Vatican
City, 17 October 2013 (VIS) – On Sunday, 20 October, Via della
Conciliazione and St. Peter's Square will be transformed into an
impromptu sports track where there will be a “100 metre sprint for
faith” before the Angelus prayer, an event organised by the
Pontifical Council for Culture and the Italian Sports Centre as a
Year of Faith initiative. Participants will include families,
seminaries and schools along with numerous pilgrims, and will take
the form of a relay race.
According
to a communique from the Pontifical Council for Culture, the
continual passing of the baton recalls how Christian life is, in the
image described by St. Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians, a sort
of ideal relay race in which faith is transmitted from generation to
generation, and in which the Christian competes in order to win “an
incorruptible crown”. Also, within the context of the Year of
Faith, it is intended to emphasise the importance of sport as a
cultural asset of education and spiritual value, and to draw the
attention of different components of the Catholic world to the
formative role that sport may assume in Christian catechesis.
From
8.30 a.m. until 12 p.m., on a genuine athletics track, the
participants in the relay race will runn the 100 metres to arrive in
St. Peter's Square. The event will be televised and will involve the
participation of, among others, the tennis player Mary Santangelo;
British ex-athlete Jason Gardener, Olympic gold medallist for the 4 x
100 metre relay race in the 2004 Games in Athens; the sexagenarian
runner Ulderico Lambertucci; and Andrea Bartali, son of the legendary
cyclist Gino Bartali, who won the Giro d'Italia three times and the
Tours de France twice. The event will conclude with the Angelus and
the Pope's greeting to participants.
The
race will be followed by a second appointment on 21 October, the
seminar “Believers in the World of Sports”, which will analyse
the relationship between sport and faith, and which will be attended
by heads of professional sports and Catholic sporting associations.
The seminar will focus on how sport can reveal man to himself, on the
value of the human body, with particular reference to disability, and
on the value of sport in openness to the absolute.
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