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Vatican City, 2 June 2026.
A few days before one of the largest sporting events, the FIFA World Cup, Pope Leo XIV dedicates his June prayer intention to the values of sports, “to build communion and fraternity in history.” Through the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network’s “Pray with the Pope” campaign, the Pope encourages the faithful each month to join in praying for his intentions. Therefore, in June, he invites us to pray that sports might be a path of peace, encounter, and dialogue between cultures, promoting respect, solidarity, and the spirit of overcoming limits.
Pope Leo begins his prayer by invoking the “Lord of life” and giving thanks “for the gift of sport, for those who glorify God through the exercise of their bodies, for the friendships born on the field and the joy of playing as a team.” The Pope prays that sports might always be “a school of fraternity, not of empty rivalry, a space of encounter, not exclusion, a path of peace, not violence.” He also expresses how sports have “a universal language that brings cultures together, unites peoples, and sows respect, solidarity and personal growth.” Lastly, the Pope prays to God that his “Spirit never be lacking in us, making us one team, united with you to build communion and fraternity in history.”
Sports as away to build peace
Littlemore than a year into his pontificate, this is not the first time that Pope Leo has placed the values of sports before us. In fact, on June 15, 2025, during the Jubilee of Sport held in Rome, he spoke about sports as a “means of building peace, since, as a training-ground of fairness and respect for others, it fosters a culture of encounter and fraternity.” In his homily during the Mass he celebrated that same day, the Pope also highlighted that “in a society marked by solitude, where radical individualism has shifted the emphasis from ‘us’ to ‘me,’ resulting in a deficit of real concern for others, sport – especially team sports –teaches the value of cooperating, working together and sharing.” It thus becomes an important means of reconciliation and encounter between peoples.
More recently, this past April 2026, when he met with the Milan-Cortina Olympic and Paralympic Athletes. Pope Leo XIV repeated this same vision, “At the present time, so marked by polarization, rivalry and conflicts that escalate into devastating wars, your commitment takes on an even greater value: sport can and must truly become a space for encounter! Not a show of strength, but an exercise in relationship. ”For the Pope, athletes are called to be witnesses of a universal language and “to compete without hating each other…to win without humiliating…to lose without losing oneself.”
Pope Francis, too, in The Pope Video of August 2016 dedicated to “Sports, a culture of encounter,” demonstrated how sports can become a “vehicle of fraternity” between peoples from different countries.
“Abridge leading to dialogue to overcomes borders, languages, and ideologies”
Infact, the cultural roots of sports as an instrument of peace has acenturies-old history, beginning with the Olympic Games themselves. The tradition of the Olympic Truce known in Ancient Greece asthe Ekecheiria began in the ninth century B.C. as a treaty between city-states thatwere almost constantly engaged in conflict to guarantee safe participation inthe games, thus transforming sports into a bridge promoting dialogue andpeaceful coexistence. Recallingthis spirit, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) revived this concept inthe 1990s so as to “to harness the power of sport to promote peace, dialogueand reconciliation more broadly.”
The international director of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, Father Cristóbal Fones, states, “Sports provide one of the most unique spaces where humanity is in contact with truth. It is abridge leading to dialogue to overcome borders, languages, and ideologies. On the court, on the field, in the pool, people from different cultures and countries share the struggle, the sacrifice, and the joy of victory, and the pain of defeat. Sports teach us perseverance, discipline, the value of work well done, humility when facing one’s own limits. Perhaps what is most beautiful is that they remind us that no one ever wins alone. We need others. This is why the Pope is inviting us to pray so that these deeply human values—respect, solidarity, overcoming personal limits—do not stay on the playing field, but transform the way we live together in the world.”
