Letters from Leo is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country, and it runs on readers rather than advertisers. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Pope Leo XIV welcomed roughly 150 Special Olympics athletes to the Clementine Hall on Saturday morning, most of them Italians who competed at last year’s World Winter Games in Turin, many in the blue tracksuits of Special Olympics Italia.
He greeted them, and then he told them why they had been invited. “Our world is in such need of people who, like you, remind everyone of the true values of life,” he said, “of men and women who show by their example that the path of sharing and love is the only one that truly leads to happiness and peace.”
The pope is a lifelong White Sox fan who, as Spike Lee reported in June, pulls for the Knicks on account of their Villanova alumni, and he told the athletes he loves sport for what it teaches.
Taking part, he said, “means committing oneself seriously and with hard work, and then sharing the fruits of one’s perseverance with loyalty, trust, openness, team spirit and courage.”
He closed by entrusting them to St. Pier Giorgio Frassati — the mountain-climbing layman from Turin, the city where these athletes competed, whom Leo canonized last September — as “a young sportsman like yourselves.”
Vatican Media’s photographs carry what the transcript cannot. A young athlete in a wheelchair takes Leo’s hand as he bends toward him; in another frame, the pope is pulled into an embrace by a woman in a blue jacket, a younger athlete tucked between them, and one man has dropped to a knee on the marble floor to greet him.
None of it exists without a Catholic woman named Eunice Kennedy Shriver. In June 1962, angry at how the country hid people like her older sister Rosemary, she opened the backyard of her Maryland home, Timberlawn, to 34 children with intellectual disabilities and called it Camp Shriver.
Six summers later, on July 20, 1968, about a thousand athletes from across the United States and Canada competed at Soldier Field in Chicago in the first International Special Olympics Games, and she gave them an oath that still opens every competition: “Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.”
The Church noticed early. Her brother John received Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, the oldest honor for American Catholics, in 1961, and the university gave it to her husband Sargent, the first director of the Peace Corps, seven years later.
Eunice’s own came in 1988; this May her son Tim, who chairs Special Olympics today, accepted the same medal at commencement.
The movement she started counts more than five million athletes and partners in some 190 countries, and on Saturday Leo recalled the words Francis gave a Special Olympics delegation in October 2017: sport “manages to unite people, making them participants in the same game and, together, protagonists of victory and defeat.”
That is the Kennedy inheritance as Rome received it this week. Washington spent the same days treating it as a nameplate to be pried off.
On Tuesday, Judge Christopher Cooper of the federal district court in Washington blocked Trump’s hand-picked board, for the second time since May, from attaching the president’s name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “Simply put,” he wrote, “Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing.”
The board, which Trump chairs, answered the same day by voting to shut the main building at once. The president announced that the renovation “cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name”; on Wednesday he was photographed aboard Air Force One holding a placard that read “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED,” and on Thursday in Charlotte he said that without recognition for his administration, “it’s going to close. It’ll end up being ripped down.”
Maria Shriver, Eunice’s daughter, had already said what the family thought when the board first voted to rename the memorial last December. “This is not dignified,” she wrote. “This is not funny. This is way beneath the stature of the job.”
Across town on Constitution Avenue, the United States Institute of Peace, chartered by Congress in 1984 as the country’s own peace academy, has carried “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace” in bolted silver letters since December. That came roughly nine months after Elon Musk’s DOGE team entered the building with D.C. police, and after a federal judge, Beryl Howell, called the firing of its board “a gross usurpation of power.” The name headed for that stone belongs to the president who instigated the immoral and illegal war against Iran in February, the war Leo called “a scandal for humanity.”
On Friday, the ousted board asked the D.C. Circuit for an emergency order because, their filing says, a contractor has already been selected to cut the name into the stone. Sargent Shriver’s Peace Corps, meanwhile, has watched its headquarters staff shrink from about 950 to a target of 575 under this administration, even as the agency promises to nearly triple the volunteers it sends abroad.
The Kennedys have their own idea of what earns a name on a wall, and they showed it in Boston last year when Caroline Kennedy and her son Jack Schlossberg handed the Profile in Courage Award to Mike Pence for refusing to overturn the 2020 election on January 6.
“At the time I thought Vice President Pence was just doing his job,” she said at the Kennedy Library. “Only later did I realize that his act of courage saved our government.” Trump’s verdict on Pence that afternoon in 2021 was that he “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Set the two weeks beside each other.
A president who has already had a golden statue of himself blessed at Doral wants his name cut into marble on a building dedicated to peace, and he threatens to raze a memorial to a murdered president unless the memorial carries his name too. In Rome, a pope stood before a hall full of people the world once locked away and told them they are the ones who remind it what matters.
Catholic teaching has a word for the difference, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver built a movement on it. Human dignity is a gift, handed first to the weakest, and no contractor with a chisel can add a letter to it. Paul told the Corinthians that God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong; Leo said it in his own words on Saturday, thanking the athletes “for the genuine joy you bring, for the positive message you embody.”
Trump will get his silver letters, or a court will pry them off. Either way, the name that carried weight in Rome on Saturday belonged to a woman who has been dead since 2009, and whose athletes, sixty-four years after she opened her backyard, are still being received by popes.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the athletes who filled the Clementine Hall on Saturday and with the family that gave them their oath, alongside millions of Catholics and people of goodwill who believe that dignity is given by God and cannot be bolted onto a facade.
In a country whose president measures greatness by the size of the letters spelling his name, we remain rooted in a faith that puts the weakest at the front of the line.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than a monument to one man. They are looking for the courage Eunice Kennedy Shriver asked of a thousand kids at Soldier Field, and right now, as the government tries to chisel itself into a house of peace, that hunger has never been more urgent.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of the weakest against a politics of self-glorification — I am asking you to join us.
If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.
Paid subscribers receive the full biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, the Epstein-Bannon investigation, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series that carries this community through the liturgical year.
Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.
Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Knowing that Trump once mocked a disabled part, it would be a national disgrace to put his name on the Kennedy Center. Thank you for this refreshing article!
While reading this I thought of former students I had taught who participated in Special Olympics. One rode horses for her event. Sports teaches athletes many lessons, the most important one is working together as a team and self-discipline. The Kennedys, for all the faults of the men, brought a lot of positive change to this country, the Peace Corps and Special Olympics are but two.