VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis received the athletics team of the Vatican City at a private audience on Saturday, discussing the "culture of fraternity" at the Athletic Championships of the Small States of Europe, a week before the athletes set out for San Marino for the postponed 2021 edition.

  The delegation, accompanied by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, were received by the pope just after 11 a.m. in the Private Library of the Apostolic Palace.

  Speaking off the cuff, the pope spoke of how significant it is that the Vatican now has an athletics team - founded in 2019, the state's first official sports team - as the church has at its heart all that is human. Sport, he said, is a central dimension of one's daily life, enough to be seen as a "sacrament of beauty."

  The pope urged Athletica Vaticana, whom he referred to as "his team", not to forget the amateur spirit, to train together, to run together, and live as a community. He confided in them his astonishment at how much some professional sportsmen earn.

  He gave each representative a copy of "Sport According to Pope Francis - An Open Letter to an Olympic Athlete", edited by La Gazzetta dello Sport, which will also be distribuited in several languages around the Olympic Village in Tokyo.

  The representatives of Athletica Vaticana in return gifted the pontiff a baton engraved with "simul currebant", the association's motto, a reference to the gospel passage (John 20:4) in which Peter and John "both ran" on the morning of the Resurrection. 

  Cardinal Ravasi, in remarks to the pope, said "even if tensions are not lacking today between some 'small' States, sports since their inception in human experience can offer a place of encounter and getting to know one another that makes prejudices and hostility fall away. This happens through dialogue between different cultures and religions, creating friendship between persons and peoples until they run together - simul currere - towards the common goal, that is, peace."

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