The president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Juan Antonio Samaranch, who announced two years ago that he and his wealthy organisation were "more important than the Catholic Church", appears to be proving his point at the Nagano winter Games.
Samaranch, who circles the globe incessantly, may have the world's biggest collection of air miles. But although a life-long Catholic, he's made a habit when on the road of not travelling the extra mile to church. Instead, he summons a local priest to his hotel suite. Even Japan, which has a small congregation of only 500,000 Catholics, is expected to provide this service during the Games.
The Olympic organisers placed a call to St Joseph's Church in the Nishitsuruga-Cho district of Nagano. Would they provide a priest at 9.0 a.m. prompt last Sunday at the Kokusai Hotel?
"I told them no, I cannot go," Father Otaro Hamada said. "Here in Nagano prefecture, we are one priest short, and on Sundays I have to travel to three churches in the region. How can I have time to go to Samaranch's hotel?
"If a parishioner is sick, I will try and go to him. If he is dying, I will certainly go and hear his confession and give him final Communion.
"They told me that in Tokyo a priest had been to his room. I guess they were saying that if it was possible in Tokyo, it should also be in Nagano."
Father Hamada went on to explain that a decade ago the Japanese Church resolved to be "on the side of the minorities, the oppressed and the poor".
He found plenty of work; illegal migrant workers, principally from the Catholic Philippines, had come to Nagano to help construct the Olympic facilities and, now the work is done, fear deportation. One group live two hours by train from Nagano and the priest travels to them every Sunday.
"They were cheap labour," said Father Hamada, who is 36, slim and boyish in casual cords, and who says one of his favourite books is George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Samaranch is a Catalan, but deserted from the government army to support Franco's rebellion. The priest was unaware of the IOC president's political background.
"I cannot ignore my parishioners and the Filipinos for Samaranch, but I invited him to come to our church," said the priest.
The distance from Samaranch's hotel to St Joseph's Church is around a mile. But rather than make the brief journey in his limousine, he has summoned two different priests from Tokyo to minister to him on the three Sundays he will spend in the Japan Alps.
They will dedicate the equivalent of six priest-days and travel a total of 1,200 kilometres to minister to Samaranch's needs. Last Sunday's private confession and Mass was conducted by Father Isidro Ribas, an elderly Jesuit from a university in Tokyo.
I asked him why Samaranch preferred not to share a service with the migrant workers who built the ice rinks and ski slopes.
"He's very busy," explained Father Ribas. He was unable to give any other explanation for the Olympic president's reluctance to attend services with his fellow communicants.
The suggestion that the Jesuit order was making Samaranch more important than other Catholics was dismissed as "a misunderstanding". Father Ribas then disclosed that he had been a school chum of Samaranch's in the 1930s in Barcelona, when the future Olympic president was active in the youth Falange.
On the eve of the Atlanta Olympics two years ago, Samaranch was seen to claim in an American TV documentary about his International Olympic Committee: "We are more important than the Catholic Church."
After hostile comment in the American press, Samaranch paid a hasty visit to the Catholic bishop's palace in Atlanta and, after making private penance, was reported to have bunged the bishop two scarce tickets for the opening ceremony.
Andrew Jennings is the author of Lord of the Rings, the acclaimed book on the Olympic movement which looked at the politics and decision-making process of the IOC. His second book on the IOC, The New Lords of the Rings: Olympic Corruption and How to Buy Gold Medals, is also available.
