Benedict XVI was also a Sport Thinker

Was Joseph Ratzinger a "sports thinker"? Many have focused on these days external hints of the link between the pope emeritus who passed away on December 31st and sport, from his support for Bayern Munich, the "national team" of every Bavarian of which Ratzinger was also an honorary member, to the numerous public meetings with athletes and champions organized during his pontificate. Some more cultured voices also recalled the short and very interesting ones theological-sporting reflections written in 1985 on the eve of the Mexican World Cupto which we will return.

Of course, at first glance, Benedict XVI's training and life path are as remotely imaginable from the paths of athletic life: austere libraries and the task of thinking about the relationship with the divine before, the secret Vatican rooms and the difficult task of governing the Christian flock towards the announcement of salvation after. Nothing to do with the sounds and noises of playgrounds and gymnasiums, with the need not to think too much, or not to think full stop, required of competing athletes, on pain of failure in one's performance, or with a social role, that of sport, which has no transcendence to indicate, but on the contrary emotions - sometimes almost animalistic in their elementary nature - to excite and unleash at a continuous pace.

Distant worlds even on the occasion of unheard-of closeness, as in the summer retreats of the then German cardinal in the South Tyrolean valleys from which the maternal branch of his family came, where it is possible to imagine him immersed in his theological and philosophical readings at the abbey of Novacella, with the footballers of Serie A retreat to sweat a few kilometers away. However there is a profound reason for the link between Benedict XVI, Catholic theology and sportwhich moves along three directions that we will briefly try to analyze.

The first concerns the universality. No item owns today anymore attractive appeal and universal power of sport, in particular its two great expressions, the World Cup and the Summer Olympics, forged by the French aristocratic spirit of the De Coubertins and Rimets. There is no Christian timbre at the origin of these great events, but a very strong commonality with the horizons of Catholicism testified by the etymological sense of the term "catholic", which precisely means universal. Although marked by different aims and purposes, Catholic thought cannot ignore such a strong unitary sharing. It is no coincidence that Ratzinger's reflections mentioned above were conceived in the run-up to the 1986 Mexican World Cup, and it is no coincidence again that during the twentieth century the umbilical link between the popes and sport, the subject of meticulous precious essay by Antonella Stelitano, was constructed above all in the vicinity of the great planetary events mentioned above, and from this perspective there cannot fail to be a stronger symbolic value than the fact that Rome, the most universal of cities in relation to political, juridical and spiritual people who have inhabited it, including those of Christianity, has hosted both events in question. For this reason the evocation of the bread and circuses made by Ratzinger in his thoughts on sport is full of sympathy, and manifests an acknowledgment of the anthropological need to attend races and competitions totally devoid of the negative meaning Juvenal's saying has always been associated with.

The second direction concerns the personalism. The importance this current had in the youthful formation of Ratzinger's theological thought is known, with the attention placed on the personal call of God capable of crossing the existence of the faithful by shaking and engaging his interiority and practical acts. A faith made not only of concepts, but first and foremost of people who believe. Let's take a new leap to the ranking of Sports Thinkers: where did the dialogue that took place last spring at the Vatican Apostolic Library between Cardinal José Tolentino and José Mourinho, at the basis of their joint nomination, begin? From a reference to the "sporting personalism" of the Portuguese philosopher Manuel Sergio, an important figure for both dialoguers, and from an illuminating thought of his: there are no shots, but people who shoot. Just to give an example, Messi is a person, not an ethereal entity placed above human affairs, a media or statistical simulacrum. And woe to think that in sport everything is resolved in the exteriority of bodies prepared for the effort to excite crowds of people, interiority also belongs to the athletic realm and is a decisive component of it, because every champion has a heart crossed and agitated by doubts, hopes, torments, fears, frustrations. For this reason every athlete who prepares for competitions and awaits their always uncertain results, even if he is not a believer, is related to prayer, to the very human invocation for help, protection and comfort.

Obviously the objectives diverge, Christian personalism is devoted to transcendence and the conquest of a victory over death called eternal salvation, which is not obtained alone but by divine grace and by faith in divine grace, dimensions irreducible to every sporting measure, to every periodization of training, to every match analysiswith every stroke of luck or talent. But this attention to people is an important meeting ground between the two worlds, in the wake of the first great meeting, the numerous sports metaphors used by St. Paul, in the historical-philological sense of the stratagems of a seasoned politician, in terms of sports theology one of the few testimonies of the ancient world that speaks to us not of the outcome of the competitions - the victories and their reification by means of statues or songs - but of the spiritual path that precedes them, the medicine of fatigue, the inner discipline, the effort of will. Christian thought in modernity has always praised human dignity and the ethical depth of being an athlete like no other European cultural traditionwithout snobbery and negative prejudices, and these are aspects that recur insistently in the various interventions of Benedict XVI on sport.

The last direction is the one opened by Ratzinger's reference to football as “being disciplined together”, great lesson (extendable to all team sports) on winning through relationships and not through selfishness, and it is no coincidence that St. Paul spoke of Christians as athletes capable of "fighting together". Herein lies the stumbling block. Can competitive sports really be reconciled without problems with the horizon of Christianity? Although Christian thought welcomes the universal capacity of sport and its strong ethical imprint, it cannot in fact accept its main founding truth. The secret of champions is humility, or rather an immoderate, idolatrous, obsessed and hallucinated ambition, of which humility, when uttered verbally, is almost always only an instrumental cover, or, in team sports, an imposition required by the rules of the game? In the days of Benedict XVI's farewell, the world comments and discusses the news of the billion euros accepted by Cristiano Ronaldo to bring his talents to the Persian Gulf.

It would be very simple to dismiss this fact as a diabolical seduction of the individualistic materialism of the modernsfrom which sport, with its ethical and personal wealth analyzed above, should try to stay away. It's a superficial read, since Cristiano Ronaldo with the wealth already accumulated in his twenty-year career has satisfied all personal material needs, and at least twenty generations of his descendants. The true sign of the mega-contract is rather the fulfillment of another desire, not material but very spiritual, that of being recognized as the first, the best, the strongest and therefore the most envied, status sanctioned in this case by the possibility of appearing in front of everyone in a rankingthat of the highest paid athletes ever, which includes sportsmen of all ages and disciplines.

The Portuguese footballer with his egolatric conceit it is not betraying the values ​​of sport, it is manifesting them in its essence, which even in modernity remains that of Homeric competitive spirit, purified by physical violence, but added with pridebecause while every Greek hero knew he couldn't become too strong, so as not to irritate the gods and risk their punishment, today the will can spread without brakes.