“I saw that the desire of the Churches for this event of the World Cup to be a festival of peoples actually happened. There was a great involvement of the public in every corner of the earth. The atmosphere created in Germany was also very positive. German friends told me that, perhaps for the first time since the war, Germany felt itself free to express its own patriotism without calling to mind very sad pages in its history”, remarked Monsignor Aldo Giordano, general secretary of the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe (CCEE), in an interview with Vatican Radio on the World Cup, which ended in Berlin on 9 July with Italy’s victory over France in the final penalty shoot out. Commenting on the commitment made by the German Church to the World Cup, Giordano said, after hearing the reactions of the German bishops, that the result was “positive”: “First of all, there were events, such as the festival of peoples at the start of the championship or the ecumenical celebration, which attracted a huge participation, up to 20/30,000 people and so right from the start once could sense the desire to turn this events into a meeting between the different cultures and different religions. A second aspect was the ecumenical one. There were many ecumenical initiatives, and there was also a tremendous effort to provide pastoral assistance. Those who went to Germany for the World Cup were struck by the warmth of the hospitality”.
