Sporting Educational Pedagogy in Catholic Western Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries: What We Can Learn from the Past

This article presents a historiographical overview of the development of the role of sport within the Western European Catholic education in the 20th century. Since the late 19th century, combining gymnastics with new sport disciplines was a huge challenge for Catholic schools. Within the 20th century, changing political situations and educational policies by governments continuously influenced the Catholic education theories and practice. Catholic schools also depended on the Holy See’s policy concerning education and its attitude toward sport. As the Catholic pedagogy is part of a broader theological concept of the human being, and the latter changed in the 1950s/1960’s, this pedagogy also developed. Meanwhile, an unstoppable evolution of the importance of physical education and its “sportification” within the European Catholic school curricula after the Second World War, opened new possibilities.