In a recent homily, Pope Leo XIV said that sports are a reflection of God’s infinite beauty. In a world increasingly dominated by an unstoppable technological revolution that ensnares our minds in virtual worlds, the pope sees athletics as an antidote that produces a “healthy contact with nature and with real life.”

The pope said that there is a transcendental purpose and meaning in sports, which is why they “are not only about physical achievements.” Sports require natural virtues such as fortitude, discipline, and self-control. That is why Plato’s educational curriculum taught that the purpose of gymnastic training was chiefly the improvement of the soul. If coaches and athletes had this simple truth in mind, the commercialized world of sports might not be the source of immorality and vice it is today.

Historically, the Church has seen athletics as good only when it is ordered towards the strengthening of the soul. Pope Pius X in 1905 called sports “the material exercises of the body [that] will admirably influence the exercises of the spirit.” Pope Pius XII in 1945 identified sports as sources of “all natural virtues, but which provide the supernatural virtues with a solid foundation.” And Pope John Paul II in 1985 identified in sports “the practice of Christian virtues, a school of religious education.” All of these remarks understand sports in light of the human person as a body-soul composite, whose life is directed by the lights of faith and reason.

Pope Leo’s homily on sports, though, was unique. While the 20^th-century popes spoke about sports during eras that were also threatened by modernism, materialism, and relativism, Pope Leo faces the additional problem of a technological revolution that privileges the virtual world over the real one. That is why Pope Leo’s homily is an invitation to see sports as a way to counter “the temptation to escape into virtual worlds.” This is a point of vital importance in the 21^st century.

Today, the realm of sports offers one of the only experiences that cannot be digitalized or corrupted by technology. It fosters a real, human fraternity that is rare in the modern world. “In an increasingly digital society,” Pope Leo said, “sports proves a valuable and concrete means of bringing individuals together, providing a healthier sense of the body, of space, effort and real time.”

Whether played recreationally or competitively, sports are near perfect remedies for those drowning in today’s superficial digital societies.

Recreational sports falls under the category of play, which can be likened to leisure and is ordered towards the soul’s rest. In his famous book, Josef Pieper identified leisure as “the basis of culture.” Leisure “means not being ‘busy’, but letting things happen,” he wrote. Recreational sports, therefore, differs from competitive sports because they are not about winning or losing, but using one’s athletic ability to celebrate “the reality of the Creation.” Recreational sports promote an attitude of mind for “those who leave the reins loose and who are free and easy themselves,” Pieper wrote.

Even though the best competitive athletes typically have a free and easy disposition, competition is different from play. Competitive sports are ordered towards the cultivation of virtue through athletic excellence. Twentieth-century popes devoted more attention to those kinds of sports because of their growing popularity. In seeing the goodness in properly ordered competitive sports, they understood athletics as a kind of skill and virtue. This point is further explicated in Mortimer Adler’s compilation of the great books of the Western world, in which he identifies athletics as an art:

Whether they produce competence in gymnastic or athletic feats … all bodily skills, even the simplest, involve the senses and the mind as well as bones and muscles. They are arts no less than music or logic … [and] they represent a certain type of human excellence.

Whether recreational or competitive, athletics is a way modern man can directly oppose the societal attempt to digitize everything. Technology in itself is not bad, but the use of it as an attempt to utterly escape reality is. Pope Leo XIV’s message to the world about the goodness of athletics is a call to embrace the physicality of life. It is a call to reject instant gratification and run towards all that is real.