ASU professors reflect on the pope’s connection to sports and humanity
Pope Leo XIV was elected on May 8 as the first pope from the U.S. iStock photo
On the surface, sports and religion may not seem like they go hand-in-hand, but they do share some similar qualities.
For example, both have devout followers and require significant time commitment.
And while some religious figures denounce sports as a distraction, others — like the late Pope Francis — champion sports and the positive impact that participating can have. His successor, Robert Prevost, an Augustinian friar from the south side of Chicago who chose the name Pope Leo XIV, seems to be no different.
While Francis was a known soccer fan, Pope Leo XIV has also made headlines as a sports fan, seen on social media attending a Chicago White Sox World Series game in 2005 and supporting his alma mater Villanova’s basketball team.
So what does it mean to have a U.S. sports fan as pope, and how might he incorporate humanity’s love for sports into his religious teachings?
ASU News sat down with three faculty members from ASU’s School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies — Terry Shoemaker, associate teaching professor of religious studies; Victoria Jackson, clinical associate professor of history; and Shawn Klein, associate teaching professor of philosophy — to learn more about this connection.
Note: Responses have been edited lightly for length and/or clarity.
Question: What role can sports serve within a religion?
Shoemaker: There’s groups that don’t like it, but there also are (religious) groups that actually will adapt sport for their own needs. For example, a lot of Evangelical churches have basketball leagues as a way of growing membership or witnessing to someone and sharing a religious message. But Pope Francis was a little bit different; he had more of what I call an "integrative approach" — that he sees sports as part of the human experience and that theologically they can be ingrained to help people become better Catholics and more devoted Christians.
Jackson: Sport is a good means through which leaders can tap into shared values that they want to project to the community. So sport is often used as a means of being a connective glue in communities. It's praised for its educational value and its ability to bring in young people.
Klein: Like Victoria said, you know, it’s this connective glue. It's popular; it's, in some ways, the most significant cultural feature of most societies, particularly when you have well-established professional or elite-level sports. Those figures are the figures of the culture, and so it does become this connective glue.
Q: Pope Francis was known for including sports in his messaging. What are some ways sports can reflect religious ideology?
Shoemaker: In 2013, Pope Francis said, "The bond between the church and the world of sports is a beautiful reality that has strengthened over time, for the ecclesial community sees in sports a powerful instrument for the integral growth of the human person."
He’s not saying this is Catholic theology, but if we just want to be good people, we should play sports and we should engage in sports more. Going on, he says, "Engaging in sports, in fact, rouses us to go beyond ourselves and our own self-interest in a healthy way. It trains the spirit and sacrifice, and if it is organized well, it fosters loyalty and interpersonal relationships, friendships and respect for the rules."
Klein: There's something valuable about sports ... right? As a sports fan, I don't watch sport because I think it's a way to connect to the community and express my identity and things like that, all of which I think are true, but at the end of the day, I watch it because it's connected to me. It's a way of living in the world and experiencing the world. I think it has an external value, which is more about what it does for us as opposed to what it means to us in a way that is more internal.
Q: Does a background in sports make the Pope seem more relatable?
Jackson: Well, I would say his predecessor was the most relatable pope that we've had, because he was out among the people. And that was his big push — that the church needed to be with its people more. And Leo represents a continuation of that, and made that clear in his very first comments as pope. So I think sport is just a natural kind of extension of that.
Klein: I do think that does make him more relatable, because one of the things that sport does is it gives people something to talk about. It's like the weather, right? But there's always something to talk about when it comes to sport. And so to have a figure like the pope be interested in sport, it's like, "Oh, OK, that's kind of cool." It's interesting. I mean, obviously it's interesting. People are making memes. It's something that's attracting our attention. And so I do think that it does make them relatable.
Shoemaker: I think (in the U.S.) it probably does something for the game of baseball, right? This game is losing out to the NFL and NBA and maybe even soccer to a certain extent because baseball has had its ups and downs. The argument is that baseball is too slow, no one is interested in it anymore, and now the pope is a baseball fan, so it may ignite some more interest. It almost signals that he is part of an older generation in the U.S. when baseball was more popular.
Baseball is exceptionally popular in Japan and the Caribbean, and there’s so many Latin American and Caribbean players, so that may make the game even more popular. Specifically, Latin America is so Catholic that it may put that game even further on people’s radars as a real game because historically it has been America’s game and not many other people play it.
Q: What impact may Leo’s interest in sports have on the Catholic church?
Jackson: This is a church that's in decline as far as its membership. The Church is growing in Africa and Asia. But gosh, I listened to an interview saying that for every eight Catholics who leave the Church, only one joins or something like that. So I think there's institutions that are anxious about their their future, and if they're not on a growth trajectory are oftentimes less inclined to cling to old ways of thinking about how to present that institution and are going to be more more open to innovate and embrace kind of anything that gets eyes on it to a certain degree.
Shoemaker: I think we are at kind of a "hurry up and wait" kind of moment with this topic, right? As the new pope settles in, he has probably a lot of orientation and things that he's doing just to get settled, and then he's got to figure out what's his agenda and what's he going to focus on. And so I think it remains to be seen exactly how his personal fandom may influence something. But then, will he kind of follow in the footsteps of Francis and actually talk ideologically more about the theological value, the humanistic value, the social value of sport for people across the globe?
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