Pope: Politics can unite people, rather than divide them

Politics has the ability to 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 organised 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.

The 2025 match held on July 15 in L’Aquila brought Italian singers to the field against top government ministers and Italian politicians. They were raising money for a project established by the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesù Paediatric Hospital in Rome and Italy’s Caritas to support the families of patients who have a lengthy hospitalisation 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,” the Pope repeated. “All that is needed is to create the opportunities to do so.”

FULL STORY

Stop the hatred; humanity is at stake, Pope Leo says in video message | USCCB (By Carol Glatz/CNS)