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Cricket Gets Papal Blessing

Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2013 3:02 am
by moongirl
Howzat! Vatican to found its own cricket club Image
Officials at the Pontifical Council for Culture, which has a section dedicated to sport, is setting up the first ever Vatican club and tournament in Rome. The initiative is the idea of Australia’s ambassador to the Holy See, John McCarthy, an avid cricket fan.

Already one match has been played between two Vatican universities – the Maria Mater Ecclesiae International Pontifical College and the Pontifical Urbaniana University – on a pitch near Rome’s Ciampino airport.

“It was an interesting match,” says Xavarian Father Theodore Mascarenhas, an Indian official at the Pontifical Council for Culture who will chair the new Vatican cricket board. “They played a Twenty-Twenty and Ubaniana won by just one run.”

The plan is to extend other twenty over matches to more Rome colleges and even further afield. “We hope to have at least six teams,” says Father Mascarenhas. The underlying aim of the initiative, he says, is to start “a kind of inter-cultural dialogue”...
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/20 ... cket-team/