Faith and football lead to love and family for a young couple
Following their wedding on August 16, 2025, in Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Indianapolis, Megan and Wes Short spent part of their honeymoon at the Vatican, taking part in a general audience with Pope Leo XIV in which he blessed recently married couples. As Megan wore her wedding dress and Wes his tuxedo, the couple presented the pope with a shirt from the JP Flag Football League in Indianapolis, a T-shirt that featured a quote from the pope during the Jubilee of Sport in 2025. (Submitted photo)
(First in an occasional series about young adults who embrace their Catholic faith.)
By John Shaughnessy
While football can divide some couples, the love of the sport helped lead Megan and Wes Short to get married—and also to an encounter with Pope Leo XIV.
The couple first met in 2021 when they both played in the JP Flag Football League in Indianapolis, a league named after St. John Paul II that was created with the goal of connecting young adults and helping them grow in friendship and faith.
Three years after Wes and Megan began dating in 2022, they married in Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Indianapolis on August 16, 2025. The following day, as the coordinators of the football league, they set up for the games and played in their own, leading to an unfortunate twist.
“Megan tore her ACL that weekend,” Wes recalls. “She was a trooper and still went on our honeymoon with the injury and got around Europe each day.”
The honeymoon led to their encounter with Pope Leo during a general audience at the Vatican in which he blessed recently married couples.
With Megan in her wedding dress and Wes in his tuxedo, they showed the pope their football league T-shirt that featured a quote from his homily on the Jubilee of Sports earlier that year: “No one is born a champion, no one is born a saint. It is daily training in love that brings us closer to final victory and enables us to contribute to the building of a new world.”
“It was a pretty brief interaction with Pope Leo but still very memorable,” Wes says. “He was intrigued by the shirt and asked where we were from, and he commented on how many American couples had made the trip to see him in Rome.
“It was pretty surreal to shake his hand and extremely special because earlier in the week we did the Scavi tour of St. Peter’s catacombs where we saw the bones of
St. Peter. To think that the man we met was in a direct lineage to the original pope, and that he grew up and lived in Chicago for a good portion of his life connected us to our faith in a very material way. It is definitely something we will remember for the rest of our lives.”
The couple’s love also soon led to building a new family. They learned in January of 2026 that Megan was pregnant with their first child.
“We welcomed Madeline Sophie Short on September 6,” Megan notes about their daughter’s recent birth. “Madeline is named after St. Madeleine Sophie, who founded the Society of the Sacred Heart. St. Madeleine also has a statue in St. Peter’s Basilica, which we both consider a special place for our faith and a place we both hope to travel back to for Mass someday.”
Theirs is a story that features the love they have for each other, the love of their faith, the love that has led them to start a family, and the love of a sport.
The Criterion invited the Shorts, who are both 30, to share their thoughts on each of those loves. Here are the perspectives they shared.
Q. Talk about how your faith guides you as a couple.
Wes: “Faith created a strong base to build our relationship on, and it is something that has brought us together from the start of our dating journey. We would go to Mass as a couple and our faith community was a great support to our relationship growing to what it is today.”
Q. How did the JP Flag Football League get started, and how do you hope it helps connect young adult Catholics to each other?
Megan: “Moses Tinio started the league in 2021 and modeled it after Kansas City’s ‘City on a Hill Catholic’ sports league. When Moses moved back to Kansas in 2024, he asked us to take over the league. We hope the league creates a unique place for young adults to meet and grow in fellowship with each other.
“It is great to see the league grow and change throughout the few years that we have been running it. It has been great to see some of the players start families and see the league mature with families bringing their young children. There are also close to 25 new players in the league this year, and it has been a joy to offer a fun place for new members of the community to build relationships.”
Q. Besides the football part of the league, is there a faith element to it as well?
Megan: “Teams gather in prayer before and after every game, and our weekly e-mails promote parish events and volunteer opportunities. In the future, we hope to host a league Mass. We also host a yearly cookout to provide another opportunity to share in the faith community.”
Q. How has your involvement in the young adult Catholic community made a difference in your life, your faith and your relationships?
Megan: “The young adult Catholic community really opened my world in 2021 after moving to Indianapolis just before COVID. It was very challenging as a new college grad in 2019, moving to a new city and only really knowing people from work. When I saw the flag football league registration in the bulletin at St. Joan of Arc Church, I didn’t realize it would open the door to so many friendships and faith opportunities here in Indy.”
Wes: “It has also given us such a great way to volunteer in our community and to become more outspoken about our faith. Neither of us are especially extroverted, but this league has pulled that out of us and helped us to meet so many great people in the community we wouldn’t have otherwise.”
Q. How would you describe your relationship with Christ, and how has that had an impact on you?
Wes: “Our relationship with Christ has deepened coming out of college as we have both learned more about our faith, partly through the Indy Catholic community. We have both developed a deep reverence and awe when it comes to the Eucharist and the eucharist miracles that were spotlighted by St. Carlo Acutis.
“It is what we share most with our friends who are not Catholic, and what we turn to the most when going through a tough time or rough patch in our faith. To know that Christ is present in the Eucharist each day and is continually offering his Sacred Heart to us is special and something that strengthens our relationship with Christ.”
Q. What is your hope for your daughter, Madeline, from a faith standpoint?
Wes: “We hope that we can raise her to have a strong understanding of her faith and to know that she is not only deeply loved by us but by God as well. We hope that she will embrace her faith through the example we set for her as we live our faith as an example.”
Q. What would you tell other young adults about how your Catholic faith makes a difference in your life?
Wes: “I would say that our Catholic faith is a great guide for our lives both in the Catholic community and in all aspects of our life. We both work professionally and strive to carry our faith with us into those settings as well.
“Our Catholic faith provides guideposts on how to treat others, what to pursue in our life, and what is really important in our lives. It also provides us comfort in hard times and gives us something to fall back on when life gets tough.”
(For anyone interested in participating in the JP Flag Football League next year, send an e-mail to youngadults@sjoa.org and ask to be added to the flag football email list.) †
