Behind the spectacle of the 2024 Olympic Games now underway across Paris, thousands of young Catholics and evangelicals from around the world are engaging in evangelism and cultural activities among the expected 11 million visitors.
Alongside activities organised by Youth With A Mission and other movements, eight Catholic dioceses and 70 parishes are collaborating in what Pope Francis has called the ‘Holy Games’ in Greater Paris near Olympic venues.
Through various outlets, the French Bible Society are distributing 200,000 New Testaments, in French and English, entitled Plus précieux que l’or /More than precious gold, taken from 1 Peter 1:7: Even gold, which can be destroyed, is tested by fire; and so your faith, which is much more precious than gold, must also be tested, so that it may endure. Testimonies of top world athletes are included in the New Testaments.
In recent decades, Christians have come to see major sports gatherings as God-given opportunities for evangelism. One thousand young evangelists converged on Munich at YWAM’s first Olympic outreach in 1972, encouraged by Brother Andrew to connect with athletes from closed nations behind the Iron Curtain (see video). In 1980, YWAMers and other evangelists travelled to the Soviet Union for the Moscow Olympics. Ever since, many thousands of believers, hundreds of churches, dozens of organisations and denominations have joined together to share their faith during the Olympics, often under the More Than Gold banner, the Catholic Church becoming a major partner.
Ambivalent
Throughout the centuries, Christianity and the Olympic Games have had an ambivalent relationship. For good reasons. The Olympics were inspired by pagan Greek culture, with priests presiding over sacrifices to Zeus.
The violence tolerated or even encouraged to please the crowds in Olympia followed naturally from worship of such a god. Deaths and injuries were extremely common. The pankration was a no-holds brawl mix of wrestling, boxing and street fighting in which kicks to the groin, deliberate dislocations of shoulders and ankles, chokeholds and breaking opponents’ fingers were all a part.
Christianity’s spread led directly to the end of the classical Games. The Roman emperor Theodosius banned pagan sacrifices throughout the empire and ended the Games in 393. They would not be revived for another 1600 years.
However, in the middle ages sport increasingly became linked with Catholic festivals and feast days.
Paradox
After the Reformation, Puritans considered sport poor use of time, and rejected the sporting activities that Catholics connected to them. Yet it was in Protestant Britain where many of the current Olympic sports were invented, or rules developed for: including tennis, table tennis, badminton, cricket, football, rugby, boxing, golf, horse-racing, hockey and bowls. Boxing and football had wild, barbaric precedents. But with a biblically-inspired sense of rule-of-law, the British codified rules for these and other sports to respect the dignity of the opponent, promoting fair play and making sport enjoyable for all. They recognised the paradox that freedom and enjoyment are maximised when rules and boundaries are respected.
This commitment to fair-play and integrity is reflected in the Olympic athlete’s oath:
In the name of all the competitors I promise that we shall take part in these Olympic Games, respecting and abiding by the rules which govern them, committing ourselves to a sport without doping and without drugs, in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport and the honour of our teams.
Catholics probably have done more thinking about God and sports than most evangelicals. Several popes have written about sport, including Pius XII (1939-58), who was active in sport most of his adult life. John Paul II (1978-2005) was a keen skier and goal-keeper, and often wrote about sport.
These Games are being held exactly 100 years after the 1924 Paris Olympics, when Scotsman Eric Liddell refused to run in his 100 metres final, because it was held on a Sunday. He was rescheduled to run in the 400 metre event for which he had not trained – and won!
His story, immortalised in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, captured imaginations around the globe. “I believe God made me for a purpose,” says Liddell in the film, “but he also made me fast! And when I run I feel his pleasure.”
Liddell, who left athletic glory behind him to go to China as a missionary, died in a Japanese concentration camp. He knew there was a prize greater than gold. “It has been a wonderful experience to compete in the Olympic Games and to bring home a gold medal. But since I have been a young lad, I have had my eyes on a different prize. You see, each one of us is in a greater race than any I have run in Paris, and this race ends when God gives out the medals.”
Weekly Word is an initiative of The Schuman Centre for European Studies. Jeff Fountain is a New Zealander holding a Dutch passport, is currently the director of the Schuman Centre for European Studies (www.schumancentre.eu), and lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Jeff graduated with a history degree from the University of Auckland (1972) and worked as a journalist on the New Zealand Herald (1972-3), and as travelling secretary for Tertiary Student Christian Fellowship (TSCF) (1973). He has lived in the Netherlands since 1975, and has travelled and spoken in almost every European country. For twenty years following the fall of communism, he was the European director for the international and interdenominational mission organisation, Youth With A Mission. He was chairman of the international, trans-denominational movement, Hope for Europe, for which he organised two pan-European congresses in Budapest in 2002 and 2011. In 2010, he established the Schuman Centre for European Studies (www.schumancentre.eu) to promote biblical perspectives on Europe’s past, present and future, to encourage effective engagement in issues facing Europe today.
