{"id":246,"date":"2009-02-02T09:09:18","date_gmt":"2009-02-02T09:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/americas-new-national-pastime.html"},"modified":"2009-02-02T09:09:18","modified_gmt":"2009-02-02T09:09:18","slug":"americas-new-national-pastime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/americas-new-national-pastime.html","title":{"rendered":"America’s new national pastime?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Prayer--or<\/span>I mean football, not Catholic-bashing–though any faithful Catholic should be outraged at this morning’s Super Bowl headlines announcing “Steelers beat Cardinals.” I will look for Bill Donohue’s righteous anger at some point today. (“Would The New York Times<\/em> have allowed a headline saying ‘Steelers beat Rabbis’? Of course not! This is a blatant double-standard. And of course, it’s no surprise that President Obama was rooting against<\/em> the Cardinals….”)
\nMy outrage is more disappointment, as I am a dedicated Giants fan, and not only did the Giants fall flat in the playoffs (and against the Eagles, of all teams), but last night’s game was terrific, every bit as grand as last year’s stunning Giants’ victory. And the Boss’ halftime show<\/a> was the first truly memorable halftime entertainment I can recall–memorable in a good sense, not the “wardrobe malfunction” creativity. He injected at least some Jersey authenticity into the event.
\nBut of course football is a guilty please–so much violence and gladiatorial ferocity. Could anyone whose faith was forged in Roman amphitheaters enjoy this? Over at First Things, Jeffrey Marlett argues in the affirmative<\/a>, more or less, using Sal Paolantonio’s book, How Football Explains <\/em>America, as his entrypoint. Paolantonio makes interesting observations about football’s reflections of American values, and its wholly different and largely unheralded course of racial intergation from that of baseball. Marlett also gets to the religious orientation–and value–of football:<\/p>\n

Originally, football was envisioned as a vehicle for moral improvement. It reflected America’s purported Protestant character and embodied both individual and communitarian values like teamwork, individual effort, manliness, and integrity. But problems arise when violence is glorified instead of merely accepted. Some insist that football canonizes everything wrong in American life. George Will’s quip comes to mind: football combines the two worst features of America–violence interspersed with committee meetings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Will is of course a baseball purist (though not a Catholic) hence his bias. Marlett tries to enlist John Paul’s “culture of life” motif in defense of the sport, but admits misgivings:<\/p>\n

Indeed, religious themes lurk throughout his assessment of American football. The sport offers a compelling, almost mythical scene: two teams, clad in helmets and body armor like medieval knights, engage in a lengthy series of short, intensely violent clashes to control both an object (the ball) and territory. Every autumn, high school boys and college men reenact this battle, but pro football attains levels of spectacle previously reserved for religious or gladiatorial spectacle.
\nUnlike baseball’s long leisurely season, football’s short season offers no second chances. Thus each game possesses its own biblical finality; win and celebrate with tambourine and dance, lose and it’s Lamentations. Autumn Sunday afternoons have become a set of sixteen services where believers, clad in their teams’ color and insignia, often carrying its relics, gather to celebrate their team’s performance and join in the drama of its liturgy.
\nStill, the interweaving of football and religion requires further exploration. George Carlin’s contrast between baseball and football captures something about the nation: “Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall when everything is dying.” Perhaps we need football for the decline of the year, as the days shorten and grow colder, and a slower, pastoral diversion for hot summer days, each game with its own beauty. While football might explain something about America, it might not always fulfill it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nor does it fulfill our religious ideals. So, can one be a football fan and a good Christian? More to the point, is football Catholic? (Vince Lombardi, the Maras, the Rooneys–good company.) Or (Evangelical) Protestant? (All those Jesus-thanking Bible Belt players from The Big Schools.) Is the mediocre state (sorry) of Notre Dame’s program an affirmation of its Catholic identity–or a sign of its wobbly hold on Tradition?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mean football, not Catholic-bashing–though any faithful Catholic should be outraged at this morning’s Super Bowl headlines announcing “Steelers beat Cardinals.” I will look for Bill Donohue’s righteous anger at some point today. (“Would The New York Times have allowed a headline saying ‘Steelers beat Rabbis’? Of course not! This is a blatant double-standard. And…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nAmerica's new national pastime? - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/americas-new-national-pastime.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"America's new national pastime? - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I mean football, not Catholic-bashing–though any faithful Catholic should be outraged at this morning’s Super Bowl headlines announcing “Steelers beat Cardinals.” I will look for Bill Donohue’s righteous anger at some point today. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}