Several accounts note that the rugby players’ team training — the experience of sustained physical effort under a coach, of collective problem-solving in a competitive context, of maintaining performance under pressure — provided a kind of psychological template for the collective survival effort. They had been trained, in a sense, to work together under difficulty. The specific difficulty of the Andes was outside any training template, but the habit of collective effort was not.
The Irish Christian Brothers’ educational tradition also produced a specific relationship with faith that was not simply decorative. The survivors’ Catholic faith was practised and genuine — they were not cultural Catholics who attended church occasionally but people for whom prayer, the sacraments, and the theological framework of Catholicism were active parts of their daily lives. The specific way they processed the most difficult ethical decision of their survival — the comparison to Eucharist, the consultation with priests after the fact, the ongoing prayers in the fuselage — reflects a religion that was real for them in the way that sustaining things are real.
The non-rugby passengers on the flight came from similar social backgrounds — Montevideo’s Catholic middle class — and brought comparable frameworks with them. The community of people in the fuselage was remarkably homogeneous in terms of social background, faith tradition, and educational formation. This homogeneity made certain things easier: shared language, shared references, shared moral frameworks.
It did not make everything easier. The group still had to work through the most difficult decisions together, and the shared background provided a framework for those discussions rather than making them unnecessary. But the foundation of shared culture and shared faith was a resource that the group drew on throughout the 72 days.