At Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field, the Brazil-Haiti World Cup match felt like a gathering of the world itself to Guilherme Lopes, who attended the game on June 19 and watched his Brazil team secure a 3-0 victory.
Nearly 70,000 fans packed the stadium, many arriving from Brazilian and Haitian diaspora communities along the U.S. East Coast. Brazilian green-and-yellow jerseys filled the stands alongside Haiti’s blue-and-red.
On the field, the game carried significance for both teams. Brazil entered needing a victory after opening the tournament with a draw against Morocco. Haiti arrived hoping to make history in its first World Cup appearance since 1974.
Brazil eventually scored three goals before halftime, with Matheus Cunha scoring twice and Vinícius Júnior adding another goal. This allowed Brazil to bounce back in the tournament standings while simultaneously eliminating Haiti from knockout-stage contention.
But for Mr. Lopes, the director of campus ministry at Neumann University, a Catholic university in Aston, Pa., the most memorable part of the night was not the final score.
It was the way supporters shared their cultures and camaraderie despite being on opposite sides, he said.
“To see how Brazil and Haiti support one another, even though their national teams were competing, how much the Haitians love Brazilian culture, to share foods and to share ideas and music and thoughts, it was really moving,” Mr. Lopes told America.
The connection between the two communities has deep roots. Because Haiti had not reached the World Cup for more than five decades, many Haitians grew up supporting Brazil, one of soccer’s most successful national teams.
But in Philadelphia, Haiti was no longer watching from afar. It had its own team on the world stage.
For Mr. Lopes, who was born in Brazil and immigrated with his family to the United States as a child, soccer has always been more than a sport. It has been a connection to home—a way of preserving family memories, culture and identity.
“Catholicism and soccer are two of the major religions in Brazil,” he joked.
Yet in spite of the sense of camaraderie and positive national pride Mr. Lopes and his wife Natalia Ruggiero-Lopes felt, the World Cup also raised harder questions, he said. From early immigrant-founded clubs in the first decades of the 20th century to today’s diverse fan and player communities, immigrants have been central to soccer history in the United States.
This summer, as the United States co-hosts the games with Canada and Mexico, U.S. immigration policy under the Trump administration has drawn widespread criticism from both secular and faith-based advocates, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, because of human rights abuses.
Mr. Lopes said he noticed that celebrations outside the stadium on June 19 were quieter than he expected among some Brazilian and Haitian communities. He attributes this to fears of I.C.E. raids among many soccer fans.
“The U.S. is hosting the world’s game,” he said, “but we’re not necessarily welcoming the world.”
A global game, a Catholic reflection
For Mr. Lopes, that tension is at the heart of Catholic social teaching.
During the World Cup, he worked with undergraduate students involved in campus ministry at Neumann University to create a reflection project that connects the World Cup with Catholic spirituality and themes from the church’s social teaching, including human dignity, care for creation and the preferential option for the poor.
The project was called “Madonnas of the World Cup” and helped students explore the Catholic faith through the Marian devotions of participating nations. Each country’s participation in the World Cup became an opportunity to learn about its culture, history, prayers, saints and traditions—from Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico to Our Lady of Lourdes in France to Our Lady of Aparecida in Brazil.
The project used the global reach of soccer to show students that “Mary has appeared to all these people across culture and time, and she wants us to see that she is amongst us, not separate from us,” Mr. Lopes said.
Much as the World Cup presented an opportunity to reflect on global Christianity and inculturated faith, the global games have also created awareness of social inequities in its host countries.
“The World Cup, as a gathering of the world coming together on the world stage, already reveals things like inequality or political tension or conflict,” Mr. Lopes said. “Catholic social teaching comes in and gives us language to think more deeply about what we’re seeing.”
The 2014 World Cup unfolded alongside debates over economic inequality in its host nation, Brazil. The 2018 games hosted by Russia drew attention to the problems of human trafficking and prostitution that often accompany international sports events—a phenomenon ignored then by Russian authorities. Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 tournament was criticized because of the human rights abuses of the migrant labor brought in to complete stadiums and residences for the competition. In 2026, the World Cup landed in the Americas at a time when the United States has been sharply criticized because of its immigration enforcement policies.
For Mr. Lopes, those troubling moral challenges cannot be disentangled from the World Cup spectacle itself, although he emphasized that soccer remains a “beautiful game,” drawing its emotional power in part from its simplicity.
“Soccer has this unique ability to be an equalizer,” Ashley Moushegian, a clinical therapist who works with migrant and refugee families in the Boston area, told America. “It creates a space where people who might feel like they don’t belong can find confidence, pride and connection.”
“Through the World Cup, kids who may feel different in their everyday lives get to celebrate where they come from and see themselves as part of something much bigger.”
Vince Rizzo, the assistant director of campus ministry at the Catholic all-boys Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., said he has witnessed that power during immersion trips with students around the world.
Although Mr. Rizzo grew up playing basketball and football, he came to appreciate soccer because it creates encounters across cultural and economic differences. Through trips to places including Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico and Spain, Mr. Rizzo has watched students and local communities build relationships through the sport.
“For me, Catholicism begins with the belief in the inherent dignity of every person and the call to encounter each other as brothers and sisters,” he said. “Sports, especially soccer because of its universal accessibility, can become a tangible expression of that belief.”
Pope Leo XIV, a lifelong athlete and sports lover, spoke of the value of sports in a letter to athletes participating in the XXV Winter Olympic Games and the XIV Paralympic Games, held in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, earlier this year.
Leo describes sport as something of deeper value than competition or entertainment, a “school of life” where people learn discipline, perseverance, teamwork, respect for opponents and hope. Leo also cautioned that “in many cases, even at the amateur level, commercial demands and values have come to overshadow the human values of sport that ought to be safeguarded.”
Like much in Leo’s pontificate, his reflection on sports extends Pope Francis’ emphasis on human fraternity and human dignity. Francis, in a 2024 pontifical message to participants in the International Conference on Sport and Spirituality, which Rome hosted ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics games, said: “Sport…is a way to use free time profitably, and it offers many opportunities to encounter others, to socialize, to build communities, to channel energies and to promote high ideals and aspirations, especially in the younger generation.”
“For this reason,” he said, “the Church recognizes her need to be pastorally present in the world of sport and wishes to promote an education in the genuine values of athletic competition, purified of forms of egotism and purely material concerns.”
Both popes, much like St. John Paul II before them, saw sports as intrinsically connected to matters of individual morals and ethics and societal conditions related to justice and human flourishing. Notably, the last two popes spent much of their ministry as bishops, and later cardinals, immersed in the soccer-loving cultures of Latin America and Italy.
Hospitality beyond the stadium
Back in Boston, Ms. Moushegian said that many of the children she works with as a social worker come from countries where soccer is central to family and cultural life.
“When they’re talking about soccer, they’re suddenly experts,” she said. “It’s something they’re proud of, something they know well.”
For children learning a new language or navigating a new culture, soccer offers a place where they are recognized for the talents they already have. At a time when many of the families she serves are worried about ICE showing up in their communities, places of worship and children’s schools, soccer provides an escape and a source of joy.
But belonging is not always simple, she said. For some refugees, national teams and flags can carry painful memories alongside pride.
“The same event that gives one person joy and pride may be deeply painful for someone else; it might remind them of the circumstances they left behind in the country they fled.”
Catholic high school teacher Maddie Davin has experienced similar moments through work with migrant families in Florida. Soccer games created opportunities for friendship across cultures, but during the last year, concerns about immigration enforcement sometimes created uncertainty about whether those gatherings could safely continue.
She regretted that an opportunity for joy and recreation in its deepest meaning, a sport “designed for connection,” could be diminished by the anxiety and fear now attending gatherings of immigrants in the United States, whether at a church or on a soccer field.
The world is watching soccer this month and following all the politics that go with it. The World Cup will soon end and its final whistle will sound. But the role soccer plays in a complex world in uncertain times, remains as a source of community.
Luis Melgar, the director of campus ministry at Assumption University in Worcester, Mass., has seen how soccer often functions within Catholic community life at the Latino parishes he has attended. In many parishes, soccer leagues, family gatherings and shared meals become extensions of church life.
Mr. Melgar describes the ways faith is expressed through culture, family and ordinary traditions. He pointed to “popular piety” prevalent across many Latino cultures.
He explained: “We do some form of sports ministry with our teams in that we bless the teams before travel, the start of a season, and we even bless the equipment.” Those “Catholic” moments in sports, he points out, regularly show up in social media during soccer games.
Soccer, Mr. Melgar suggests, can be a place where evangelization can occur and community can be built.
The strong friendship between “rival” teams like Haiti and Brazil or the solidarity many showed with Venezuelans as the national team played right after its devastating earthquakes, offers a glimpse of what belonging across nations and peoples can look like.
“The question is,” Mr. Lopes said, “Is it better for fraternity? Are we learning from one another? Are we integrating spirituality into our daily lives? By interacting with a Haitian or with somebody from Morocco, what gifts am I offering and what am I allowing myself to learn from them?”
Or more simply, he said, “what is this game allowing us to create?”
This article appears in September 2026.
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