Jesus is a spinner
Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2015 10:29 pm
A friendly match has been taking place between an all-Muslim team from Yorkshire and the Vatican cricket team - St Peter's Cricket Club - in Rome.
The Vatican team consists of mainly trainee priests drawn from Catholic seminaries in the Italian capital city.
Organisers hope such matches will help promote greater tolerance between different faiths and cultures.
The Vatican team is mainly made up of seminarians, or those training to become priests, from south Asian countries. They can't practice inside the walls of the Vatican -- "the curators of the historic buildings realised high balls crashing through windows would cause something of a problem," McCulloch laughed -- but instead train on a small oval outside Rome owned by the Campanella cricket club, which itself is a social club made up of mainly expatriates living in Italy. The team is allowed to train sometimes on football grounds near the Vatican seminaries.
The Vatican cricket team will this weekend face off against the Mount cricket club, an all-Muslim team from Yorkshire, England. McCulloch said the idea for the match came after the Vatican team visited the United Kingdom in 2014 to play against a team assembled by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He said the Vatican team jumped at the chance of such a unique game.
"The team started in 2013, with the Australian ambassador to the Holy See, John McCarthy. He was a cricket fanatic and he realised even though there was football being played here, really cricket was the game which captured the attention of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Australia, England, New Zealand and more," he said.
"We thought it was the opportune time to start the St Peters cricket club, named after the St Peters basilica, but it has quickly become known as the Vatican cricket club."
McCulloch is a Columban priest who worked in Pakistan for 34 years, so knows well the esteemed position the game of cricket holds in south Asia.
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