Pope compares rugby to life with Azzurri, Pumas
(By Paul Virgo) (ANSA) – Vatican City, November 22 – Pope Francis said rugby symbolised the way people cannot thrive without each other during an audience on Friday with the national teams of Italy and his homeland Argentina.
Italy, the Azzurri, and the Argentine Pumas will play each other at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico on Saturday.
“I pray for you. I wish you the best,” the pontiff said during his audience with the two national teams.
“But you should pray for me too so that I and my collaborators make a good team and we reach the tryline”.
The pope said there were many aspects of rugby that he admired.
“Rugby is a very good sport,” he said. “It’s a hard sport, there is a lot of physical contact, but there’s no violence, there’s great fairness, great respect.
“Playing rugby is hard. It’s not a stroll. And I think this is useful to toughen the character.
“Another aspect that stands out is the balance between the group and the individual.
“There are the famous scrums, which sometimes cause quite an impression. “Then there are the individual moves, the agile race to the try,” he added using the Italian word for try, “meta”, which also means “objective”.
“In rugby you run towards the ‘meta’. This is a beautiful word, which makes us think about our lives, because all our lives reach for an objective. “This is hard and it is necessary to fight and work, but it’s important that you don’t run on your own.
“To get there it’s necessary to run together and the ball should be passed from hand to hand until you get to the tryline, then you can celebrate. “Maybe my interpretation is not very technical, but it’s the way a bishop sees rugby. And as a bishop, I hope you put this into practice on the field and in your lives”.
The pope received signed shirts, pendants and rugby balls from the teams, as well as an olive tree that recalls one that Francis planted in Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo square several years ago as a symbol of peace and solidarity when he was simply Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
The pope also met the Argentine and Italian national soccer teams in August before they played a friendly in his honour in Rome.
“I’m pleased to see there are numerous sporting encounters between Italy and Argentina,” said Francis, a big soccer fan.
“This is a good sign. It’s also a sign of a great tradition that continues between these two nations”.
The pope’s father and grandfather came from the northwestern Italian town of Asti.
Several members of Italy’s national rugby team, including captain Sergio Parisse, were born in Argentina. The Pumas go into Saturday’s match aiming to end an eight-match losing streak following big defeats to England and Wales in test matches this month. It they lose to Italy it will be the longest sequence of defeats in the national team’s history.
Italy lost their opening November test 50-20 to Australia but rallied to beat Fiji 37-31 in a bad-tempered encounter last weekend. On Friday Pope Francis also met Joseph Blatter, the head of international soccer’s governing body FIFA.
Blatter gave the pope a copy of The FIFA Weekly magazine translated into Latin, the Vatican’s official language.