VATICAN CITY CNS — Politics can unite instead of divide as long as it refuses to settle for propaganda that feeds on creating enemies, Pope Leo XIV said.
Politics can unite, he said, if it “engages in the difficult and necessary art of an exchange of views, which seeks the common good.”
“It is still possible, it is always possible, to come together, even at a time of division, bombs and wars,” he said in a video message that aired before the start of a charity soccer match.
He urged people to have the “strength to believe and ask for a truce to come.” It is time to stop “the race of hatred. Our humanity is at stake.”
Italy’s annual Match of the Heart (“Partita del Cuore”) is organized by the national federation of Italian singers to raise money for a different cause each year.
The televised soccer match pits Italian singers against a team made up of “adversaries,” which changes each year. For example, the match in 2000 saw singers face off against a mixed team of Israelis, Palestinians and well-known sports stars like Formula One racing driver, Michael Schumacher. The late Yasser Arafat, who was president of the Palestinian National Authority at the time, and the late Israeli statesman, Shimon Peres, sat together in the Rome stadium stands.
The 2025 match held July 15 in L’Aquila brought Italian singers to the field against top government ministers and Italian politicians, including the former prime minister of Italy, Matteo Renzi. They were raising money for a project established by the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital in Rome and Italy’s Caritas to support the families of patients who have a lengthy hospitalization and live far from Rome.
In his video message recorded from the papal summer villa in Castel Gandolfo, Pope Leo said it was “significant that two teams, one of politicians and one of singers, are playing today.”
“It tells us that politics can unite instead of divide, if it is not content with propaganda that feeds on building enemies,” but engages in dialogue aimed at the common good, he said.
“And it also reminds us how music enriches our words and memories with meaning,” he said.
He recalled Paul McCartney’s song, “Pipes of Peace,” and the film “Joyeux Noël,” which were both inspired by the 1914 Christmas truce between a group of British and German soldiers who left their trenches to meet in “no man’s land” to exchange gifts, take photographs and play soccer.
“It is still possible, it is always possible, to come together,” he said. All that is needed is to create the opportunities to do so.
That means, he said, creating opportunities to: “confront divisions and recognize that the greatest challenge is encountering the other; contribute together to a good cause; repair broken hearts, our own and those of others; and recognize that we are one in God’s heart, and that the heart is the place of encounter with God and with others.”
Pope Leo praised the charity event for mixing sports and television, and for raising funds “for life, for healing, not for destruction and death.”
When practiced well by athletes and fans, sports are great for turning “confrontation into encounter, division into inclusion, solitude into community,” he said. When television is not just about being “tuned in” but becomes a “communion of gazes, it can make us rediscover how to look at one another — with love instead of hate.”
He invited all those who came together for the event and who support the charity project to “look into the eyes of children and learn from them,” to find the courage to be welcoming and to be “men and women of encounter.”
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