Former professional footballer Philip Mulryne was ordained a priest for the Dominican Order.
Photo: Philip McShane A former Manchester United player turned priest has cautioned against turning football into a god and treating it as a religion.
Fr Philip Mulryne OP, who spent most of his career with Norwich City, said football was fundamentally good and was a wonderful vehicle for teaching virtue but should be kept in perspective.
Speaking on St Patrick’s Podcast, the Dominican priest said football shared a lot of characteristics with religion and could be a form of worship in which there is collective adulation and chanting.
Re-bind
“Even the word religion comes from the Latin religare – to bind, to re-bind yourself. That’s what we are doing when we practice our religion towards God. We bind ourselves to God and him to us. In a sense people bind themselves together into a particular club and so it is a form of worship in some way,” he said.
However, he warned: “From our perspective [it] can be quite disordered if it takes over one’s life, affects and starts affecting one’s family life and marriages and your moods and things like that.”
“Taken to an extreme it can have a detrimental effect on one’s life. While there is a fundamental goodness in it, there is that temptation to turn it into a god.”
Fr Mulryne was in conversation about faith and football with former adoration sisters turned pilgrim guides, Martina Purdy and Elaine Kelly. The podcast is produced by The Saint Patrick Centre, Downpatrick, the world’s only permanent exhibiton to St Patrick in the world.
At the end of the podcast he was asked what he would like to ban from Ireland, in the Spirit of St Patrick. “I would like to ban Liverpool supporters,” he joked.
He added that he would also like to ban “indifference” especially around faith and would rather have an argument with someone about faith than meet with an attitude of “I don’t care.”
He told the podcast that he felt called to the priesthood when he realised that he truly believed in his Catholic Faith. He said that St Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, had much to teach us about the worship of God, the Trinity and prayer.