Milan-Cortina, Pope: “No propaganda logic or fanatical cheering in sport”

Rome, Feb. 6 (LaPresse) – “When sport is bent to logics of power, propaganda or national supremacy, its universal vocation is betrayed. Major sporting events should be places of encounter and mutual admiration, not stages for the affirmation of political or ideological interests.” This was written by Pope Leo XIV in ‘La vita in abbondanza, sul Valore dello sport’, a letter published on the occasion of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympic Games. In the text, the Pope voices opposition to cheering that “turns into fanaticism” and to stadiums that “become places of confrontation rather than encounter”. “Here sport does not unite but polarizes, it does not educate but miseducates, because it reduces personal identity to a blind and oppositional belonging. This is particularly worrying when cheering is linked to other forms of political, social and religious discrimination and is used indirectly to express deeper forms of resentment and hatred,” the Pope further writes.