The Patron Saint of Soccer: Who Is St. Luigi Scrosoppi?
The World Cup has a winner. Football also has a patron saint, and he is a bit of a surprise.
The World Cup has a winner, the confetti is swept up, and somewhere a small child is already asking to be the next star. So here is a good question for the week: is there a patron saint of soccer? There is. His name is Luigi Scrosoppi, and he never kicked a ball in his life.
A priest from Udine
Luigi Scrosoppi was born in 1804 in Udine, in the Friuli region of northern Italy, into a family that gave the Church all three of its sons. He and both his brothers became priests. He was ordained in 1827 and joined the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, the community founded by the cheerful sixteenth-century saint who believed you could serve God gladly and among children rather than apart from the world.
That suited Scrosoppi exactly. He spent his life on orphans. With his brother he took over a house for poor and abandoned girls in Udine, and he did not only pray over them. He fed and clothed and schooled them, and when there was not enough, he went out into the streets of Udine to beg for bread so the children would eat. To carry the work past his own lifetime he founded a congregation of sisters, named for St. Cajetan of Thiene, the patron of providence and of work. They are still going.
How a nineteenth-century priest became the saint of football
Here is the part that makes people smile. Scrosoppi was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2001, honored for a life of charity, and the honor had nothing to do with sport.
The football connection came later, and it is genuinely recent. In 2010 an initiative from football fans around the Wörthersee in Austria proposed that the game ought to have a patron of its own, since it did not have one. Working with the Church authorities and the archbishop of Udine, a bishop formally named Scrosoppi patron of footballers at a service that August. The reasoning was not that he played, but that his life stood for the things the sport is meant to build in young people: fairness, perseverance, discipline, and heart. A saint who spent everything on children was an easy fit for a game that so many children love.
So he is less the saint who scored and more the saint whose virtues a good team is asked to imitate. There is something fitting in that. The values that win a dressing room are not so different from the ones that filled an orphanage.
Where the story comes to us from
We like to say where things come from. The life is well documented: a priest of Udine, three brothers in orders, decades among orphan girls, a congregation founded, a canonization in 2001. The patronage of football is documented too, and it is simply young, a devotional appointment made in our own century rather than an ancient tradition. His feast day is April 3, which lands in the middle of many a league season.
Keeping his feast
If your household runs on soccer, his day is a nice one to notice. There is no charm in it that bends a match, and the saints would be the first to say so. What Scrosoppi offers is better company than a lucky jersey: the example of a man who was fair, who kept going when the money ran out, who gave everything he had to the children in front of him, and who is now, by a happy and modern accident, the one you can ask to watch over the beautiful game.
A saint like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of Saints by Mail: printed, reverent, and mailed to your door. A thoughtful gift for godchildren, families, and anyone who loves the saints.