By Devin Watkins
Following the close of the Milan-Cortina Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in mid-March, Pope Leo XIV met with the Italian athletes who participated in the world’s premiere sporting event.
In his address, the Pope said the competition spread a “noble human, cultural, and spiritual message” throughout the world.
“Sport, when it is lived authentically, does not remain merely a performance,” he said. “It is a form of language, a story made of gestures, effort, waiting, falls, and new beginnings.”
Athletes showcased their well-trained bodies but also their stories of sacrifice, discipline, and perseverance, he added.
“In the Paralympic competitions in particular,” he said, “we observed how limitation can become a place of revelation: not something that hinders the person, but something that can be transformed, even transfigured, into rediscovered qualities.”
Pope Leo praised the athletes’ solidarity with the many men and women of their families and teams who supported their sporting journey.
Sport, he said, helps mature character and requires a firm spirituality, as athletes learn to know their body without idolizing it and to govern their emotions.
“Training the mind together with the limbs, sport is authentic when it remains human, that is, when it remains faithful to its first vocation: to be a school of life and of talent,” he said.
Sport teaches us that true success is measured in the quality of our relationships, mutual esteem, and shared joy, added the Pope.
Recalling his letter Life in Abundance, released ahead of the Olympic Games on February 6, 2026, Pope Leo said an abundant life achieves harmony between corporeality and interiority.
He recalled the ancient tradition of the Olympic truce, saying its value rings true in our time marked by polarization, rivalry, and conflict.
“By your presence,” he told the athletes, “you made visible this possibility of peace as a prophecy that is anything but rhetorical: breaking the logic of violence in order to promote that of encounter.”
At the same time, he added, sport carries the temptation to win at all cost, even through doping, or to succumb to market forces that raise athletes to celebrity status or reduces them to an image or number.
Pope Leo thanked the Olympic and Paralympic athletes for their witness that it is possible to compete without hatred, win without humiliating others, and lose without losing one’s sense of self-worth.
“Sport, if lived well,” he said, “becomes a laboratory of reconciled humanity, where diversity is not a threat, but a richness.”
In conclusion, Pope Leo XIV noted the presence of the Cross of Athletes, which he said gathers the prayers, expectations, hopes, fears, and sufferings of all athletes under the banner of the Risen Christ.
“I entrust you with a mission,” he said, “to continue ensuring that the human person remains at the center of sport in all its expressions.” – Vatican News
