Matt Hoven
Episode 278
27 MAY 2024
This is something of a special edition. This guest was on the show before, more than a year-and-a-half ago, back on Episode 190 in September 2022. He is a professor and Kule Chair at St. Joseph’s College, a Catholic college at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada. And since we met him then – and you can go back and hear his story on that episode – this conversation instead gives us all the chance to learn all about a fascinating individual from the world of sports and our Catholic faith, because this guest just last month had a book come out that is a Number 1 New Release on Amazon in Canadian Historical Biographies, a book called, “Hockey Priest: Father David Bauer and the Spirit of the Canadian Game,” published by The Catholic University of America Press.
Notable guest quotes:
“Father David Bauer was born in 1924. He passed away in 1988. His brother played for the Boston Bruins of the NHL, and David Bauer wanted to be an NHL hockey player, but over time he instead became a priest.”
“This is a priest that had a national standing, even an international standing in the sport.”
“I might have been nine years old; I was just kind of shocked. Computing my experiences of priests as a kid, a Catholic kid, you know, I probably just received first holy communion. And what? This priest is involved in hockey at the highest level?”
“Christians have been involved in sport for centuries, but really quite heavily since the modern sports in the middle of the 19th century. And with Bauer, he provides such an excellent example of a religious person trying to make sport good for young people, trying to make it better for adults.”
“On one hand, he’s Catholic and he’s drawn from his Catholic values in his beliefs, but at the same time, he’s using that to build up sport for the common good.”
“He was very devout, praying his rosary, and he finally said – like many soldiers – he said, ‘Ya’ know, God, can you please just make me not go to war? I don’t want to go. Can you make something happen?’ He says, ‘If you do, I will become a priest. But I need this answer in the next month before I ship out’.”
“Throughout all this, Bauer finds a place where he starts to see and he really believes that he can make a difference in young people’s lives… all the ways that sport can be a benefit.”
“He believed in, I guess in the power of sport, I guess in some larger sense that God is present, wherever you go. And he believed in Christians being involved in sport over the centuries and he wanted to promote that… one phrase that he spoke about, he got it from Pope Pius XII, was, ‘Make use of technique but let the spirit prevail’.”
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