Whether on the pitch, the court, or the road, sport offers lessons that extend far beyond competition. Since the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV has repeatedly praised the values that athletic life can foster, including solidarity, fraternity, discipline, mutual respect, and peace.
Sport as a Team Sport for Life
Even during lighter, off-script moments with the faithful, the Pope has returned to the theme. Speaking about his own experience with sport, Pope Leo joked that “everyone now knows” he plays tennis, before recalling that he also played American football when he was younger and later soccer with seminarians in Trujillo, where he played as a defender. Though he admitted he was “not a great goal-scorer,” he said soccer offers an important lesson: life is not a race to be lived in isolation, but a team sport in which people must learn to work together.
Sport has clearly become a topic close to the Pope’s heart. Less than a week after his election, while the 2025 Italian Open was underway in Rome, Pope Leo welcomed Italian tennis star Jannik Sinner to the Vatican, along with Sinner’s family and the president of the Italian Tennis Federation.
A Path of Encounter and Reconciliation
One of the first Jubilees Pope Leo celebrated after his election was the Jubilee of Sport. Speaking to thousands of athletes gathered in St. Peter’s Basilica for the concluding Mass, the Holy Father emphasized that sport has a unique ability to bring people together and even draw them closer to God.
He explained that sport, especially team sports, teaches cooperation, shared responsibility, and working together. These values, he said, are at the heart of God’s own life and can make sport an important means of reconciliation and encounter among peoples, communities, schools, workplaces, and families.
In the first year of his pontificate, Pope Leo has continued to meet with athletes from different disciplines. A month after his election, he welcomed 159 cyclists from 29 countries during the final stage of the Giro d’Italia. Speaking to them, he reminded the athletes that they are role models for young people around the world. He praised cycling, and sport more broadly, as important not only for the body but for the whole human person, urging them to remain attentive to body, mind, heart, and spirit.
Competing Without Hatred
Ahead of the 2026 Milano-Cortina Olympic Winter Games in northern Italy, Pope Leo issued the letter Life in Abundance, reflecting on the value of sport. In it, he praised athletics as a place where human fraternity can grow, peace can be promoted, and people can pursue what is good and holy.
That message continued after the Games, when the Pope addressed Olympic and Paralympic athletes. He thanked them for witnessing to what he called an honest and beautiful way of inhabiting the world. Through their example, he said, athletes show that it is possible to compete without hatred, to win without humiliating others, and to lose without losing oneself.
The Vatican itself also has a visible presence in the world of sport through Athletica Vaticana, the official sports association of Vatican City State. Its president, Giampaolo Mattei, said Pope Leo’s genuine love of sport gives new energy and meaning to their mission. Recalling the passage of the Giro d’Italia through the Vatican on June 1, 2025, Mattei said one could see in the Pope’s eyes that he understood sport as a means of evangelization and peace-building.
For Mattei, sport reflects what Pope Leo has emphasized in his teaching: proximity, accompaniment, and being together. These, he said, are also foundations for building peace.
Training for Holiness
Established in 2019 and overseen by the Dicastery for Culture and Education, Athletica Vaticana reflects the Church’s broader vision of sport as a path of human and spiritual growth.
Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, described sport as a metaphor for cultivating something greater than oneself. He pointed especially to the discipline required of athletes, who do not simply wake up one morning as champions but must train constantly. The same, he said, is true of the Christian life: no one wakes up and discovers they are suddenly a saint. Holiness is a continuous ascent.
At the beginning of the month, as the FIFA World Cup prepared to begin, the Vatican released the monthly “Pray with the Pope” video, prepared by the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network. For June, Pope Leo is asking Catholics around the world to pray that sport may promote peace, fraternity, and communion.
In his prayer intention, the Holy Father asked that sport always be a school of fraternity rather than empty rivalry, a space of encounter rather than exclusion, and a path of peace rather than violence.
For Pope Leo XIV, sport is not merely recreation or competition. It is a place where the human person is formed, where communities are strengthened, and where the Gospel’s call to fraternity can be lived in a visible and concrete way.
Adapted by Jacob Stein
