Sideline Cut: The decision taken by the Vatican to consciously promote and foster a relationship with its flock of one billion souls through the medium of sport is bound to raise a few cynical smiles.
After all, given the power and influence the Roman Catholic Church has wielded throughout the centuries and its predilection for scandal of one kind or another, one would imagine that, for instance, the oily machinations of the Premiership would be little more than easy pickings.
The Vatican is not short of a bob or two and if it so chose it could speak to the people through soccer, the global game, fielding a super team of its own to combat the secular giants. It could enlist the services of fallen princes and outcasts, bringing together the Collymores and Gascoignes of this world, gifted wastrels that flew too close to the sun of contemporary sporting excess and were left permanently burned and unwanted.
The Vatican could even do England's hapless FA a favour and buy their joke leader, Sven-Goran Eriksson, out of a grossly inflated contract that will consign Britannia to another full soccer revolution of weakness, politesse and disappointment.
Money, property, pride, vanity, violence, greed, sex, death: these are matters to none of which the Church is a stranger and more than ever they have come to dominate the arenas of professional sport - the dazed and bereft Mike Tyson lying against the rigging in Kentucky late last Friday night the embodiment of many of them.
For sport and the Church, it would seem like a perfect union: the quintessential match made in heaven. And so the announcement leaves the ever-beleaguered Church open to easy potshots and jibes.
But the thing is that in this country, the land of saints and scholars, sport may well be the last bastion of religious faith. It was notable that when, a few months ago, debate arose about the possibility of Pope John Paul the Second making a return visit to Ireland, the general reaction seemed to be of apathy.
There were, if memory serves, a few text messages, hostile for the sake of hostility, fired off to radio talks shows. But for the most part: silence.
It is hard to believe when you think back to the original visit in 1979, a period anybody with even the vaguest memory of it recalls for the sheer weight of importance and celebration it inspired. It was not quite the appearance of Our Lady in Knock but it was the next best thing.
It was also the last great mass rally in this country, a movement that in scale and idealism will not be repeated - regardless of how Madonna packs them in at Slane.
Whatever your religious faith or persuasion or indifference, you cannot but be impressed by the perseverance and stamina of the shrivelled being the smiling Pope of 1979 has become. However irrelevant you may deem the message he is trying to impart, you cannot deny he continues to try with spirit that is admirable.
It is sometimes frightening to stand back and consider the rapidity and thoughtlessness with which Catholicism has been wiped off the radar in this country. Which is not to hanker after the bad old days of authoritarian absolutism, the austere 1950s when the Church ruled with a heavy hand.
The avalanche of scandal that broke open this country in the last decade provoked a gleeful response as the influence of the Church buckled to the extent that its dictatorial voice has been replaced by something less sure, something pleading and mostly unheard. Of course the Church housed and protected its evils. But it also had a significant number of good and dedicated people with something important to say.
That is probably more the case than ever now. All the concern about teenage nihilism, all the fears about violent young men stalking the streets, all the rampant consumption of drink and narcotics that are presented as the new scourges. Surely it is no secret that the half reason for this must be that all of a sudden there is no reference point. Kids, by nature, hurl themselves against the great wall. Only now, there is nothing there.
Nothing other than the elevation of materialism best represented by the grotesques who leer at us from the society pages of our Sunday papers, which present them as the exemplars of modern Ireland.
These are the icons that have replaced the moving statue in Ballinspittle. You don't have to spend long in this country to detect that the prevalent attitude is smug and shitty and hard. If there was one thing the Church was always good at communicating, it was the danger of smugness.
All this, in true, meandering and disorganised Church-pulpit style, is leading on to our playing fields. The GAA has always had a close association with the Church, although the bishop no longer throws in the ball and the decimation of the seminaries has led to the virtual disappearance of the collar-wearing hurling wing back.
Like the rest of the country, the GAA has largely gone secular. But within many of the top teams in the country, there is a growing tendency to turn towards spirituality and sometimes out-and-out Catholicism. The present All-Ireland football champions, Tyrone, have a Catholic priest on the back room staff and regularly attend Mass as a team - although the decision to do so is purely optional. A heavy leaning on spirituality - on a greater power - is nothing new in sport. It is first nature in the Bible belt football states of the American south and Midwest and many of Italy's soccer players at least go through the motions of nodding to the religious dimension of their upbringing.
In this country, as the GAA championship acquires a greater depth and following and as greater seriousness is placed on the winning of it, teams and managers are increasingly opting for symbolism and spirituality to get an edge. This trend has been manifest in little bands and signs teams have begun to wear, in the mantra of their essence being about 30 players, in the way they stand together during anthems. The nature of the games demands that our elite players now are in many ways the archetypal Catholic ideal: abstemious, obedient young men bound to an essential humility and a belief in the greater, collective cause.
This is not to say that they spend their free nights saying the rosary (or that they don't) - these are 20-somethings who enjoy a privileged rank in their communities: they would, frankly, be mad not to cash in on it now and again. But unlike many of their peers, they have bought into a belief system, a guiding voice that in many ways mirrors the better message the crumbling Church tried to communicate down the ages.
It would be fun if tomorrow, some sort of device - call it a Godomoter - could be attached to the turnstiles at Croke Park to assess the religiosity of the counties involved in the big games of the weekend.
The bet here is that Mayo would win. That is not to doubt the devoutness of the other counties but faith and football have always been the twin pillars of the Mayo sensibility. Their adherence to the former has, of course, brought them little joy in the latter, proof that you can't simply pray your way to the Sam Maguire. But at least it has permitted them to believe, for hard on half a century, that next summer will be the great one.
But as the Church continues to slide towards irrelevance, we could do worse than consider why many of its fundamental points and morals have survived in our native games, the great, noisy occasions now framing the Irish Sunday in the way the Church once did.
