Vatican City (AFP) - Pope Francis on Wednesday encouraged competitors making a beeline for the Rio Olympics to battle the "great battle", pointing not for awards but rather solidarity in a world "wiped out with brutality".
"I trust that the soul of the Olympics can rouse everybody, both members and observers, to battle the 'great battle' and complete the race together," he said, refering to an expression from the book of scriptures about resolute confidence and the battle against shrewdness.
The point ought to be to "win as a prize not a decoration but rather something all the more valuable: the acknowledgment of a civilisation in which solidarity rules, in light of the mindfulness that we are each of the one family, paying little heed to contrasts in society, skin shading or religion".
The 79-year-old Argentine was talking two days before the Olympic opening function in Brazil.
"The world craves solidarity, resistance and compromise," he said as he welcomed Portuguese-talking travelers amid his week after week general group of onlookers at the Vatican.
He said he trusted the diversions would help Brazilians "beat troublesome times and take part in collaboration to manufacture an all the more just and more secure nation, wagering on a future loaded with trust and delight".
Francis discussed his visit a week ago to the Nazi German concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, where nearly 1.1 million individuals, for the most part Jews, were killed amid World War II.
"In the quiet, I appealed to God for every one of the casualties of viciousness and war. Taking a gander at this remorselessness, in this death camp, I instantly thought about the brutalities of today, which are comparable. Not as gathered as in that one spot, but rather all through the world".
It is a world "wiped out with brutality, torment, war, scorn, misery," he said.
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