The Vatican cricket team has unveiled the schedule for its English tour this summer. This follows the publication earlier this month of the Vatican’s first document on sport, Giving the Best of Yourself. The text describes how, at its best, sport offers an ethical training for life. The Vatican cricket team – known officially as the Vatican (St Peter’s) Cricket Team – are the ambassadors of this vision.
The Vatican XI was founded in 2014 and consists of priests, deacons and seminarians studying and working in Rome. The team is under the official patronage of the Pontifical Council for Culture and players hail from across the Commonwealth.
The team’s objectives are to increase awareness of the importance of religion for society and to promote inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue through cricket. Matches are thus seen as a means of bringing different communities together and promoting what Pope Francis has called the “culture of encounter and dialogue”.
This year’s tour, which runs from July 3 to July 15, features a diverse array of fixtures. The tour will begin with a match against a Stonyhurst Gentlemen’s XI, comprised of current students as well as alumni, teachers and friends of the Jesuit school. Then the team will travel south for encounters with a mixture of rogues and royals, electors and the elected.
The Vatican and the Archbishop of Canterbury will field a combined team to play an interfaith side at Lord’s. St Peter’s Cricket Club will then play against Her Majesty’s Prison and Young Offenders Institution XI, a Commonwealth XI, the Mount Cricket Club, the Houses of Parliament XI and the Royal Household Cricket Club. The team will visit 10 Downing Street before flying back to Rome.
The choice of Stonyhurst as the first fixture is particularly evocative. An early form of cricket was played by the scions of recusant aristocracy and gentry at the English College in St Omers, the precursor to Stonyhurst, as early as the 1590s.
The game used a single wicket, a 17-inch milestone, and a hand-crafted ball with raised seams, and encouraged bowling with two or more bounces. It endured in its Elizabethan form for 280 years, long after the game had modernised in England under the Marylebone Cricket Club’s rules. After the College migrated to England in 1794, the game from St Omers became known as “Stonyhurst Cricket” and was played regularly until the 1870s.
Stonyhurst’s first external match under “London” rules took place in 1861. Fr John Gerard SJ recorded the scene: “The Eleven burst upon an astonished world in a uniform, secretly prepared, of white flannel trousers and pink shirts,” he wrote. They also wore pink cummerbunds and scarlet caps. For
this first match with an external club, the rector secured the coaching talents of Henry Lillywhite, a professional from the famous cricketing family.
Jan Graffius, Stonyhurst’s curator, has ensured that, when they play next month, the Stonyhurst Gentlemen’s XI will wear the traditional scarlet caps, though they will play without cummerbunds and their shirts will be white.
But for all this colour, the tour is a serious undertaking. Of notable interest is the interfaith match at Lord’s, where the joint Catholic and Anglican side (an ecumenical first) will play a team of Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews. This is why Baroness Scotland, secretary general of the Commonwealth, has dubbed the tour “Peace at the Crease”. The Vatican XI will also be making informal visits to a mosque, a Hindu temple, a Sikh gurdwara and a synagogue.
Fr Sameer Advani, one of the tour managers, describes this aspect of the trip as an effort to “underline the vital importance of authentic religious experience for society and also to emphasise the bonds among major religions”. Fr Advani believes that the Vatican cricket club can “build bridges between cultures and religions through the sport of cricket and, in a simple way, to give witness to our Catholic priesthood and to our faith”.
Stephen Withnell is a governor of Stonyhurst College and Westminster Cathedral Choir School
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