Villanova relies on ‘power of the pope’ going into Rome doubleheader against Notre Dame
Villanova and Notre Dame will open their college basketball seasons with a men’s and women’s doubleheader in Rome as part of the Eternal City Tip-Off. The four teams and traveling fans are expected to meet Pope Leo XIV in a private audience at the Vatican, subject to his health. The Italy visit also includes a basketball clinic for local children, a welcome reception, and a private Mass celebrated by Archbishop Nelson J. Pérez. Coaches and players described the trip as a rare opportunity to share the experience and visit Rome, while keeping their focus on the season ahead.
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Villanova and Notre Dame will open the 2026–27 college basketball season in Rome on Nov. 1, with men’s and women’s doubleheaders and a scheduled audience with Villanova alumnus Pope Leo XIV. The event combines a high-profile sporting matchup with Masses, receptions and other Catholic and cultural activities. 1 2
The games will be played at Rome’s Palazzo dello Sport. The men’s matchup is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. local time (9:30 a.m. ET) on Fox, followed by the women’s game at 6 p.m. (noon ET) on FS1. 1 2
Organizers describe the event as the first men’s college basketball season opener played abroad and the first regular-season Division I basketball game in Italy. The arena seats 8,500, while organizers expect nearly 20,000 people to travel to Rome for the games and related events. 2
The schedule begins with welcome receptions on Oct. 30. On Oct. 31, Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson Pérez is set to celebrate a private Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica, followed by a private audience with the pope in the Paul VI Audience Hall; around 7,000 people are expected at the audience. 1 2
Pope Leo, a Villanova graduate who earned a mathematics degree in 1977, is a central draw for many Wildcats fans and alumni. He has said that Villanova supporters are expected to make up most of the crowd, though an event organizer said the pope’s reported 90-to-10 estimate favoring Villanova was likely exaggerated. 2
Villanova women’s coach Denise Dillon joked that her team would rely on “the power of the pope” against No. 13 Notre Dame. Coach Kevin Willard described the opportunity to meet the leader of the Catholic Church as a special experience, while Notre Dame players also welcomed the chance to travel and make memories together. 1
The audience remained on the schedule after Leo underwent surgery to remove the lower lobe of his right lung earlier in October; the articles report that the trip’s papal plans had been arranged before his surgery and hospitalization. 1 2
The men’s game will include Villanova center Luigi Suigo’s American basketball debut in his home country. The 19-year-old Italian is 7-foot-3 and has been projected as a potential NBA lottery pick. 1 2
Notre Dame’s women enter the season ranked No. 13 in the preseason AP Top 25. Guard Hannah Hidalgo is coming off a season in which she averaged 25.3 points and 5.6 steals per game; Villanova was picked second in the Big East preseason women’s poll. 1 2
The matchup also brings together programs with national championship histories: Villanova’s men have won three titles, most recently in 2018, while Notre Dame’s women won championships in 2001 and 2018. Notre Dame’s men have not won an NCAA title. 1 2
The wider program includes a basketball clinic for local children, an Augustinian sports-and-spirituality session, All Saints’ Day Mass options and pregame prayer presented with the Catholic app Hallow. The event’s organizers said they also aimed to make tickets available to Italian fans. 1 2
The trip has drawn students, alumni and families from the United States and beyond. The National Catholic Register reported that more than 6,000 Villanova supporters had booked travel, while the universities are also arranging campus watch events and alumni gatherings for those unable to attend in Rome. 2
Catholic understandings of sport as spiritual formation
Catholic thought sees sport as more than exercise or entertainment: properly ordered, it can help form the whole person—body, mind, character, and spirit. Its spiritual value does not come automatically from winning, exertion, or competition. It comes when sport respects human dignity and becomes a setting for practicing virtue, accepting limits, serving others, and remaining open to God. The Church’s 2018 document Giving the Best of Yourself describes this as an approach that welcomes sport while also correcting and elevating it, so that sport serves the integral development of the person.
Catholic spirituality does not treat the body as an obstacle to holiness or as something spiritually unimportant. Giving the Best of Yourself grounds the Church’s esteem for sport in a unified understanding of the human person: the body is part of the person God created, and physical development can contribute to personal maturity. Athletic activity can therefore exercise capacities that are not merely muscular, but also intellectual and spiritual.
This matters because sport makes the body’s significance tangible. Training, coordination, fatigue, injury, and recovery are not experiences detached from the person’s interior life; they can shape how a person understands effort, dependence, vulnerability, and responsibility. The Dicastery describes sport as a striking setting in which people encounter the unity of body and soul. It cautions that either neglecting the body or treating physical power as everything gives a distorted picture of the human person.
A Catholic account therefore avoids two opposite mistakes. One is to dismiss physical activity as spiritually trivial. The other is to make athletic achievement the measure of a person’s worth. Sport is valuable insofar as it serves the person; the person is not valuable merely insofar as the person performs well.
Sport often requires repetition, self-control, patience, and perseverance. These habits can support the development of virtue: stable dispositions to choose what is good. The document identifies fortitude, temperance, prudence, and justice as cardinal virtues that sport can help introduce and develop. Put simply, fortitude helps someone face difficulty; temperance governs effort and desire; prudence helps judge what is wise in a particular situation; and justice concerns giving others their due.
The point is not that every demanding practice session is automatically virtuous. Discipline becomes spiritually formative when it is directed toward a worthwhile good and kept within proper bounds. Training can teach someone to persist without being ruled by comfort, but also to recognize when rest, safety, or another person’s needs must take precedence. Likewise, learning to follow rules can train respect for a shared standard rather than the assumption that one’s own advantage is all that matters. The Dicastery connects sport’s educational value to dignity, discipline, loyalty, friendship, and respect for rules.
The discipline of sport can also illuminate Christian sacrifice. Athletic effort involves giving up immediate ease for a goal: practicing when it is difficult, accepting correction, or continuing through setbacks. The Church’s document draws an analogy between this experience and the sacrifices involved in Christian life, including the difficulties that accompany prayer, sacramental life, and service of the common good. It says sport’s demands can strengthen self-awareness and the spirit, while emphasizing that Christian sacrifice is sustained by God’s grace and directed toward love of God and neighbor.
“All of the noble sacrifices we make are important in the Christian life, even when they take place in seemingly insignificant human activities such as sport.”
That insight gives ordinary athletic effort a possible spiritual dimension without making sport a substitute for explicitly Christian practices. A person might learn through sport something about perseverance that also helps in prayer or service; but the analogy should not be confused with the realities of Christian worship and discipleship. The document speaks of sport as one human activity in which sacrifice can matter, while placing that sacrifice within a life sustained by God’s grace.
Sport also teaches that freedom and limits need not be enemies. A game’s rules constrain what a player may do, yet they make shared play possible and create space for skill and creativity. The Dicastery presents this relationship as an image of freedom lived with responsibility: the person acts within a common practice rather than simply inventing private rules. It also emphasizes that individuals develop through relationships with others; even individual sports depend on contributions from other people.
This makes sport a practical school of social life. Teammates must cooperate; competitors must recognize one another as participants rather than obstacles to be humiliated; and coaches and officials help sustain the conditions that allow play to continue. In the Church’s account, competition need not exclude mutual respect. Its discussion of Don Bosco’s approach to youth education specifically links sport with personal accompaniment and respect even in competition.
Sport can also bring together people separated by culture or religion. The Dicastery observes that sports often cross those boundaries and can help the Church build bridges and promote the unity of the human family. This does not mean sport resolves every conflict or makes every sporting culture just. It means that shared play can create opportunities for encounter and cooperation.
Sport can disclose both human possibility and human limitation. It gives people opportunities to develop talent and creativity, but success is never guaranteed; players encounter weakness, uncertainty, and finitude as well as strength. The document argues that these experiences can prompt reflection on freedom, dependence, community, and the meaning of human life. It also notes sport’s capacity to reveal beauty, which can stimulate a search for ultimate meaning.
In this sense, sport may open a person to transcendence—the awareness that human life is not exhausted by immediate physical achievement or material success. The Dicastery says that when sport respects human dignity and is not exploited for economic, media, or political ends, it can educate people toward the fullness of life and openness to transcendence. It also recalls Pope Francis’s description of rightly lived sport as reaching beyond “pure physicality” toward the spirit and mystery.
Catholic appreciation of sport is not an endorsement of every sporting practice or institution. Sport’s formative potential is weakened or contradicted when the person is treated as a tool for profit, publicity, political messaging, or victory at any cost. The document makes respect for human dignity a condition of sport’s positive role and warns against economic, media, and political exploitation.
So the relevant question is not simply whether a sport is intense or competitive, but what it is forming people to love and choose. Does it encourage discipline without contempt for the body? Does competition preserve respect for opponents? Does success remain subordinate to human dignity? Does the sport help people grow in character and relationship, or reduce them to performance? These questions follow from the Church’s central principle: sport is at its best when it serves the whole human person.
The Church’s positive view is therefore hopeful but discerning. Sport can become a genuine setting for human and spiritual formation—not because athletic achievement is holiness, but because ordinary physical activity can teach self-command, perseverance, respect, cooperation, and wonder. When those lessons are received in a life oriented toward God and neighbor, even everyday sporting efforts can take on significance within Christian formation.