The TVs are tuned to Winter Olympics: for once, everyone glued to the screens not only when it comes to football. Adrenaline-filled competition, anger or mortification at defeat, exultation at victory.
But how do you learn to handle tension? How do you learn to win, to lose? Blessed are the young people who have gained experience learning in oratories. On the football pitches, volleyball pitches, in games and during skiing holidays in the mountains.
The speakers were training ground for any sport: precise rules and understanding for those who make mistakes, training in hard work, especially in putting up with others; management of emotions, conflicts, because they are all your companions, even your adversaries.
He is an authority to follow, who referees and corrects when necessary, who embraces and rewards. Today sport is a stage for champions only: the individual triumphs, rather than the team; the image, dilated by gossip, by the weight of sponsors.
The athletes’ narrative does not include the path to competing in the most important sporting competitions. Instead, as Machado said, the journey is made by going.
It is education that creates champions, but above all it creates solid, passionate, generous, mature men and women.
Now, if so much learning is learned in the oratory fields which once again become the object of attention as a social garrison, it is incredible what is happening in Palermo, parish of Santa Teresa del Bambin Gesù.
Palermo, where the speakers should bloom in abundance like wildflowers to remove children from the streets and from colluding families. Well, the residents of a nearby building reported the parish for the disturbance caused by too much noise from the kids.
A diligent judge, evidently not blessed with children and grandchildren, issued a conviction. A sentence that is a scandal, in the literal sense of a stumbling block, because the compensation amounts to approximately 60 thousand euros.
It is impossible to cover it with donations from the faithful in a neighborhood that is certainly not wealthy, or the kids would go to play football in expensive sports clubs.
It is a small news story, but emblematic of a narrow and arid mentality and heart: children are annoying. Outside hotels, outside restaurants, dogs are better.
Now, even outside the churches, which as is known do not operate for profit and live on the generous impulse of religious and lay people.
And it is an affair that does not honor our justice and increases distrust: how can a judge, in Palermo, dedicate his work and his time to such a miserable cause? Do you reserve the same obstinate attention for the armed gangs that terrorize the neighborhoods?
This incredible story has been going on for at least ten years, with various failed attempts to find an agreement, studied down to the last detail even establishing the brand of acceptable, less noisy ball, in addition to the obligation of foam rubber barriers, and very rigid timetables.
In short, it is more radical to eliminate children. Let’s play Play, locked in the house.
In collaboration with Credere
Credere, the magazine for living the “adventure of faith”
BELIEVE is the magazine that offers you stories, characters and columns every week to inspire faith in everyday life. Already chosen as the “Official Magazine of the Jubilee of Mercy”, it is a newspaper rich in content for the spirit, with many testimonies of famous people and ordinary people and the gestures and words of the Pope, closer than ever.
Discover the magazine and subscribe »
