Pope to Olympic athletes: Sport must keep human person at its centre

Vatican, April 9, 2026: Pope Leo XIV met with a delegation of Italian Olympic and Paralympic athletes who took part in the Milan-Cortina Games, highlighting the importance of sport as a space for encounter and self-mastery.

By Devin Watkins

Following the conclusion of the Milan-Cortina Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in mid-March, Pope Leo XIV received Italian athletes who had competed in the world’s leading sporting event.

In his address, the Pope noted that the competition conveyed a “noble human, cultural, and spiritual message” across the globe.

“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.”

He added that while athletes displayed their well-trained bodies, they also revealed personal stories marked by sacrifice, discipline, and perseverance.

“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 also commended the athletes’ solidarity with the many men and women—family members and team supporters—who accompanied them throughout their sporting journey.

He said that sport contributes to the formation of character and calls for a strong spirituality, as athletes learn to understand their bodies without idolising them and to manage 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.

He further explained that sport teaches that real success lies in the quality of relationships, mutual respect, and shared joy.

Pope Leo XIV meets with Italian Olympic and Paralympic athletes on April 9, 2026 (@VATICAN MEDIA)

Recalling his letter Life in Abundance, issued ahead of the Olympic Games on February 6, 2026, Pope Leo said that an abundant life is achieved through harmony between the body and the inner self.

He also referred to the ancient tradition of the Olympic truce, noting that its significance remains relevant in today’s world marked by polarisation, 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 cautioned that sport carries the temptation to win at any cost, including through doping, or to give in to market forces that elevate athletes to celebrity status or reduce them to mere images or numbers.

Pope Leo expressed gratitude to the Olympic and Paralympic athletes for demonstrating that it is possible to compete without hatred, to win without humiliating others, and to 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 referred to the presence of the Cross of Athletes, which, he said, gathers the prayers, expectations, hopes, fears, and sufferings of all athletes under the sign of the Risen Christ.

“I entrust you with a mission,” he said, “to continue ensuring that the human person remains at the centre of sport in all its expressions.”

Courtesy: Vatican News