When the news story broke that a Canadian children’s soccer league, in order to promote self-esteem and eliminate the negative consequences of competition, was removing the soccer ball from its games, a tidal wave of disbelief and indignation inundated online comment boxes. The story turned out to be a CBC radio satire mistakenly picked up by several mainline newspapers as real news, but the attention given it points to the truth that competition is healthy. We build character when called to excellence and rewarded for it, and we learn humility by failing on occasion.

In this Easter season, when we can be tempted to rest on our laurels after the rigors of Lent, we may take as a meditation the words of the 16th-century Dominican St. Catherine de Ricci: “Holy rivalry is a thirst for the heavenly spring to which we must hasten with great vigor. If this rivalry were in Christian hearts, how many people would come to that desired reward, which now only a few people are able to reach. My dearest children, let us so strive that we may run and obtain it (1 Cor 9:24).”

Daily life continues after Easter, but Christ’s resurrection is far from an excuse to grow slack in our cultivation of virtue and of prayer; it should rather provide us with great encouragement to apply ourselves more assiduously and with greater love — because Christ has won the victory! We will still be tempted, and we will still sin, but He has overcome both temptation and sin, and He wants us to share His triumph.



The Christian life is a struggle, but it is a joyful struggle, because every supernatural help is available to us if we but ask for it. In each new day that dawns, our good Father has planned exactly the events necessary to help us grow in love: difficulties and also the graces necessary to meet them. Our guardian angels coach us along the way, prompting in us holy inspirations to choose rightly. The saints cheer us on from heaven, interceding for us in order that we may eventually join them there. The sacrament of penance binds up our wounds; the Eucharist sends divine nourishment coursing through us. And at the end awaits a trophy infinitely more valuable than any gold medal or cup or check.

Christ said, “Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find.” What a tremendous exhortation! We should ask boldly for the graces we desire, for the charity, the humility, the patience of the greatest saints — and for greater than theirs! Our Lord told St. Faustina that He is pleased when we make even outrageous requests for spiritual goods: what request of ours can exceed God’s capability or generosity?

“We must run this race,” St. Catherine de Ricci reminds us: Christ suffered and rose for our sake and “signed our foreheads with his sacred blood, so that we may approach the eternal Father with this sign and tell him that his only-begotten Son paid our debt.”

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Sr. Maria Veritas Marks is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.