Baseball and the Gospel
In rural Nicaragua, a shared passion for baseball has had surprising results. You can support Maryknoller Ted Custer's work as he helps young and old alike.
For the better part of 30 years, Maryknoll Father Edward (Ted) Custer has stood on the sidelines in Nicaragua. In doing so, he has dwelled in the heart of a handful of communities. His mission in Rancho Grande, which he has called home since 1999, includes literacy training, parish work and horseback outreach. However, the centerpiece of Custer's work has always been baseball.
The soon-to-be 60-year-old missioner certainly didn't approach his Central America assignment as an opportunity for fun and games. After all, he never cared for baseball, and his years of high school football were behind him. But when he first arrived in 1973, forming a team seemed the best way to "batter up" the youth.
"When I came to Ocotal," Custer explains, "I noticed kids playing baseball beside the church, although those kids were not churchgoers. So I read a book about baseball and organized the kids as a team. We ran a Little League, and Ocotal won on the Nicaraguan national level."
Capturing the championship in their first year of Custer's coaching was an unexpected bonus for the players, many of whom found a sanctuary on the team that their broken homes did not provide.
This initial success sparked the direction of Custer’s mission. "The older kids and young adults took interest, several leagues were formed and hundreds of youth were involved," he says. "They were brought into the Church in this way, and went to catechism and first Communion. Many of the kids became Sandinistas later on, but they always remained loyal to the Church."
Custer remained in Nicaragua until 1979, when the Sandinista revolution came to the verge of toppling the dictator Anastasio Somoza. The missioner returned to the United States for renewal. He served the next two years with Father Fernand Gosselin in Guatemala, but civil war was swelling in this country as well. After the death of a priest and the disappearance of two nuns from the United States, receiving a death threat prompted Custer to leave Guatemala in 1981.
It wasn't long before he came back to Nicaragua. This time he put chalk lines in Terra Bona, southwest of Matagalpa and about 60 miles from Managua, the capital. "It was often compared to the Wild West, where life wasn't worth a dime," he says. "Many atrocities were committed by old cronies of Somoza, although most of them left after the revolution."
In his 11 years here, Custer renewed his baseball ministry, forming a local committee and, with the help of the Sandinista government, building a proper field. To celebrate his legacy, Terra Bona is building Father Ted Custer Stadium.
Custer next landed in San Dionisio for, as he describes, "three wonderful years." During this time he designed and built a chapel, with the financial help of German bishops through the Catholic relief agency Misereor. He wasn't ready to hang up his spikes, however, as the youth came and asked him to form a baseball team. Under Custer's management they won the municipal championship and ultimately went on to become the national youth champions of Nicaragua.
The South Bend, Ind.-born missioner then took a curveball, returning to his hometown to promote Maryknoll from there to Chicago, but five years ago he was back at bat for the children of Nicaragua. Custer started a mission in Rancho Grande, in the diocese of Matagalpa, and has a new team called Los Indios de Rancho.
"When I came to Rancho Grande, there were no youth at Mass," Custer says. "I found that strange. Now the church is full of youth!"
Maryknoll Father Richard Frank, who served in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, recently returned and joined Custer in his mission. The two priests live in a simple house surrounded by dense tropical vegetation in a part of Nicaragua that is known for its heavy rainfall.
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