The World Cup
And the Grace of Gathering
What was your favorite part of the World Cup played here in the Americas?
Did you enjoy scoffing at the ticket prices? Did you relish watching some of the game’s greats near the end of their careers? Were you surprised by a particular team—and, if so, wasn’t that part of the delight?
For me, the best part was what so many others seemed to love: watching people from around the world encounter one another.
I enjoyed the videos and testimonies of visitors falling in love with America and its people. I laughed at the Scottish presence in Boston—and at all the beer drinking that came with it. I felt a small pang of jealousy that I am not Norwegian when I watched their supporters perform the Viking Row.
More than anything, I enjoyed the gathering itself: people from different nations, languages, and cultures inhabiting the same cities, singing in the same streets, and giving themselves to the same game. As a resident of Atlanta, my family ran into visiting families at restaurants, parks, and stores. It was very cool.
Did you know that something like this was part of the World Cup’s original vision?
The tournament emerged, at least in part, from a Catholic imagination and from a distinctly Christian concern for human dignity, meaningful work, social solidarity, and peace. I recently learned this from an excellent episode of NPR’s Throughline, which I commend to you.
Here are a few of the details that stayed with me.
1. The World Cup was influenced by Catholic social thought
One of the lesser-known influences behind the tournament was Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. (Our current Pope Leo took his name because of shared values with this Leo, the values of labor rights, etc).
Jules Rimet, the French lawyer who became president of FIFA and is often called the father of the World Cup, was a devout Catholic. He was deeply influenced by the encyclical’s concern for workers, human dignity, and the bonds that hold society together.
Rimet did not regard sport as mere entertainment. He believed football could cross social divisions, build character, and create solidarity among people who might otherwise remain separated by class, nationality, or politics.
2. Rimet imagined football as an instrument of peace
Rimet’s vision deepened after his experience of the First World War.
Having witnessed the horrors of war, he became convinced that friendship between nations had to be cultivated before the next catastrophe arrived. He believed international sport might provide a peaceful alternative to conflict.
Nations could compete on the field rather than the battlefield.
Ordinary people could encounter one another across national boundaries.
Former enemies could gather around a shared game.
Rimet’s goal was not simply to determine which nation played the best football. He hoped the World Cup might become an institution of peace and reconciliation.
That is an astonishingly ambitious vision for a sporting event.
Maybe you think that the Olympics already achieved these aims. But for Rimet, the Olympic attitude toward amateurism ensured that only wealthy people could compete. He wanted World Cup players to be paid—like the rest of the Rerum Novarum, he was interested in workers’ rights!
3. The tournament was entangled in controversy almost immediately
The idealism did not remain pure for long.
The first World Cup was held in Uruguay in 1930. Only a small number of European nations participated, largely because of the cost and difficulty of the long sea voyage. From the beginning, national interests, money, and politics shaped the tournament.
The deeper controversy arrived four years later.
In 1934, Benito Mussolini’s Italy hosted the World Cup. Rimet continued to insist that football could rise above politics, but Mussolini understood perfectly well how sport could be used for political purposes.
The tournament became a propaganda triumph for the Fascist regime. Allegations of intimidation, political pressure, and favorable refereeing surrounded the competition. What had been imagined as a celebration of international friendship became a stage for authoritarian nationalism.
The World Cup had scarcely begun before its founding ideals were being compromised.
4. The World Cup has always carried this contradiction
The World Cup has always possessed two competing identities.
On the one hand, it bears Rimet’s hopeful conviction that shared play can bring human beings together. On the other, it has repeatedly been shaped by nationalism, dictatorship, corruption, commercial excess, and geopolitical conflict.
Its history is not one of innocence.
And yet, for all its contradictions, the World Cup remains one of the few events in which much of the world turns its attention toward the same thing at the same time.
People travel. Strangers sing together. Cities become meeting places. National pride becomes playful, at least for a while. We are reminded that competition does not always require hatred and that difference does not always require distance.
The World Cup has never fulfilled Rimet’s dream of world peace. No tournament could bear such a burden.
But perhaps the togetherness we witnessed this year offered a glimpse of its original grace.
For a few weeks, people from across the world gathered in our streets, our stadiums, our restaurants, and our neighborhoods. They remained different. They cheered for different teams. They wanted different outcomes.
And still, they gathered.
Perhaps that is not peace.
But it may be one of the places peace begins.