The Rev. Gregory Carlson, SJ, associate professor of classics and the spiritual exercises, and assistant director of the Deglman Center for Ignatian Spirituality, attended the Sport in Service to Humanity Conference at Georgetown University from Nov. 6-8.
Background:
Several years ago, Pope Francis wrote a document on sport, “Giving the Best of Yourself: About the Christian Perspective on Sport and the Human Person.” Its key line is “challenge yourself in the game of life like you are in the game of sports.” The pope sent our gathering a personal message encouraging our discussions and reflections. Under Pope Francis, the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture instigated the first SSH conference in Rome in 2016, followed by conferences at Villanova and Loyola Marymount in the following years. This is the fourth year.
Fr. Carlson’s key takeaways from the conference
- Playing real sports is more important – and perhaps more threatened – than ever as a basic human experience in growing up. The papacy is not alone in extolling its basic lessons of persistence, teamwork, inspiration, and enjoyment. Playing sports is endangered by the monetarization of sports, e-sports, computer games, parents’ hopes of having a high-earning star in their child, and frequent limitation of children to specialization in just one sport.
- If the picture from the bottom is important but threatened, the pressure from the top is inexorably pushing down. Professional sports are no longer about a temporary escape from harsh realities; they are rather governed by money and have become a mirror-representation of our reality. Sports have taken over many of the functions of religion; some like Michael Novak say that they have become our civil religion. Professional sports – whether seen from the spectator or the player – are not so much about those values lauded by the pope.
- Our Creighton athletes may be caught in the middle, having grown up as players but now working in a world largely governed by money. It is an open secret that large state schools often use athletes and then throw them away. The “Name, Image, and Likeness” movement to pay college and high school athletes makes it clear how much they are caught in the middle. How can we help our student-athletes to enjoy athletics as one part of their integral formation at Creighton?
- One Georgetown student-athlete described being at another prominent non-Jesuit school and being known only as a player in his sport. That was what people there expected him to be or do. He proudly said that his Georgetown experience was different. His being a player in a prominent sport was just one more aspect of who he was, together with classes and other activities. He was proud of that sense of priorities.
Other observations:
- We learned of a number of successful ground-up initiatives, like “DC Scores,” a program of soccer and poetry for kids who otherwise had nothing to do after school. It started with one female soccer player in DC who saw kids loitering after school and started playing with them. It has reached now to over 2500 kids at 56 sites. We heard a magnificent “poetry slam” from a DC Scores alumna. Might this program be something for the SCSJ to advocate for in North Omaha?
- I taught for a year as the holder of the Jesuit Chair at Georgetown some 25 years ago. Georgetown has not only grown physically through a really surprising multiplication of facilities. It has also, I believe, taken up the challenges and opportunities of being our Jesuit university in the capital city. Two good examples are the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, several of whose participants served as panelists and moderators. This is a well funded presidential think tank on issues of the day. What a luxury to have a stable of highly qualified people who can be asked to think and research on important issues, including the place of sport in our lives today. A second example is a popular undergraduate course called the “Prisons and Justice Initiative,” in which students take up the cause of people unjustly incarcerated. We heard a moving account from one such “exoneree” who had been in prison for 27 years. The occasion for highlighting him in our conference is that he became an artist in prison, famous for his drawings of golf courses! Valentino Dixon became known as the “Attica Artist,” and students are justly proud of having secured his release from Attica.
- After the first four sessions in a packed day, we were invited to join a group talking about takeaways from those four sessions. What can we think of doing practically? What is our call to action? I chose the first group: “Reflecting on Sports – and Engaging with Questions of Values.” It is perhaps not surprising that about half of the 15 or so people in the group came from Jesuit schools! The preliminary readout near the end of the conference highlighted starting early to engage kids in sports, making the values we spoke of tangible in the experience of sport itself, and giving athletes at schools time and opportunity to enjoy concrete service. My own focus in the group was, as I stated above, how we can help our college student-athletes deal with the pressures growing out of the commercialization of sports.
- One particular aid in that effort that I want to explore as Fr. Gillick and I deal more and more with athletic coaches at Creighton is the Federation of Christian Athletes. By contrast with Athletes in Action, which has players touring and giving testimony to their Christian faith, FCA works to support coaches’ faith as the best way to support the student-athletes. I look forward to getting more of their material to see how we can us it in our work.
- Joining the Big East put Creighton on the map athletically. People love to come to Omaha. And confreres from Jesuit schools meet very easily with each other. So many people from other institutions — Jesuit and non-Jesuit — speak warmly of their experience of Jesuit education!
