TRANSCRIPT
Americans love their major league sports, as well as the big-time college extravaganzas. Inevitably, the athletes themselves, with sometimes almost superhuman displays of grace and skill, become idols (extremely wealthy idols), with the best among them getting even more money from endorsement deals than their actual sports contracts.
They live in a rarefied air that most people can’t even imagine and will never have any kind of experience of. They become trendsetters, legends and superstars who get paid millions, tens of millions, to appear on a cereal box or drive a certain vehicle. As much as it is possible, they are treated as gods among us.
Which raises the question of these dominant males, this celebrated alpha class, why are they so conspicuously quiet in the face of the woke agenda?
On a recent episode of our Church Militant Mic’d Up program, host Dave Gordon explored this whole conundrum of celebrity athletes bowing to wokeness with guest John Doyle, a young, bright Catholic social media voice who pulls no punches.
No one can really be surprised that the institution of sports, like so many other institutions in America, has been invaded and overrun by the woke mob. What is, however, surprising is the degree to which even the superstars among superstars simply go along with it.
Sports, athletic competition among mostly males, is as old as human history. The urge to compete — and not just compete but win, to vanquish, to conquer your opponent and drive him from the annals of recorded history — is practically inborn with men. While that does overstate it, somewhat, underlying all that is the virtue of hard work and discipline paying off.
Giving it everything you have, not just in sports but in whatever endeavor, and busting your tail and dedicating yourself to truth and justice and vanquishing whatever opponent or demon you have — all of it has a spiritual dimension to it.
Entire movie plots are built around this theme: Think Rudy, for example — a plucky young guy with no athletic ability determined to play football at the best college football team in the nation, Notre Dame, and succeeds. Even Notre Dame haters can plug into the underlying story and celebrate as he’s carried off the field to the strains of the “Notre Dame Victory March.”
Winning as the consequence of hard work and tireless, nonstop, even lonely effort, in fact, is the bedrock of the Catholic life. Even St. Paul compared meriting Heaven to winning the race and achieving the victor’s crown. Sports imparts spiritual truths. But lately, spiritual truths have been kicked off the field, and sports has become an end in itself, as young Doyle notes so well.
This giant shift among U.S. males to no longer stand for truth, and even substitute consequential for inconsequential things of earth, is happening not only off the field in the stands but in the locker rooms and the post-game interviews.
The failure to confront evil is ravaging the culture, wiping out generations of everything that built the culture. Soon, says Doyle, it will all implode, as nature will correct course. Good men, not cowards, will have to seize that moment.
We invite you to watch the entire episode of Mic’d Up, which is one of our longest-running shows here at Church Militant.
We produce regular episodes of Mic’d Up, and enjoy bringing you these thought-provoking Catholic conversations and interviews with some of the brightest minds in the Catholic world.
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