By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I haven’t thought about the question of whether God determines the winner in athletic competitions since I was a high school freshman. When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, I routinely would make the Sign of the Cross before I took a foul shot in a basketball game. I wasn’t the only one. Large numbers of Catholic basketball players, including those who played at the college level, would cross themselves quickly just before taking a foul shot.
If memory serves, I can remember watching on television the All-American and eventual NBA player Billy Cunningham doing it while playing for the University of North Carolina Tar Heels. It was just part of the routine, like bouncing the ball a few times, inhaling deeply, and staring at the basket. It was so commonplace — much like modern Latin baseball players pointing toward Heaven after making a good play — that television commentators never took note of the practice.
I stopped my foul line Sign of the Cross in high school. Why? No one told me to stop, but several of the Marist Brothers who taught me at the time would joke about people who prayed for their team to win in big games. You would hear things such as, “Do you think God is a Yankee fan? He has more important things to think about.”
The message sunk in. I started to think it was immature to drag Jesus into the outcome of a basketball shot. The same thought must have struck many other basketball players. My impression is that the practice faded away by the 1960s.
Why am I writing about it now, then? I came across a column on the web site “CAPC: Christ and Pop Culture” a few days before this year’s Super Bowl. It was entitled, “Does God Care if Your Favorite Football Team Wins?” The author was Derek Rishmawy, director of Young Adult Ministries at Trinity Central Presbyterian Church in Orange County, Calif. He does not dismiss out of hand the possibility that God may control the outcome of a football game.
Far-fetched? Consider his logic: “Unless you’re a total fanatic, convinced that God himself favors your home team, your gut instinct is” that God probably does not intercede in the outcome of a sporting event. “It seems inconsistent with his universal love for all. Still, in Scripture, God did pick Israel to be his chosen people,” and throughout Scripture God “is seen to bestow special grace on various figures, either for particular purposes in redemption or his own good pleasure. God loves all but he also seems to focus on particulars.”
Hence, concludes Rishmawy, “It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that God may have special plans” for victory for one team or another in the Super Bowl.
It should be noted that for most Christians with traditional views God’s intervention is seen as the cause of the parting of the Red Sea, Joshua’s victory at Jericho, the Emperor Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge, and Don Juan’s defeat of the Turks at the naval Battle of Lepanto. And that’s just for starters; we could go on. When I was a boy, after every Mass prayers were said for the conversion of Russia. We pray for the spiritual and physical health of our loved ones because we believe that God intervenes in our lives.
But can a football game be seen in the same light as such momentous events? Rishmawy does not dismiss the possibility, writing that God may have had “special plans” for this year’s Super Bowl. Jesus, he continues, “declares that the hairs on your head are numbered and that a sparrow doesn’t fall to the ground without God’s consent. . . . If God invests himself in all these things, including the death of sparrows, why not multimillion-dollar events like pro football games, or even peewee games.”
Rishmawy asks us to consider the “various personal, financial, political, and social transactions set off by the winning or losing of a game,” the “providential ripples that are unseen and untraceable to anyone but the Almighty God who sees all.”
What “ripples” does he have in mind? “In God’s wisdom, he may use the outcome of a game to bless one player, discipline another, and test still another, none of which is apparent from the outside. In God’s wisdom, blessing may come in the form of a loss for a player who may be given over to pride. . . . God does not measure blessings as humans do. . . . So if two Christians step onto the field and face each other, a victory one way or the other is not a flashing red light signaling the righteousness of one or the other. Learn a lesson from Job’s friends here.”
Rishmawy adds that “God is big enough to care for the big events as well as the small ones.” After all, “even presidents and kings care about their kids’ little league games.”
OK. But we are talking about a football game. Is it worth the effort to analyze a sporting event in this manner? Maybe. Theodicy, it should be remembered, is a respected category of theological inquiry, an analysis of why an all-powerful God would permit evil, pain, and injustice to take place.
We all have heard the questions: “Why did God permit the Holocaust?” “Why does God permit an innocent child to be born with severe deformities?” “Why does God permit cruel and selfish people to enjoy great wealth and power, when so many good people are left to endure great suffering in life?” “Why does God permit so many pro-abortion candidates to win their elections?”
To my mind, no matter how intelligent and well-intentioned the theologian who seeks to answer these questions, the explanation he or she comes up with always falls short. My fallback answer is always that God’s ways are not our own.
It is true: The Creator of the universe and the miracle of human life could easily send a gust of wind to divert a field goal attempt at a crucial part of a football game — if He wanted to. If Jesus could heal the sick, walk on water, and raise Lazarus from the dead, in this year’s Super Bowl He could have intervened to form a slick spot on the field that would have caused Malcolm Butler to slip and never make the interception of Russell Wilson’s pass that determined the outcome of the game — if He wanted to. My opinion is that He does not want to.
But it is just my opinion. There is nothing in Catholic doctrine that answers this question for us. God very well could have determined the outcome of the Super Bowl, but, the way I see it, this is one part of life where He lets His creatures — the athletes upon whom He has bestowed such great ability — to go at it on their own.
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