Fr Craig Vasek
Episode 160
21 FEB 2022
He is the Chaplain for athletics at the University of Mary, a Catholic institution in Bismarck, North Dakota, where he works full-time with 19 athletic teams and around 450 scholar-athletes. Ordained as a priest in 2010 in Minnesota, he is a graduate of the Pontifical North American College in Vatican City. Raised around sports, he began to letter in ninth grade as a multi-sport athlete in football, basketball and track & field, including having been a two-way starter for his high school football team which advanced to a state championship, AND earning a trip to the state track & field championships his senior year. He also hosts various radio shows and has even done a podcast of his own.
Notable guest quotes:
“This didn’t convert my life to the Lord at all, but it was like this sort of athletic redemption thing.”
“By the end of it I had opened my entire life before God through the priest.”
“The only thing that I knew at the end of that retreat and from that moment forward was that Jesus died for me, and He just saved my life and now I’m going to live for Him ‘cause I love Him.”
“Jesus just whispered right through me pretty, I mean, it was kind of a loud whisper, ‘This is what I want you to do’ as I’m looking at the priest.”
“To have a priest walking around in the athletic department, when I first arrived, it was kind of funny. I mean, I almost felt awkward. I’m usually fine walking around in clerics, but I almost started feeling awkward ‘cause, like, I’d come around a corner and there’d be students walking and they would immediately, like, clam up, these football players or whoever they were, they’d clam up… because they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, God just walked around the corner’.”
“The world of athletics needs conversion because these are the people that, for better or for worse, are the ministers, are the pastors, of a generation of youth… We need a conversion so that, like, we can proclaim the gospel through sport rather than trying to convert people away from sport so that we can get the gospel to ‘em.”
“The purpose of sport is not to win. The purpose of sport finds itself within the greater purpose of all human endeavors, which is that I become who God has created me to be so that I might inherit eternal life.”
“A lot of our mental health struggles, that I find, is that people don’t have any virtue, and that’s why they’re struggling. And because they’re clamoring for their identity in their sport or they’re clamoring for their identity in their friends rather than in the Lord.”
“First Corinthians chapter nine in the heart of it, ‘Run so as to win, for a crown that is imperishable rather than one that is perishable.’ It’s magnificent work by Saint Paul, he who is in Greece, understanding the Olympics, understanding that Gentile way, and then leaning in with this kind of drawing together two principles: the one of the pursuit of eternity… and then also this objective that you run instead of win.”
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