soul and spirit, as St. Paul put it. This sensibility led to the emergence of a religious culture with embodied practices, such as processions, pilgrimages, dramas, praying with statues and art, use of incense, water, fire, ashes, bread, wine and oil.

St. Paul played an important role in a positive sense with regard to Christian attitudes toward sport. A Greek-speaking Jew, he used analogies and metaphors drawn from sports to explain the Christian faith to Greeks. Such analogies or metaphors presupposed a ‘through line’ between experiences of participating in sport and the dynamics of Christian life. Christian writers also used athletic imagery when writing about the early Christian martyrs and the dynamics of monastic life. The scriptural precedent provided by St. Paul made it easier for Christians in later centuries to accept the ball games and other sports of cultures that were converting to Christianity. As one historian put it, the approach of Christians was not to reject these customs, but to “baptize” them by having them played on feast days.

In the 13^th century Thomas Aquinas played an important role in providing a theological justification for playing games on feast days. In his Summa, he asked: “Whether there can be a virtue about games?” His answer: Yes. This is because, he said, virtue has to do with moderation. So a person shouldn’t be working or thinking about work all the time. A fully human life also needs time for play and recreation. Indeed, for Aquinas it could be sinful to have too little play in one’s life. He also thought that play was similar to contemplation, because both were enjoyable and done for their own sake. While play was not engaged in for an external end such as money or fame, the enjoyment in play was directed to the “good of the player” in that it provided him with pleasure and relaxation.

Aquinas’“play ethic” had a very significant influence on preachers in the later medieval period when this question of how to spend time on feast days would come up. His thinking also influenced the way the humanists and early Jesuits set up the schedule for their schools in the Renaissance. Studying too long would be excessive, they said, and so they set aside time and spaces for the students to also play sports during the school day.  In Jesuit schools, the students would also walk with the scholastics (Jesuits in training) to the Jesuit villa in the countryside to play games and sports on free days.

IACS: Sports play an important role in campus life at many American universities. When Jesuits and other Catholics were first establishing schools and universities, did athletics have a place in the curriculum? 

Rev. Kelly: Yes, this was very clear from the documents in the archives at Jesuit universities and others such as Notre Dame and Villanova. It’s interesting that Catholics did not have the same anxiety about play that many of our Protestant brothers and sisters did in the nineteenth century. Protestants were working with a different heritage. Early in our country’s history the Puritans had eliminated all feast days, on which Europeans had played sports for centuries. Their  association of godliness with work and emphasis on human sinfulness led to a new level of suspicion of play. Games and sports did not have a significant place at Harvard or other colleges in the early years of their existence.  Prominent Protestant ministers in the nineteenth century were critical of how this heritage had led to excessive work in the U.S. and argued for the need for play in the culture. This is what opened the door again to play and sports. Whereas in the Catholic and Jesuit schools there was more of a continuity with the medieval and Renaissance cultural and theological/ethical traditions I mentioned earlier. In the student newspapers of the nineteenth century one can find very entertaining accounts of “Field Day” games and other sports, where the joy and exuberance of the students are very evident. 

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholic schools began participating in interscholastic and intercollegiate competitions. In a context where Catholics often didn’t feel real welcome in American society in general, they viewed success in sporting competitions as a way of establishing themselves as competent, strong and smart as the Protestant majority. And they had a good deal of success in this regard at Catholic high schools and colleges around the country. At times, Catholic-public school contests garnered considerable interest. According to Gerald Gems, in the early part of the twentieth century the Chicago Prep Bowl football game between Catholic and public school league champions could bring out as many as 100,000 fans.

However, in the process Catholics seem to have lost touch with the earlier traditions I have been describing. And yet, I think the earlier traditions have relevance for our culture and sport today. To take one example, the play element is disappearing from youth sport in our time. This is happening as it becomes increasingly common for young people, their parents and coaches to view participation in sport as a means to a college scholarship or elite career. Many children specialize in one sport and train year-round, which is leading to an alarming number of overuse injuries and burnout. Other young people who aren’t interested in a sports scholarship or career are dropping out of sport in record numbers by age 13, and the top reason they give is it is no longer fun. The play ethic described earlier emphasizes enjoyment and doing something for its own sake, and the end has to do with the well-being and growth of the young person. Youth sport could benefit from drawing on this heritage in our time.

Secondly, mind-body dualism (whether of Cartesian origins or newer versions) is very much present in our culture. It is seen in our institutions of higher education, where university presidents and others often struggle to explain how the academic and athletic parts of the university are meaningfully related to one another.  We ask our students to think about all sorts of important topics in the classroom, but it would be very rare to ask them to think about all the time they are spending playing sports on behalf of the university.  In the earlier traditions I was describing, the person is understood as a unity. This means that when engaged in an embodied activity such as sport, the young person’s mind and spirit are affected as well, for good or for ill.  In a positive sense in the context of playing they can arrive at new insights about themselves and how they are related to others, and even about the meaning of their lives. The person’s “spirit” is affected too. Most spiritual traditions would recognize this dimension of a human being which relates a person to the transcendent (for Christians, it makes them capable of relationship with the Holy Spirit).  This understanding of the person as a unity provides a basis for understanding how sports can be understood as part of the education of the whole person, which is sorely needed in our time. 

IACS: Pope Francis is notably a fan of soccer. What has he said about sports and their importance?

Rev. Kelly: The extent of his engagement with what the Vatican offices have been doing with respect to sport is noteworthy. Pope Francis attended and gave substantive talks at two international Vatican conferences on sport, one in 2016 and a recent Summit this fall. He also wrote an introduction for the first ever book length Vatican document about sport “Giving the Best of Yourself: A Document on the Christian perspective on sport and the human person”  (June, 2018). He has met with many sporting groups and has given many other talks about sport, in particular in the context of education.

I think his engagement with sport is a concrete expression of his more general way of understanding the Church. At the General Congregation before the papal conclave in 2013, then Cardinal Bergoglio shared with the other cardinals that he was praying with the passage from the Book of Revelation, where Jesus says “I stand at the door and knock.”  He said that usually we consider this passage with respect to allowing Jesus to enter into our hearts. But he imagined Jesus standing inside the church, knocking on the door wanting to get out into the world so he could be with people as they live their lives, with their hopes and dreams, fears and anxieties. If you wanted to walk with people as they are actually living their lives, accompanying them in their experiences in sport is one good way to do that.

With regard to the content of what he has said, he continues some of the key themes of his predecessors. He emphasizes the dignity of the human person as the starting point and criterion for evaluating sport practices and policies. And that the person doesn’t exist to serve sport, but that sport should serve the person in his or her integral (i.e. holistic) development. When sport is viewed only in economic or commercial terms, it corrupts it as it moves it away from these human ends. He also speaks of sport as a way of fostering the common good and the unity of the human family. His own emphasis on building a “culture of encounter” and on interreligious dialogue shapes how he speaks about these themes. His style at times is informal, and he speaks colloquially about his own experiences in sport or as a fan. He emphasizes the play character of sport more than most of his predecessors, and is implicitly following Aquinas in understanding play as having its end in “the good of the player.” As he put it in a recent Vatican Summit: “The reality of play is fundamental, especially for the very young: it gives joy, fosters sociability and engenders friendships, while also being formative.”

IACS: You just returned from the Vatican Summit in Rome titled “Sport for All: Cohesive, Accessible and Tailored to Each Person.” Can you tell us about that?

Rev. Kelly: The timing of the conference was significant. It was held as we are (perhaps slowly) coming out of a global pandemic which has been a context for many people to reflect in a new way on the meaning of their lives and their relationship to work. For some, it has been a time of making changes so they can live in a way that is more consistent with their own values or who they feel God is calling them to be.

A Declaration that was signed by all participants in the presence of Pope Francis encourages athletes, coaches, sport institutions and others to play their part in an era of renewed responsibility. The Declaration expresses concern about the excesses that accompany sport when it is purely performance and profit-driven.

It is in the context of such excesses that a chasm has developed in many parts of the world between elite and more popular or grass roots sport. And the call for “cohesion” is a call for a ‘unitary’ vision of sport that allows professional athletes, intramural basketball players, children playing soccer, special Olympians and others to recognize one another as fellow participants in a common human endeavor.

This unitary vision of sport and recognition of its internal goods opens out onto a call in the Declaration to make sport accessible to all who wish to participate. Barriers to participation need to be removed, and sport should be tailored and adapted to persons and situations so they can enjoy developing their talents in a way that fosters their health and well-being.

Several speakers spoke about the important role sport has played and can play in societies. They emphasized that global challenges such as the pandemic and climate change require solidarity of purpose and cohesion in societies and our world. And yet these are unusually unstable times of social conflict, wealth inequality and wars, with record numbers of persons forced to flee their own countries.

Solidarity was a theme that many other speakers also expressed. It was the basis for the emphases on making sport accessible to all and tailored to the particular reality of each situation and person.

IACS: What was your role at the summit and what was the experience like?

Rev. Kelly: I was part of an international group that worked for a year to draft the Declaration that was signed. And then at the Summit itself I chaired a session entitled “Accessible.” I introduced the theme for a few minutes and then had the honor of introducing Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

He gave a passionate talk about the extent of the refugee crisis and the plight of refugees in our time. He also spoke about how, in addition to providing the basic things refugees need, it is important to provide them with the opportunity for social and cultural experiences. He emphasized how playing sports can help to provide refugees with an experience of belonging, at a time when they have had to flee their own country and everything they knew.  Playing sports they enjoy and are familiar with also puts them back in touch with ordinary life and helps them temporarily to let go of the uncertainty and anxiety that characterize so much of their lives.