A Personal Reflection on a Historical Connection
In friaries and homes the world over, a ball is on countless screens. We are in the final matches of the 2026 World Cup, and for about a month the whole world has quietly agreed to care, together, about the same small round object. What most viewers don’t know is that the man most often credited with making this global spectacle possible was once a seventeen-year-old doing homework assigned—unknowingly—by a pope. It was homework that took him sixty years to finish.
His name was Jules RIMET, a grocer’s son from the small village of Theuley, in France. Born in 1873 to a devout French Catholic family, he was seventeen in 1891 when Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum, the encyclical that placed the full weight of the papacy behind the dignity of labor, the rights of workers, and society’s responsibilities toward the poor. RIMET is widely understood to have been deeply influenced by the encyclical while still a young man. He started a charity for the poor, then, in 1897, founded a Paris sports club Red Star, which refused to sort its members by social class.
This led him, in 1904, to help found FIFA—the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. He then fought in the First World War and came home convinced, almost theologically, that nations who played together might be less inclined to kill each other. In 1930, thirty-nine years after first reading Rerum Novarum, he boarded a ship for Uruguay with a gold trophy in his luggage to watch the first FIFA World Cup kick off.
That much of the story has made the rounds during this year’s tournament. What follows is a connection I have seldom seen explored—and my own reading of it.
Leo XIII was himself a professed Secular Franciscan. Rerum Novarum didn’t fall from some abstract height—it came from a pope whose social vision was deeply shaped by the spirituality of Francis of Assisi—the saint who stripped off his own fine clothes in a public square rather than let cloth and coin define him. A long-standing Franciscan tradition even attributes to Leo XIII the oft-quoted expression, “My social reform is the Third Order of St. Francis.” Thus, a Catholic teenager spent the rest of his life building something that attempted to put that same vision into practice: a game that did not ask what country you were born in or what your father did for a living, but only whether you could play.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to call this a metaphorical sine proprio applied to nations. Although the original Jules RIMET Trophy could eventually become the permanent possession of a national team under the rules then in force, the deeper symbolism remains striking. For ninety minutes, the ordinary hierarchies of money and power are supposed to fall away, leaving only eleven against eleven on the same-sized rectangle everywhere on earth. That’s Rerum Novarum with a scoreboard: solidarity written into the rules and dignity symbolized by the ball itself. The ball does not care whose foot touches it.
Therefore, this weekend, Franciscan reader, watch how badly the world still wants that kind of leveling. Remember, too, that someone had to believe it first. Whether or not RIMET consciously understood his life’s work in precisely these terms, he spent the better part of his life building something that sought to unite nations more closely through sport because a pope, deeply formed by the Franciscan tradition, wrote a letter that profoundly shaped his imagination.
Enjoy the Beautiful Game, and perhaps say one small prayer of thanks for a grocer’s son from Theuley who took an encyclical seriously enough to help give the world a game that, at its best, still reflects something of its vision.
P.S. As the saying goes, the Church is at her best when she keeps reforming herself—ecclesia semper reformanda. It turns out the same could be said of FIFA.
RIMET’s whole gamble was that sport could serve as a practical model of the common good: solidarity and honest competition ordered toward something greater than the success of any one player or nation. Whether or not he consciously expressed that aspiration in the language of Catholic social teaching, it echoes the concerns of Rerum Novarum. It is also worth admitting how far the institution he built has drifted from that gamble. FIFA’s real reform problem has never been what players earn on the pitch. It is what the men who run the game have quietly extracted from it: bribery indictments, bloated executive compensation, financial interests that place hosting rights and broadcast revenue ahead of the sport itself.
Leo XIII’s encyclical wasn’t really about football, but its principles can reasonably be applied to the boardroom as much as to the factory floor. An institution built upon the labor and loyalty of ordinary people owes those people more than a trophy every four years. If RIMET’s generation had to fight for the dignity of the worker, our generation may have to fight for the integrity of the game itself—finding, as he once did, new and creative ways to level a playing field that money continually tries to tilt.
Friar Michael LASKY
