Update on Football fever

The seminary Redemptoris Mater won the first annual Clericus Cup, an amateur soccer tournament featuring 16 teams with 311 seminarians from 50 different countries. The champions knocked the Pontifical North American College's Martyrs out in the playoffs, Catholic News Service reported.

Last winter Cardinal Tarcisco Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, boasted that the Vatican could put together a team on par with professional European teams. But instead, he proposed the tournament between seminaries as a way to show soccer's positive values amidst the game-fixing scandals and fan violence of professional soccer in Italy.

"Wherever the church lacks a presence...that environment becomes impoverished" of values and ethics, said Father Claudio Paganini, pastoral adviser to the Italian Sports Center, which put on the event in view of St. Peter's cupola. Recalling a time when village priests would gather kids for games, he also said that seminarians don't realize that sports can be a valuable too for evangelizing youth. "As priest, we have to return to being among the people," he said.

(In June's Catholic Tastes section, I reported that the tournament would conclude this month, but it actually concluded in late May.)