{"id":101129,"date":"2026-07-15T13:59:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:59:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/un-filo-francescano-nella-storia-della-coppa-del-mondo\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T14:08:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T12:08:57","slug":"un-filo-francescano-nella-storia-della-coppa-del-mondo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/un-filo-francescano-nella-storia-della-coppa-del-mondo\/","title":{"rendered":"A Franciscan Thread in the Story of the World Cup"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Personal Reflection on a Historical Connection<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

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\u2019t know is that the man most often credited with making this global spectacle possible was once a seventeen-year-old doing homework assigned\u2014unknowingly\u2014by a pope. It was homework that took him sixty years to finish.<\/strong><\/p>\n

His name was Jules RIMET, a grocer\u2019s 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<\/em>, the encyclical that placed the full weight of the papacy behind the dignity of labor, the rights of workers, and society\u2019s 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.
\nThis led him, in 1904, to help found FIFA\u2014the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration 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<\/em>, he boarded a ship for Uruguay with a gold trophy in his luggage to watch the first FIFA World Cup kick off.
\nThat much of the story has made the rounds during this year\u2019s tournament. What follows is a connection I have seldom seen explored\u2014and my own reading of it.
\nLeo XIII was himself a professed Secular Franciscan. Rerum Novarum<\/em> didn\u2019t fall from some abstract height\u2014it came from a pope whose social vision was deeply shaped by the spirituality of Francis of Assisi\u2014the 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, \u201cMy social reform is the Third Order of St. Francis.\u201d <\/em>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.
\nI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a stretch to call this a metaphorical sine proprio<\/em> 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\u2019s Rerum Novarum<\/em> with a scoreboard: solidarity written into the rules and dignity symbolized by the ball itself. The ball does not care whose foot touches it.
\nTherefore, 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\u2019s 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.
\nEnjoy the Beautiful Game, and perhaps say one small prayer of thanks for a grocer\u2019s 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>\n

\n

P.S.<\/strong> As the saying goes, the Church is at her best when she keeps reforming herself\u2014ecclesia semper reformanda<\/em>. It turns out the same could be said of FIFA.
\nRIMET\u2019s 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<\/em>. It is also worth admitting how far the institution he built has drifted from that gamble. FIFA\u2019s 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.
\nLeo XIII\u2019s encyclical wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s generation had to fight for the dignity of the worker, our generation may have to fight for the integrity of the game itself\u2014finding, as he once did, new and creative ways to level a playing field that money continually tries to tilt.<\/p>\n

Friar Michael LASKY<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":101125,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,120,148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-general-offices","category-gpic-en","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101129"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101133,"href":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101129\/revisions\/101133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ofmconv.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}