Rome (Italy). On 14 and 15 June 2025, athletes, sports players, coaches, associations, sports leaders, and all those involved in the world of sport, were the protagonists of the jubilee event dedicated to them.
From the Press Conference, held on 11 June, Card. José Tolentino de Mendonça, Prefect of the Department for Culture and Education, the organizing body, expressed the desire to give life to an event that, “more than a competition program”, connected sport with culture and education, rediscovering its essence, that is “a great human experience of the search for meaning, of the positive maturation of the importance of the collective and of the community.” The Prefect also highlighted the importance of sport in transmitting values, especially to young people, and the high responsibility that sport represents for society, hoping that the Jubilee event could awaken in athletes and in the wide public concerned the awareness of being “missionaries of hope”.
It is the same encouragement reiterated by Pope Leo XIV at the end of the Catechesis held in the Vatican Basilica on Saturday 14 June, in the presence of participants in the Jubilee of Sport:
“The time that you will spend together in these days will offer you a valuable opportunity to reflect on the relationship between sport and the virtue of hope. If we think about it, sport is animated by hope, in the sense that it involves commitment to achieve a goal, constantly trying to improve our performance and learning to work with others as a team. At the same time, our deepest hopes challenge us to make the world of sport an arena in which authentic human and Christian values can be exercised and communicated to others for the construction of a better world. In the spirit of this Jubilee, therefore, I encourage you and the participants in the International Motorcycling Rally to be, each in its own way, “missionaries of hope”, working to achieve a culture of ever greater solidarity, acceptance, and fraternity.”
At the end of the Audience, at the Auditorium Augustinian, there was the International Conference, “The Momentum of Hope”, organized by the Dicastery. Among the voices of athletes of international caliber, including Sérgio Conceição, Portuguese footballer and coach; Letsile Tebogo, athlete from Botswana, Olympic gold in the 200 meters in Paris; Amelio Castro Grueso, champion for the Paralympic fencing; and various actors and realities of the practice and of the sports ministry, including Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and also called was Sister Francesca Scibetta, Daughter of Mary Help of Christians, Italian referent of the Salesian Youth Sports Centers (PGS).
In the discussion moderated by Novella Callegaris, swimming legend and journalist, and Alessandro Gisotti, Deputy Editorial Director of the Dicastery for Communication, Sister Francesca highlighted the link between sport and evangelization that emerges from the childhood of St. John Bosco, who through play, healthy fun, and good example of life led his companions to God and prayer. These first experiences will bring him as a young priest, to gather the children in the Turin of the Industrial Revolution, to the first oratory, and to start his educational and evangelizing action by undertaking with them a path of integral education, according to the style of the Preventive System.
“As PGS, therefore as a sports promotion entity, we bring forward the theme of hope. I steal an expression from a South Korean philosopher, ‘hope is the ability of everyone to work on something because they feel it’s right to do so and not because they think that it will bring success.’ Through sport, there are fundamental values for building a different society,” concluded Sister Francesca.
After the Conference, she joined the boys and girls at the “Village of Sport” – promoted and organized by the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI), with the participation of the Sports Federations, Disciplines Associate, Promotion bodies and associations, and the involvement of numerous sports disciplines. At the PGS Region Lazio stand, they were engaged in small competitions and performances in fit-walking, athletics, and othello games.
The game itself, from the First Reading (Pro 8:30-31), was the trigger for the beautiful homily of Pope Leo XIV at the Holy Mass on Sunday 15 June, in which he brought out “three aspects that make sport today a valuable means of human and Christian formation”:
– the value of collaboration, of walking together, of sharing, taught by sport, which can thus become “an important instrument of recomposition and encounter: among peoples, in communities, in school and work environments, in families!”
– the concreteness of being together, the sense of the body, of space, of fatigue, of the real time valued by sport, “in an increasingly digital society, where technologies, although bringing people far away, often alienate those who are close.”
– the experience of fragility, that opens to hope: “in a competitive society, where it seems that only the strong and the winners deserve to live, sport also teaches how to lose, making persons confront, in the art of defeat, with one of the deepest truths of their condition: of fragility, of limitation, of imperfection. (…) The athlete who never misses, who never loses, does not exist.”
These are some of the values transmitted to their athletes by the Salesian Youth Sports Centers, of which Sister Francesca Scibettaspoke on 16 June, invited – together with the Paralympic athlete Amelio Castro Grueso and Fr. José Miguel Fraga Cardoso of the Department for Culture and Education – to the television program “Di buon mattino” of the Italian TV station, TV 2000:
“Through sport, we try to enter heart to heart with our children and then accompany them on the path of integral growth. (…) As Don Bosco wanted, we welcome them in an environment where they are truly ‘at home’, valued for who they are. Co-responsibility, joy, family spirit, youth protagonism are part of our way of doing sport. In PGS, we want to do sport in function of the person.”
