At 12:30pm today, in the Sala Clementina at the Vatican Apostolic Palace, the Holy Father, Pope Francis received in audience a delegation of athletes from the Special Olympics who will represent Italy in the World Games in Los Angeles from July 25 to August 2 of this year.
Dear friends,
Welcome, and thank you for coming to this meeting before the World Games in Los Angeles, in which you will participate at the end of July. I hope it will be a wonderful adventure!
The world of sports usually looks to the Church with trust and attention, for it knows that together we can work toward restoring the true meaning to sports: an educational meaning, recreational, entertaining; and also its cultural and social dignity. You know this very well, you who have chosen sports and who seek in it an experience of promotion and growth, even as you face a condition of fragility and limitation. In fact, the Special Olympics involves - as one of its Statutes - people with different abilities, and it helps to improve the quality of their lives.
It is beautiful and significant that young people and adults find the practice of sport and participation in international competition to be a stimulus for living their lives to the full. It certainly is a challenge, and you have accepted this challenge. You are taking the field! I encourage you to continue in your commitment to help each other to discover your potential and to love life, to appreciate it with all its limits and above all with its beauty. Don't ever forget beauty: the beauty of life, the beauty of sports, the beauty that God has given to each of you. Sports is a very suitable path to discovering beauty, a path to appreciating it, to going outside of ourselves and to get involved. It helps us to learn how to participate, to overcome and to struggle together. All this helps us to become active members of society and also of the Church; it helps society itself and the Church to overcome every form of discrimination and exclusion.
Please, stay faithful to the ideals of sports! Don't ever allow yourselves to become infected with a false culture of sports, or with a thirst for economic success, for victory at any cost, for individualism. We all need to rediscover amateur sports, the gift of gratitude, sports for the sake of sports. We all need however to care for and to defend sports as an experience of human values, of competitions, yes, but in the context of leisure, in solidarity. Dignity for every person: always! No one should ever feel excluded from the practice of sports. In order to achieve this goal, we need generous action in concord with various institutional and social realities.
I hope you experience the upcoming World Championships in a joyous way, passionate yet serene. Have fun and make beautiful friendships with brothers and sisters from all over the world! Upon each of you, your families and all those who will accompany you on this sports adventure, I invoke the blessing of the Lord. And you, please, don't forget to pray for me. Thank you.
Speech of the Holy Father, Pope Francis
for the meeting with Special Olympians
Dear friends,
Welcome, and thank you for coming to this meeting before the World Games in Los Angeles, in which you will participate at the end of July. I hope it will be a wonderful adventure!
The world of sports usually looks to the Church with trust and attention, for it knows that together we can work toward restoring the true meaning to sports: an educational meaning, recreational, entertaining; and also its cultural and social dignity. You know this very well, you who have chosen sports and who seek in it an experience of promotion and growth, even as you face a condition of fragility and limitation. In fact, the Special Olympics involves - as one of its Statutes - people with different abilities, and it helps to improve the quality of their lives.
It is beautiful and significant that young people and adults find the practice of sport and participation in international competition to be a stimulus for living their lives to the full. It certainly is a challenge, and you have accepted this challenge. You are taking the field! I encourage you to continue in your commitment to help each other to discover your potential and to love life, to appreciate it with all its limits and above all with its beauty. Don't ever forget beauty: the beauty of life, the beauty of sports, the beauty that God has given to each of you. Sports is a very suitable path to discovering beauty, a path to appreciating it, to going outside of ourselves and to get involved. It helps us to learn how to participate, to overcome and to struggle together. All this helps us to become active members of society and also of the Church; it helps society itself and the Church to overcome every form of discrimination and exclusion.
Please, stay faithful to the ideals of sports! Don't ever allow yourselves to become infected with a false culture of sports, or with a thirst for economic success, for victory at any cost, for individualism. We all need to rediscover amateur sports, the gift of gratitude, sports for the sake of sports. We all need however to care for and to defend sports as an experience of human values, of competitions, yes, but in the context of leisure, in solidarity. Dignity for every person: always! No one should ever feel excluded from the practice of sports. In order to achieve this goal, we need generous action in concord with various institutional and social realities.
I hope you experience the upcoming World Championships in a joyous way, passionate yet serene. Have fun and make beautiful friendships with brothers and sisters from all over the world! Upon each of you, your families and all those who will accompany you on this sports adventure, I invoke the blessing of the Lord. And you, please, don't forget to pray for me. Thank you.
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