Commentary 26/07/13 Trust made visible

[성기화 요셉]

The FIFA World Cup offers an unexpected lesson in trust, unity and shared purpose for the Church's synodal journey

Germany and Curaçao players form a huddle to pray after their FIFA 2026 match. (Photo: X/Curaçao National Football Team)

By John Singarayar

Published: July 13, 2026 12:18 PM GMT

Updated: July 13, 2026 12:19 PM GMT

There is a moment in soccer — anyone who has watched enough of it knows the one — where a team that has been outplayed for sixty minutes suddenly finds its shape. Nothing dramatic triggers it. A midfielder drops deeper, a winger tracks back without being told, and somehow the whole structure tightens. The crowd feels it before they can name it. That is not tactics. That is trust made visible.

It keeps coming back to me as I watch the Church navigate its Synodal Path.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup arrived this summer as the largest in the tournament’s history — 48 nations and three host countries carrying the weight of it across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Borders that carry real political freight, languages that don’t always translate cleanly, histories between these three nations that remain unresolved in ways no opening ceremony could paper over. And yet the coordination happened. Not because the friction disappeared, but because everyone involved decided the goal was worth the difficulty. That is more interesting to me than anything the tournament actually produces.

The Church is making the same choice or trying to. Synodality, as Pope Francis shaped it, is not a consultation exercise or an administrative reform wearing theological clothing. Church documents describe it as the specific way the People of God journey together — gathering, listening, discerning, and eventually acting from a shared sense of mission. The rhythm he kept returning to was deliberate: listen, convene, discern, decide, eval‎uate. Then begin again. It is slow by design. What it is trying to build collapses if you rush it.

Soccer knows this. Teams that try to force the game — to push for the decisive moment before the conditions are ready — are usually the ones that concede on the counter. Patience is not passivity. It is discipline that only looks like waiting from the outside.

What the expanded World Cup keeps demonstrating is that broader participation changes what is possible, not just who is included. Forty-eight nations mean styles of play, tactical traditions, and footballing cultures that the old format quietly excluded. Those were not just extra teams. They were perspectives the tournament did not know it was missing. When voices from the margins of the Church contribute to its discernment — not as a gesture of openness, but as a genuine need — something similar happens. The community discovers things about itself it could not have found any other way. Inclusion is not charity. It is a different kind of intelligence.

There is a harder lesson too, and soccer delivers it without sentiment. At its worst, the sport reduces people to their utility. Players become assets, then liabilities, then statistics. The joy that drew them to the game gets quietly stripped away, and what remains is performance without meaning. The Church faces its own version of this — treating synodality as a mechanism for producing outcomes and mistaking procedural momentum for genuine discernment.

The real measure of this journey is not how efficiently it generates documents. It is whether the most vulnerable people in the room feel protected rather than managed. Whether truth can be spoken without cost. Whether anyone who arrived carrying something difficult leaves feeling it was actually received.

That is harder than it sounds. It is also the only version worth doing.

Unity without uniformity — the phrase appears in synodal documents, and it matters — is something soccer has been practicing for a century without calling it that. Teams keep their identity, their temperament, and their way of reading the game and still play by the same rules toward the same goal. Nobody asks Argentina to play like Germany. The differences are the point.

The Church is called to hold together communities whose experiences of faith are genuinely, sometimes painfully, different — not as a problem to resolve before the real work begins but as the terrain the journey actually crosses.

The most memorable moments in soccer are rarely the clean victories. They are the comebacks, the unexpected partnerships, the player who gives everything in a match nobody will remember and somehow shifts the shape of the whole tournament.

The Synodal Path will probably look like that too. Not a triumphant resolution, but a long accumulation of small acts of genuine listening — moments where someone stayed in the room when leaving would have been easier, where a voice that was expected to be ignored was actually heard, where trust was built so quietly that nobody could say exactly when it happened.

Just like that moment on the pitch.

The crowd feels it before they can name it.

*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.