Pope Leo XIV: Sport Forges Cooperation and Holiness
About 7,000 Wildcats and Fighting Irish filled the Paul VI Audience Hall on All Saints' Eve ahead of Sunday’s Rome tip-off.
On Saturday, October 31, 2026, Pope Leo XIV received about 7,000 athletes, students, faculty, staff, alumni, and supporters of Villanova University and the University of Notre Dame in the Paul VI Audience Hall. The groups are in Rome for the Eternal City Tip-Off, men’s and women’s college basketball games set for Sunday, November 1. Villanova’s president, Father Peter Donohue, and Notre Dame’s president, Father Robert Dowd, were among those present.
Recalling the “Go Irish” cheer he heard growing up on Chicago’s South Side, the Pope joked that, having graduated from Villanova, he “doesn’t take sides.”
Sport as a School of Fraternity
He told the pilgrims that athletics, “by acting as a concrete means of bringing people together,” can teach “the values of cooperation and mutual sharing.” That lesson, he said, “is increasingly necessary in an age marked by the distance that can be created by technology.”
The Church, especially through recent popes, has proposed “a vision of sport centered on the dignity of the human person, on his or her integral development, on education and on relationships with others,” underscoring sport’s universal value in promoting “fraternity, solidarity and peace.” He pointed to the apostolic letter Life in Abundance of February 6, 2026.
“In any competition,” he added, “the members of two teams, even when they have a competitive rivalry, are certainly not enemies.” He expressed hope that, despite the competitive nature of college basketball, players and fans of both sides would find opportunities in Rome to get to know one another.
Training for an Imperishable Crown
Because the audience fell on the eve of All Saints’ Day, the Holy Father recalled that God “calls everyone to be a saint.” “No one is born a champion, just as no one is born a saint. Rather, holiness requires a daily training in love,” he said, invoking Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati, patron of athletes, and citing Saint Paul’s image in 1 Corinthians 9 of Christians called “to run in the race of life with the objective of winning an imperishable crown of glory.”
“Our true goal, beyond emerging victorious in any one event, is to win the prize of everlasting life,” he concluded. He entrusted the pilgrims to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas of Villanova, and Blessed Basil Moreau.