Modern lawn tennis is an inheritance from the cloisters of 12th-century France, where monks were the first to play a racketless precursor to the sport called jeu de paume. But prior to Pope Leo XIV, the last tennis-playing Popes of record were inventions: such as John XXIV, from Guido Morselli’s novel Roma senza papa (Rome without the Pope), who deserts the Vatican to inhabit the countryside, hit optic-yellow balls, and do psychedelics.
Thus, when Pope Leo XIV was announced, a flurry of articles took advantage of a line from a 2024 interview in which he identified as “an amateur tennis player”; a vicar made a TikTok at a Roman tennis court that Cardinal Prevost used to frequent; a meeting with Jannik Sinner was arranged.
When Pope Leo XIV was announced, a flurry of articles took advantage of a line from a 2024 interview in which he identified as “an amateur tennis player”.
Tennis is one of the few worldly activities we know Pope Leo XIV enjoys. (That, and Wordle.) When it comes to his secular likes and dislikes, he often resorts to dating-profile bromides: “I also really enjoy reading, taking long walks, and travelling. … I enjoy relaxing with friends and meeting a broad range of different people.” Such tact is to be expected of someone whose duty is to hollow himself of mortal bias in service of unifying the Catholic world. Yet the new Pope, Chicago born and the first American, does not hide his love of tennis or the White Sox.
That Pope Leo XIV drops the veil of impartiality to talk sports is a byproduct of decades of papal efforts to make room for athleticism in the Holy See. Picking up Pope Pius XII's post-World War II rhetoric about the spirituality of sport, ex-goalie and avid skier Pope John Paul II (nicknamed the 'Athlete Pope') established an Office of Church and Sport in Vatican City. During his papacy, according to an article republished on the Pontifical Council for the Laity's website, many tennis tournaments were held on the Vatican City courts—culminating in the 1985 “Vatican Open,” in which Priest Giovanni Battista Re bested Director General of the Vatican Radio Roberto Tucci in the finals.
Under Pope Francis, the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life published a lengthy document debunking the notion that “the Catholic Church has only had a negative view of and impact on sport.” The document points to theologians both ancient (“It is well known that St. Paul used sports metaphors to explain the Christian life to the Gentiles”) and contemporary ("As Pope Francis has said, 'It's beautiful when a parish has a sports club and something is missing without one.'")
The purpose of the document becomes clear when the writers explicitly confess, at one point, to being interested in athleticism due to “the universality of the sports experience, its communicative and symbolic strength, and its great educational and training potential." Call it audience development or, to borrow a phrase from another Curia curio, “the new evangelization."
Popes announcing an athletic allegiance has become as established a modern ritual as celebrities delivering hot takes on the NYC subway or Obama dropping a summer playlist.
But in sports, what's most universal is partisanship; the otherwise unknowable papal figure becomes recognizable by demonstrating that he, too, feels the impulse to root for a side. And so Popes announcing an athletic allegiance has become as established a modern ritual as celebrities delivering hot takes on the NYC subway or Obama dropping a summer playlist—a material opinion offered at the altar of human relatability and good PR. Often, the papal team of choice is an infallible one: that of his home country or city. Pope Benedict XVI rooted for Bayern Munich, Pope Francis was a card-carrying member of San Lorenzo, and adhering to the pattern, Pope Leo XIV does not shy from chanting for the White Sox in public.
For Pope Leo XIV to like tennis is a little more surprising than him siding with his hometown's baseball team or taking an interest in the world's most popular sport. Tennis is also less evidently virtuous than other forms of athleticism. When Pope Pius XI scaled mountains, he was bringing his body and soul to "the sublime peaks of the Alps, [where] our soul easily rises to God, the author and Lord of nature"; when Pope Francis backed association football, he was condoning a sport that instills communal values.
Tennis, meanwhile, throws its players onto manufactured courts, wielding instruments of unnatural shapes and colors, practicing the art of rugged individualism. When Tolstoy—also an ascetic Leo—took up the solo sports of tennis and cycling in his late sixties, one of his close companions wondered, "Is this not inconsistent with Christian ideals?"
Tennis is also less evidently virtuous than other forms of athleticism.
Margaret Court and Roger Federer would disagree, as would the Dicastery's 2018 treatise on sports, which states, "even in individual sports, such as tennis or swimming, there is always some form of teamwork." Tennis in its ideal form can be a miracle to behold—just ask anyone who watched the Roland-Garros finals this year. Or see David Foster Wallace writing on Federer, who invokes so much awe in him that he has to "come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or—as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject—to try to define it in terms of what it is not." In Álvaro Enrigue's introduction to his novel Sudden Death, he writes of tennis's "redemptive overtones: angels on one side, demons on the other … the ball as allegory of the soul flitting between good and evil, scheming to get into heaven, Lucifer's messengers waylaying it."
Sports often seem the most religious when an athlete or team does astoundingly well, human bodies becoming conduits for the divine. But loss can be an equally holy affair. Enough unforced errors will fill a nonbeliever with Catholic guilt; test the faith of the most devoted fans; send a player down the suffering road, without which there can be no redemption. Our new Pope knows this well (as would any White Sox fan, given their prior 88-year dry spell)..
"In our competitive society, where it seems that only the strong and winners deserve to live," he recently tweeted, "Sport also teaches us how to lose. ... It is through the experience of these limits that we open our hearts to hope. Athletes who never make mistakes, who never lose, do not exist." 📿