The World Cup, the Pope, and a Prayer That Changed Bedtime

Stephanie Quesnelle shares how one printed prayer transformed her family's bedtime routine and opened a new way to pray together. 

My home is intensely sports-focused. It doesn’t really matter the sport; if there’s a competition, we want in. We have always leveraged that for learning: basic math skills, geography, physics: You name it, I can fit it into a sports game. So I was ecstatic to see the pope’s prayer intention for June: the gift of sports. Timed with the World Cup opening, it was a fun note and I almost left it as a little tidbit of news. 

Instead, I clicked on the article and read the full prayer for sports and realized we’d been missing an incredible opportunity to teach our kids that sports are also a lesson in prayer, connecting our family’s prayer life to the universal church. In this prayer, Pope Leo beautifully crafts a narrative of sports being about community, bringing us together with others in victories and failures, and that athletes use their athleticism to “glorify God through the exercise of their bodies.” 

I listened to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and printed it out. Instead of our usual bedtime prayers, we’ve been reading this prayer for sports every night. The ideas in the prayer are big ones for elementary-school kids, so we’ve also unpacked new vocabulary words like “fraternity” and talked about different sections. This new integration of the Church’s rhythm into our life doesn’t feel forced, and the kids have been more engaged than usual because it comes from the Pope!

How We Grew Through the Prayer 

The kids started to connect their bodies to prayer, not just sitting and standing at Mass, but a deeper understanding of our bodies wholly as a temple of the Holy Spirit. We were able to talk about how even if we don’t like a specific team, we’re still required to love them, or as Pope Leo said, that sport is “a school of fraternity, not of empty rivalry.” 

Of course, that led to the question “What is empty rivalry?” Last year, my husband and I mentored a young engaged couple. The husband graduated from our favorite college football team’s greatest rival. My kids also adore him deeply and had just spent Sunday afternoon playing with him. I was able to tell them that empty rivalry would be not loving him or not wanting to play with him because he just happens to like a different team. They connected to that idea quickly. 

Another night, we used the prayer to talk about how much more fun it is to celebrate as a family. The prayer talks about how “we need others to grow … to celebrate together the victories we achieve.” This opened up a whole conversation about needing community and others to rely on. It’s impossible to grow to your full potential as an athlete or human without the help of others. 

I’ve always known the papal prayer intention existed, but this has opened up a whole new avenue for our family prayer life. The prayer intentions are a short and accessible way to connect with the universal Church. Looking at the list of other prayer intentions, I don’t think we’ll find a month that replicates this month (nuclear disarmament for toddlers?), but I did learn some things about family prayer that I want to carry forward.

Three Takeaways for Family Prayer

Normally, we do a read out loud of a saint story without much discussion. This was a different experience because it was repetitive, sustained, and tangibly relevant. 

Repetition changed everything: Choosing a prayer, rather than a new saint story every night, was the first real benefit. The saint stories provided us conversation starters, but it shifted nightly. There has been something beautifully impactful about sharing the same words each evening together. I would love to do this again with a psalm or a prayer with a particular saint. 

Sustained commitment deepened conversations: The month-long commitment also improved the quality of the conversations. Instead of just remembering a key fact or surprising story about the saints, we had an opportunity to really dive in. Over a whole month, we were able to unpack the words and meanings, talk about how sports can help us know God during bedtime but also during the day. The most common conversation was what it means to glorify God with our bodies. When we saw a particularly exciting play during the World Cup, it wasn’t just a conversation about the incredible athletic feat, but there was also an opening to talk about God’s gift to us. 

Making it tangible mattered more than I expected. We’ve already established how much sports resonate in my family. In replicating this, I would find a very specific patron or intercessory prayer that relates to our family life. But the other piece was that each kid had their own copy printed out to read along with. This was very different from when I held onto a book and they just have to listen. Having a hard copy of the prayers we share will be a strategy I use moving forward.

The gift of the month’s prayer intention might have been missed if I hadn’t clicked "print" in those first days of June. The Holy Spirit might call you to pray in a different way than normal. The Church offers so much to our family lives and if we listen to the Holy Spirit’s promptings, we can discover exactly what our families need in each moment.

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Copyright 2026 Stephanie Quesnelle
Images: Canva