What Has Rome to Do With FIFA?
Discovering The Catholic Roots of The FIFA World Cup
Tertullian once posed the question, “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?” While his question was raised in relation to the faith-reason debate of his time, I now ask in similar fashion a question that relates to the faith-culture arena of our time: what does Rome have to do with FIFA? We approach Christmas day, and the FIFA World Cup is currently underway. The nations of the world have been fighting it out in dramatic fashion and the remaining teams strive to honor and glorify their country by attaining the renowned cup. I want to take a step back in time, however, to a different fight between nations, that is, the First World War.
It was not long after the beginning of World War I, in December of 1914, that a wonderful event occurred. In short, it was on that Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that warring nations—primarily Germany and England, and the French to a lesser degree—came together peacefully on no-man’s land to celebrate the birth of Christ. (For those of you familiar with the events from the Christmas Truce of 1914, I won’t waste your time in retelling it in detail. For those of you not so familiar with the story you can find a nice article on the topic here, as well as this video clip from the French movie Joyeux Noel portraying the wonderful scene.)
Calls for a Christmas truce by Pope Benedict XV on December 7th had been rejected by leaders from all sides, making the unintended Christmas truce of 1914 a spontaneous phenomenon, an outburst of grace in the gutters of war (Romans 5:20), and a spark of light before the impending 20th century tsunami of darkness. This isn’t to say that all fighting ceased during that twenty-four-hour period, as there were still several casualties recorded; but in the places that the impromptu cease-fire did occur, the feeling was “fantastically wonderful and strange,” as one German soldier noted in his diary. Furthermore, most historical records point to the Germans having initiated the event (a sign of the truly Catholic Germany, perhaps).
But what does the Christmas Truce of 1914 have to do with the FIFA World Cup? There are records that soccer games picked up between the English and the Germans on no-man’s land. Now, there’s no direct connection that I can use to prove that these games inspired the World Cup, but I have a feeling there was a certain man who would have heard of them, and he would have been inspired by them (news of the matches became well known not long after the truce occurred). This man was Jules Rimet, a devout French Catholic who served in World War I, and who would go on to become the 3rd and longest lasting president of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, also known as FIFA, which he had helped found in 1904. It was under his leadership that FIFA first proposed, and then hosted in 1930, the first ever World Cup in Uruguay. It was Jules Rimet himself who carried the World Cup trophy, later to be named after him, to Uruguay in his bag.
While the historic soccer matches of Christmas 1914 may or may not have inspired the World Cup to some degree or another—seeing as Rimet had already proposed plans for an international soccer tournament before the war—there is evidence that one thing did, and many people, including Catholics, might find this earlier source of inspiration surprising: Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum. Rimet was only 17 years old at the time of the encyclical’s release, but it is clear that he was deeply moved by it.
I myself have found no record of him explicitly stating that Rerum Novarum was a direct and immediate inspiration for founding the World Cup, however, the encyclical was deeply formative as to who he was, and to what he did. As such, founding the World Cup was but one of many things he did to alleviate the sufferings of the poor and to overcome both class and national differences (in a non-Marxian way), which is much of what Rerum Novarum sought to address. Jill Esfeld, who wrote a nice piece on this subject, writes, “He saw sports as a universal interest that didn’t require participants to share language or politics; and he had a dream of uniting nations by organizing a world-wide sports competition.” That said, could the Christmas Truce matches of 1914 have been a precursor to this dream? A precursor to Rimet’s ideal in sports which brought men-at-war together in peace, even if briefly?
Even though FIFA is now rife with corruption, has been hijacked by profit-minded men since Rimet’s time, many make an idol of soccer itself, and sparks of violence have erupted due to contentious matches in the past, we can still find joy in watching the World Cup and find inspiration in the original aim of the tournament as purported by Rimet: a means of promoting peace among men during a time when men were killing one another over race, nation, and class. We live in a world where, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “the times are nightfall,” but like Rimet we must seek to bring the light, despite the fact that our lousy best will inevitably be destroyed. There is an excerpt of Kent Keith’s “Paradoxical Commandments,” made popular by the Mother Theresa, that goes, “What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.” In light of this reality, let us create.
Inspired by the words of Pope Leo XIII, Rimet was a man ‘in the world but not of it’, meaning that he was not blind to the qualms and queries of his day—men were indeed suffering in a unique historical way through the evils wrought by the Industrial Revolution—but he chose to infuse the Gospel into the worldly aspects of his life, and one of the fruits of this was the World Cup. We can all take something of value from that, that is, the infusion of the Gospel into our work in the world.
The final match of the FIFA World Cup is on December 18th, just a week before Christmas day. As France and Argentina come together to battle it out on the field, the no-man’s land of the tournament, let us continue to pray for world peace and interior peace as we prepare, more importantly, to welcome Christ into the world and into our hearts. Whatever the connection between the 1914 Christmas Truce match, Rerum Novarum, and the World Cup, one thing is certain: without Christ, none of these would exist and Rimet would not have done the things he did. We are indeed a world at war, both within and without, but Christ has come to grant us peace—an interior peace without which no true world peace can exist, a peace that allows us to fight the greater war (Ephesians 6:12), a peace that heals and unites, and a peace “which surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7).
“Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy, a joy which will be for all people; for today in the town of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” ~ Luke 2:10
P.S., as for the World Cup Final, my chips are on Argentina.