Clericus Cup

Clericus Cup

Official Clericus Cup Logo
Founded	2007
Number of teams	16
Current champions	Mater Ecclesiae (2nd title)
Most successful club(s)	Redemptoris Mater (3 titles)
Website	http://www.clericuscup.it
10th Season (completed)

The Clericus Cup is an annual association football tournament contested by teams from the Roman Colleges, which are seminaries of the Catholic Church located in Rome. During the fourth season (2010), the tournament involved sixteen schools and fielded players from 65 countries, with the majority coming from Brazil, Italy, Mexico, and the United States of America. The players are normally seminarians studying to be Roman Catholic priests. A handful of players are ordained priests. The annual tournament is organized by the . The league was founded in 2007, and matches for the eleventh season will begin in early 2017.

Officially, the goal of the league is to "reinvigorate the tradition of sport in the Christian community" and has been called the "clerical equivalent of soccer’s World Cup." In other words, it exists to provide a venue for friendly athletic competition among the thousands of seminarians, representing nearly a hundred countries, who study in Rome. The league is the brainchild of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Tarcisio Bertone, who is an unapologetic football fan. While some press outlets hinted that the Church hoped to offer a brand of football free of football hooliganism, the reality is that play on the field is intensely competitive. The teams that regularly contend for the eight play-off spots are, on the field, fierce rivals.

This competition had its beginnings in 2003 when Jim Mulligan, a seminarian at the Pontifical Beda College, founded a knockout tournament involving eight international teams from the Rome Seminary Colleges. This competition was then called THE ROME CUP. The first match in the competition took place in May 2003 between the Pontifical Beda College and The Venerable English College. (It was won 5 - 2 by the English College.) Fr Jim Mulligan is now a priest in the Archdiocese of Westminster, London and continues his sporting activities carrying out sponsored abseils and parachute jumps to raise money for various Church projects.