NEW YORK — By the time this story goes to press, father Roberto “Tito” Serrano will have thrown the first pitch for the May 20 Miami Marlins v. Atlanta Braves baseball game, kicking off a summer-long evangelistic mission to all 30 Major League Baseball fields alongside Father Casey Cole.
The journey took eight years for the two Franciscan priests, who dubbed themselves the “Bleacher Brothers”. It was inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi.
“Years ago one of the brothers told us that [St. Francis of Assissi] didn’t necessarily go to churches to preach,” Cole said. node. “He went to the streets of the city, he went where the people were and preached the language they could understand.”
“People don’t necessarily congregate on city streets anymore, so being baseball fans, I thought it would be great to go to stadiums to meet in the other cathedral, the other place of cult of sorts, this summer,” he continued. .
From Miami, Cole and Serrano travel to Tampa for a Rays game where Cole will get his chance to throw the first pitch, which he describes as the “cherry on top” of the trip. For the first leg of the journey, the “Bleacher Brothers” will drive in a rental truck through the South, Northeast and Midwest. Then they will fly to the West Coast and visit the remaining 10 baseball diamonds, ending the trip on July 30 with a Colorado Rockies game.
With evangelism as their goal, at each stop they will be doing more than just watching a football game. In each state, they have scheduled events in schools, parishes and dioceses. Cole said some of the talks will focus on vocations and “inspire people to be faithful citizens and engage in the world.” Others will focus on the Beatitudes and how Cole believes “they are the answer to a divided and hopeless world.”
“A lot of people have come to us on this topic, which is how to be reconcilers, and how we make sense of the pain and the afflictions that we’ve been through with COVID-19, and the racial upheavals and all those things,” said Cole.
Of course, they will also talk about baseball. Cole noted that America’s pastime has “spiritual things about patience, about brotherhood, about tradition, that we can easily connect to church, to life, and to faith.”
Serrano added that the goal is also to meet people at ball games. He imagines them walking around the stadium and creating opportunities to meet as many people as possible, noting that their brown Franciscan ways will make them stand out.
“We want to make ourselves available,” Serrano said. node. “We want people to come to us and be curious because we are curiously dressed, so we want them to come to us, and that gives us an opening to share our life, to share our brotherhood and to share the message of gospel in another way.”
Cole generally described the trip as an evangelistic mission.
“‘We’re on a mission from God,'” he said with a laugh, a reference to the movie ‘The Blue Brothers’, noting the parallel with ‘the Bleacher Brothers’.
“It also fits very well with the synodal process of listening and reaching out to people and people who don’t come to churches and see what’s wrong, why aren’t they coming, what are they struggling with. and how can we agree to do them a favor,” he said.
In baseball terms, Cole is a Chicago Cubs fan and Serrano is an Arizona Diamondbacks fan. They each said that Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, and Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, were high on their list of things to do for the summer.
Cole also pointed to a four-day period from late June to July where his father will be flying out. Together they will go to a St. Louis Cardinals game. Then they will travel to Iowa to go to the Field of Dreams site to see it and do a catch. From there, they will travel to Wrigley Field in Chicago to watch the Cubs play.
“That three or four day period is going to be pretty surreal,” Cole said.
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