Sports ethics and Christian life: A pedagogical alliance to be revalued for the education of the new generations

Abstract

This essay intends to resume and deepen the ancient reciprocity of values between sports ethics and Christian life. Sport and Christianity are two phenomena which have remote origins. Both of them have influenced each other reciprocally in many occasions through the contact between the original cultures and they are today globalized all over the world. Among the many arguments the question arises whether Catholicism can contribute today to restore the original epistemological statute of sports sciences for a rediscovery of the most authentic sport (without doping, corruption, betting, lack of fair play, excess of technicality and economic investments, etc.) in order to become a fundamental resource for the education of the new generations, on the base of the evangelical and at the same time rational principle: “not man for sport, but sport for man”. Sport, as an educational vehicle with widespread diffusion, is on the same wavelength of the Christian message for the same reason that the essence of real sport shares the majority of Christian values and its practical dimension allows to stage, in real terms, the ‘game field’ in which those values can be reached.