Papal Colors Will Decorate Holy Father’s Skateboard

By Beth Griffin

When Pope Benedict XVI returns to the Vatican, he’ll be toting a gift not generally associated with an 81-year-old pontiff. He’ll take home the “official papal skateboard,” a gift from the youths of New York.

The gift and a contest to design it started with a remark made by a teen member of the skateboard club at St. Elizabeth parish in Washington Heights, a hilly neighborhood in northern Manhattan.

Father Peter Pomposello is a skateboarder and the parochial vicar at St. Elizabeth. As he recalled it, he was talking about the papal visit with the club members and they began to ask him questions about why the pope was coming and what he would do in New York.

“I said, ‘We pray with him and we give him gifts,’” he said, “and one kid, without missing a beat, said, ‘Let’s give him a skateboard!’”

Father Pomposello agreed, to the surprise of the boarders. But he sees it as a vehicle for evangelization. “It’s no secret that skateboard culture does not have a clean image,” he said in an interview. “In their age of cell phones and iPods, this is meeting the kids where they’re at.”

Father Pomposello secured the necessary permissions and began to advertise online a contest to design the underside of the skateboard. It was open to youth ages 11 to 18 who live in the Archdiocese of New York. The rules limited the colors to papal gold, black, red and white and encouraged the use of symbols such as the papal visit logo and the visit’s motto, “Christ Our Hope.”

Some 76 eligible entries were received. Father Pomposello said that he had to decline entries from Europe and U.S. cities beyond the Archdiocese, “because this is meant to be a gift from the children of New York.”

Father Pomposello hoped the winner would be announced April 6; entries were being judged on the basis of creativity and originality. The winner will get three tickets to the papal youth rally April 19 at St. Joseph Seminary in Yonkers.

Father Pomposello said that replicas of the winning papal skateboard would be available for sale.