FORGIVE me Father, for I have sinned. I committed a blatant foul just outside the penalty area.
The Roman Catholic Church, whose core business is saving souls, is to set up its own department of sport. However, although the Pope was a keen athlete in his earlier days, the Vatican has no intention of entering the competitive arena with or without God on its own Serie A football side.
The new unit's stated aim is to re-inject the fundamental values of fairness, ethics, transparency and legality into professional sporting life.
Coinciding with the start of the Olympics in Athens next week, the department, called Church and Sport, has been opened as part of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Laity.
''Every time you pick up a newspaper you see how urgent it is to promote ethics in sports,'' said Father Kevin Lixey, the American priest in charge of the new department.
''Sports involve every single person. People talk about it in the coffee bars, on the buses, kids practise it. The Church has to be a part of this world.''
In a statement, the Vatican said the move had become necessary because many tendencies in sport had distanced people from its original ideals.
Since sport had become ''one of the nerve centres of contemporary culture'', the world's one billion Roman Catholics should see the world of sports as a fertile ground to spread the Church's evangelical message. The new unit would draw attention to the Pope's speeches and writings on ethics in sports and propose studies on various aspects, including doping, violence and excessive commercialism.
The Pope is said to be actively involved in the new department, expressing the wish that ''the Holy See's solicitude is felt in the world of sports''.
Its remit will include contact and dialogue with a range of sporting bodies, and will involve identifying spiritually positive role models from a variety of sports.
It is not known how many, if any, fouls the young Karol Wojtyla committed when he played football in his native Poland in the 1930s. As a goalkeeper, the transgressions of the future Pope were probably few in number.
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