"Do Catholic countries have better football players?"

I was surprised to see this headline on the Austrian Catholic website kath.net today... and even more surprised to see they seemed to mean it seriously.

"A look at the participants in the final round of the European football championship in Switzerland and Austria suggests this," kath.net writes in a report from Vienna. "In seven of the 16 participating countries, Catholics are clearly in the majority: Poland (95 percent of the population), Spain (92 percent), Italy (90 percent), Portugal (90 percent), Croatia (77 percent), Austria (69 percent ) and France (51 percent). Only one Protestant stronghold confronts them, Sweden. Of the 8.8 million inhabitants of the northern European country, 80 percent are Lutherans."

There's no hint of analysis of why this should be relevant, or mention of the personal faith -- or lack thereof -- of the players on these national teams. This purely statistical view (sports fans love stats, don't they?) goes on to point out which participating countries have large numbers of both Catholics and Protestants (Germany, Switzerland and Netherlands).

The article notes that only 32 percent of all Czechs call themselves Christians, making the Czech Republic the most "de-churched" participating country, i.e. the country where religion has retreated the most. Even there, though, the Catholics make up the largest group among the believers (26.5 percent of the population). So maybe they still have a chance after all.

No religion story in Europe is complete without a mention of Islam, so the Vienna-datelined article ended up with a comment about Turkey. The Turkish team, by the way, beat Austria's co-hosts Switzerland 2-1 on Wednesday in Basel and face the "de-churched" Czechs on Sunday in Geneva, aka "the Protestant Rome".

"The only Muslim-dominated country in the European Championship is Turkey, where 98 percent of the 72 million inhabitants are Muslims. The 120,000 Christians there have a hard time because of much discrimination," it wrote. "In Europe there are 224.5 million Catholics, 57.8 million Protestants, 39 million Orthodox, 15.7 million Muslims and 1.6 million Jews."

These statistics appear to be completely irrelevant to Euro 2008. In fact, with the large Catholic majority in Europe that kath.net mentions at the end, it's almost inevitable that many countries with a Catholic majority will end up in the final rounds every time the championships are held. Can any football fan tell me if there's something this religion editor is missing?

"Religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st Century as political ideology was to the 20th Century," Tony Blair said on Thursday in a statement before Friday's launch in New York of his new Faith Foundation to improve understanding between different religions and fight global poverty by mobilizing people through faith.

Blair is not the first person to talk about how important religion is and will be in the 21st century. Decades ago, the late French writer André Malraux reportedly went so far as to issue a wonderfully Gallic sweeping statement: "The 21st century will be religious or it will not be."

Even if British understatement isn't what it used to be, Blair's comment is really quite bold. The main political ideologies of the 20th century were communism, Nazism and fascism. They rallied huge masses of people, justified totalitarian regimes and imposed skewed views of the world on whole populations. When communism collapsed across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union following the fall of the Berlin Wall, millions of people felt that they had been liberated.

I'm sure Blair doesn't mean to evoke this negative aspect of the political ideologies that gripped the 20th century. He's clearly thinking of the positive power of faith, as he explains in this interview in Time. Isn't it clumsy, then, to compare religion to the ideologies of the 20th century?

The museum at Vienna's Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Stephen has a new exhibition meant to show what it says soccer owes to religion. As my colleague Alexandra Hudson writes from the Austrian capital:

Players such as Argentina's Diego Maradona are venerated as saints of the modern age, the exhibition explains, and fans frequently set up shrines or collect "relics" of their favourite teams or players.

"There are many parallels between the cult of football and the rituals of the Christian Church," said museum director Bernhard Böhler.

An "I belong to Jesus" shirt worn by an AC Milan player and Maradona's famous "hand of God" goal are cited to show the links between faith and football. The exhibition, entitled Heroes, Saints and Heaven Stormers, runs from May 21 to September 22.

Do you think soccer owes as much to religion as the museum director says?

P.S. Readers of this blog may recall Bernhard Böhler from an earlier and far more controversial exhibition, the show of artist Alfred Hrdlicka's work that included a painting depicting the Last Supper as a gay orgy (we blogged on it here and here and here). That got him into hot water, with protests pouring in from Austria, Germany and the United States. It wouldn't have surprised me to hear he had been fired, but this soccer story suggests he's weathered the storm.  

Should some Islamic countries be barred from the Beijing Olympics? The question came up in an interesting op-ed piece this week arguing that countries that ban women from competing in sports events violate the Olympic Charter and thus should be excluded from the Games. As Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, wrote in the International Herald Tribune:

The procession of the Olympic torch drew protests from Paris to San Francisco over China's treatment of the Tibetan people, but no one has protested another tragedy that is afflicting millions of women in Saudi Arabia, Iran and other Muslim countries. Many Muslim women dare not even dream of the Olympics because their countries ban female sports altogether or severely restrict the athletic activities of the "weaker sex."

The International Olympic Committee charter states that "any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, sex or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement."

But the Olympic Committee is failing to adhere to its own standards. While the hypothetical example of participating countries barring black athletes from the Olympic Games would have rightly caused international outrage, the committee continues to allow the participation of countries that do not allow women on their Olympic teams.

Countries with men-only Olympic teams include Brunei, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. According to their respective governments, women are barred from Olympic participation for "cultural and religious reasons."

This raises some interesing questions about Islam and sports.  Al Ahmed says those countries barring women from the Olympics cite "cultural and religious reasons" for doing so. If there are 56 members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), that means that over 50 other Muslim countries do not agree with the idea of banning women from sports competition. So is the opposition from Brunei, Saudi Arabia and the UAE simply cultural? And if so, is it valid for those countries to cite Islam as a reason for their decision?

The Olympic Charter clearly states in its Fundamental Principles of Olympism that sex discrimination violates the Olympic spirit. But obviously the International Olympic Committee is not enforcing this rule and the men-only teams are not respecting it. Should the IOC put its foot down and demand compliance?

Another interesting aspect that Al Ahmed mentions is that the number of men-only teams is falling- "from 35 in Barcelona in 1992 to 26 in Atlanta in 1996 to only 10 in Sydney in 2000 and four or five at the last Olympics in Athens." One country in those statistics is Algeria -- a recent feature by our North Africa chief correspondent William Maclean tells the story.

Al Ahmed has an optimistic conclusion:

"If the IOC is pressed to live up to its own standards, the London Games in 2012 should witness the celebration of female Olympians from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and other Muslim countries."

Can this change that quickly? Let us know what you think.

German soccer blogs are not a place I usually go to for a story about religion, but an interesting one has popped up on the forum of the Eintracht Frankfurt team. The team let its fans vote over the Internet late last year to pick a 2008/2009 season jersey among 16 proposed models. Despite the fans' enthusiasm for this innovation, Eintracht has ignored the result and chosen to use the runner-up design. As the team explained on its website:

After a close examination, we have decided that the winning jersey with the cross unfortunately cannot be used because the symbol on the front has a religious background. Inter Milan, an Italian club with a long tradition, has appeared in the current Champions League competition in a similar jersey and been strongly criticised for it. So after careful consideration, Eintracht Frankfurt has gone back and chosen the second jersey, which came in a close second in the vote.

The runner-up that came out on top has what Eintracht calls "hints of eagle claws on the front and a stylised eagle on the shoulder". The city's coat-of-arms has a red eagle that also figures on the Eintracht team logo.

So why the change? It turns out that a Turkish lawyer (and Fenerbahçe fan) asked UEFA in December to invalidate an Inter Milan victory over the Istanbul team in the Champions League last November because the red cross on the Italian jerseys recalled the Knights Templar crusaders. Shortly afterwards, the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia reported that fake FC Barcelona jerseys were on sale in Saudi Arabia with the crossbar removed from the cross on the team's emblem. Eintracht doesn't mention this Christian/Muslim angle explicitly, but it takes only a few clicks to find it.

Eintracht's fan forum erupted with comments. The main thread on the jersey is up to 1,728 and climbing, many defending the loser as simply a better design. Almost 500 fans have signed a petition against the winner. The religious angle seemed irrelevant to most of them.

Do you think that teams should pay attention to possible religious overtones on their jerseys?

At a conference on terrorism in Brussels this week, debate on how to tackle al Qaeda was punctuated by repeated arguments over the terms "jihad" and "jihadist".

The terms have became synonymous in the West with "holy war" and "holy warrior" against the West, and al Qaeda itself has used it in that sense. But for most Muslims, as our Security Correspondent Mark Trevelyan points out, it originally means a spiritual struggle and they don't want it hijacked anymore.

"Now to call jihadists as terrorists is either reflective of ...lack of understanding of Islam, or it is I must say an intended misuse, which again is unfortunate," General Ehsan Ul Haq, former chairman of Pakistan's joint chiefs of staff, told the annual conference of the EastWest Institute think-tank. "It might have been somewhat excusable in the trauma post-9/11 but I don't think it is any more."

Raphael Perl, head of the Action against Terrorism Unit at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the failure to agree on a shared terminology in the wake of the September 11 attacks was "a major mistake on our part."

Read the whole article here. And then let us know if you think that the way these terms are used muddles our understanding of what is going on.

UPDATE: The trial ended in stalemate on Feb. 29 and a retrial is due in a few months. Murphy-O'Connor was not called to testify.

The British papers are all over the story of the libel suit brought by former spokesman for London's Cardinal Cormac Murphy- O'Connor against the Daily Mail. The tabloid wrote in 2006 that Austen Ivereigh, 41, had pressured one former girlfriend into having an abortion and wanted another to abort twins she was carrying (she later miscarried). He flatly denies the charges and accuses the Daily Mail of making him lose his job and his reputation. The story broke at a time when Ivereigh was an active Church campaigner against abortion.

The case opened in court on Monday and Ivereigh has been on the stand giving his side of the story. He admitted he did not always live up to Church teaching (on sex before marriage, for example) but strongly denied that he proposed abortion and insisted that he, as a practising Catholic, opposed it.

The story has all the elements for lurid headlines and snap judgments -- sex, abortion, the Catholic Church, charges of hypocrisy, "he said/she said" accusations, libel and the link to a "prince of the Church." The second woman in the case is referred to only as "Madame X." The cardinal is due to take the stand next week and the press section is sure to be packed. It's not often that such a senior Catholic prelate gives testimony in court.

The lawyers for both sides came out swinging. Ivereigh's lawyer told the court that his client was "threatened and baited like an animal" by "journalism at its most personally destructive and vicious." The lawyer for the Daily Mail told Ivereigh: "You were behaving hypocritically, contrary to the beliefs of your church and in a callous and cruel way to both these women."

Full disclosure: like many other journalists covering religion in Europe, I dealt with Ivereigh when he worked for the cardinal and found him to be an intelligent and informative spokesman. I have no special insight into this case and have no idea how the court will finally call it.

That said, this trial comes against a background of years of highly publicised cases regarding Catholic priests abusing young boys. This one is different because it's about adult heterosexual lay people. Still, the Catholic connection is strong. Do you think this case will be just as damaging for the Church?

The uproar over Archbishop Rowan Williams and sharia law brings up a question we've asked before with Pope Benedict -- are we too addicted to soundbites to discuss complex religious issues in public? Both have tackled difficult issues in nuanced speeches, only to see -- rightly or wrongly -- that what they thought was their message did not come across.

The Guardian says Williams was naive to discuss such a complex argument in public: "This was the stuff of seminars and was never going to register in the mass market without being boiled down into soundbites. The archbishop did not do that, ensuring others would. As a result, this most humane of men finds himself being caricatured as supporting the severing of limbs."

Do you think religious leaders should simplify their message when they speak in public? Or do we -- the media, politicians, bloggers, readers -- have to make more of an effort to understand them?