VATICAN CITY: The Vatican served up tea and cucumber sandwiches on Tuesday as it launched its own cricket club, challenging the Church of England to a match and vowing to take on Indian Hindu and Muslim clerics.

With the coat of arms of St. Peter’s as its symbol and the Vatican yellow-and-white flag as its colors, the club will unite cricket-mad priests and seminarians — and perhaps eventually nuns.

“The team will be strong enough to beat anyone in the world,” said Father Theodore Mascarenhas, an Indian priest and a mean off-spin bowler, who is the chairman of the new St. Peter’s Cricket Club.

The initiative brings together the sporting madness of hundreds of clerics — mainly from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — with a Vatican aim to find new ways to spread the word.

“This represents the council’s desire to go to the peripheries of the world that Pope Francis has spoken of,” said Monsignor Melchor Sanchez, who is the club’s honorary president and an official at the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture.

Sanchez said cricket could be a way of engaging with other denominations and religions, saying he hoped the Church of England would form its own team and the two could square off on Lord’s cricket ground in London — the “home of cricket.”

The planned “ecumenical” game could be in September next year — the month chosen because it is a time of holiday for seminarians in Rome.

The Church of England responded with a statement from the Bishop of Shrewsbury Mark Rylands, a known cricket enthusiast, who said he looked forward “to welcoming them to England as brothers.”

“I’m confident that it will be possible for an annual fixture to be played in the spirit of ecumenism. To that end I hope we can keep any sledging to a minimum and that neutral umpires will not be necessary,” he said, using the term for verbal intimidation of players.

The Vatican club said it was also looking at matches against teams of Hindu and Muslim trainee clerics who would come over from India.

“I never imagined cricket was so popular in Rome!” said Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who is informally known as the Vatican’s “culture minister.”