Vatican City (AFP)
The Pope received players from the NBA, the American basketball league, at the Vatican on Monday, committed against racism and social injustice, and who offered the sovereign pontiff a ball and jerseys.
Francis spoke in the Apostolic Palace library with Anthony Tolliver (Memphis Grizzlies), Jonathan Isaac and Marco Belinelli (San Antonio Spurs), as well as Sterling Brown and Kyle Korver of the Milwaukee Bucks.
"We are extremely honored to have had the opportunity to come to the Vatican and share our experience with Pope Francis," Kyle Korver said in a statement from the players' association, NBPA.
His team from the Milwaukee Bucks, a Wisconsin franchise, boycotted the NBA play-offs against the Orlando Magic in August to support Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old African-American seriously injured by Kenosha police, in the same State, during his arrest a few days earlier.
"A + dream team + has crossed the ocean to say, with Pope Francis, + no to racism," for its part indicated the Vatican News agency about what it describes as "an unusual meeting between very different".
According to this official agency of the Holy See, the meeting was organized at the request of the players.
The Argentine Pope himself has consistently tackled discrimination and racism in his speeches, books and public hearings.
In a book to be published on December 2 in French by Flammarion and entitled "A time for change", he salutes "the healthy indignation" of the millions of demonstrators who protested last spring against the death of George Floyd, a suffocated African-American under the knee of a white policeman at the end of May.
On the other hand, he regrets in the debunking of statues of personalities often associated with slavery or other forms of oppression, a desire to "purify history".
“The ignominy of our past, in other words, is part of who and what we are. I am recalling this History not to praise the oppressors of old, but to honor witness and greatness soul of those they have oppressed ", he pleads.
© 2020 AFP