The Churches are playing a part in the Olympic Games

THE CHURCHES are going to the Olympic Games. You may wonder. why. After all, the whole thing has becpme a hot potato, and a cause of intense controversy, not to say conflict.
Soaring estimates and squabbles about who is to pay: accidents, tragedies, deaths; labour disputes: quarrels about who should open the Games — the Games seem to have been beset by every problem known to man.
Not to mention the stresses and strains of the Games when they actually take place — the hazards involved and the security required: the intense competitiveness and the racial feelings: the possible accusations of unfairness or drug use. How, you may ask, can the Churches belong there?
Simply, says Fr Anthony Mancini, the Catholic priest who has for two years been chairman of the ecumenical group planning the chaplaincy, because the Churches have been asked to serve.
Intense strain
Simply because 11,000 young athletes brought together from all over the world, under conditions of intense strain, need to have people around who will listen to them, let them talk in confidence and freedom, and allow them to be private persons away from the ballyhoo. Simply because the Church is in business to serve the world as it is, not to keep safely away from the arena where the problems are. (That, says Fr
Mancini, is what the Incarnation of Jesus Christ is about).)
The Chaplaincy Service involves other Faiths as well as most main denominations of Christians. There will be Muslims, Hindus, Jews and others present. It will not be building a mini-cathedral (as at Munich) or merely existing in a crit (as at Mexico City). But it will be available to people within the "International Centre" where all the other services from discos to dentists will be housed.
"If Mayor Drapeau could arrange the Second Coming for Montreal in July, 1976, he would certainly do so," said a church journal recently. But the chaplaincy service is not out to be a big flashy part of the circus. Its purpose is simply to be there.
Five chaplains
There will be five chaplains and many volunteer assistants, from different language and denominational groups, and quiet preparations have been going on for months. Indeed, one chaplain has been in the Olympic Village for six months. When, back in February and March, tragedies happened on
the site and men were killed, "he was there".
Fr Mancini does not pretend that all is well, He speaks with feeling about the irony that, by the choice of this particular site, the people of Montreal have been deprived of their only free golf course and many — comparatively poor — families have had to be rehoused.
In a report on The Gospel and Sport, published recently, the churches draw attention to the need for deprived people throughout the world to have decent facilities for sport, and the value of sport as fun not merely for intense competition and frenetic efforts to break new records.
But the Chaplaincy Service is not out to criticise but to help, in a quiet unobtrusive way — to draw out all the best potential that exists within the Olympic ideal: greater understanding between peoples and races, a refoicing in human achievement, and a quest for excellence.
Those are some of the reasons why the Churches have accepted the invitation to go to the Olympic Games in Montreal this summer. And most people will be glad that they will be there.
Rev Barney Milligan