The Pope, the President, and Paige Francis and Biden speak the language of sports.

“Lost in threads of contested interpretations on social media was the fact that Biden was speaking to Pope Francis in one of their common languages: sport. This was no jumbled word salad, as some Biden-baiters charged. Rather, the story the president told tapped into many of Francis’s favorite themes, from the importance of the dreams of elders to the role of sport as a catalyst for social change.”

“While the pope’s dialect reveals a fluency in soccer/fútbol, there’s no mistaking his understanding of sports as a vernacular to create spaces of encounter, narrate the struggles for inclusion, foster solidarity, and inspire practices for dialogue and living together justly.”

Read more here: The Pope, the President, and Paige