N.B.A. Players Meet With Pope Francis on Social Justice Efforts

A delegation of five N.B.A. players and officials from the players association met privately with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Monday to discuss their efforts toward addressing social justice and economic inequality.

The visit came after the Vatican extended an invitation to the players’ union, saying the pope wanted to learn more about their activities. Michele Roberts, the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, joined Kyle Korver, Sterling Brown, Anthony Tolliver, Marco Belinelli and Jonathan Isaac, players who are all active in the union, at the meeting.

“I thought it was a fraud email that I got,” Korver, who plays for the Milwaukee Bucks, said. “I called Michele right away. I was like, ‘Is this for real?’ She said, ‘Yes, it is and would you like to come in like two days?’ This came together really quick.”

After the 30-minute meeting, the players and officials still appeared stunned as they talked about it on video calls with reporters. “I’m still not even sure if this really happened,” Roberts said. The players took turns addressing the pope and offered him a book documenting many of their community and social initiatives in the last few months as well as jerseys and a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.

“He said sport is such an opportunity to unify, and he compared it to a team, where you have a common goal and you’re working together, but you all use your own personalities,” Korver said.

For the players, the meeting provided an opportunity to expand global awareness of the efforts to promote social justice after the deaths of several Black Americans at the hands of the police, including George Floyd in Minnesota, and the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin.

Brown and Korver were members of the Bucks team that initiated a work stoppage throughout sports in August. Confined inside the N.B.A.’s so-called bubble environment near Orlando, Fla., Bucks players refused to take part in a scheduled playoff game after the shooting of Blake in Kenosha, Wis. Their protest quickly spread to other teams and other sports, forcing the postponement of games in the W.N.B.A., Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer.

Most N.B.A. players during the season wore league-authorized messages on the back of their jerseys, while the courts featured Black Lives Matter wording. The majority of players and coaches knelt during the national anthem before games.

Isaac, a member of the Orlando Magic and an ordained minister, elected to stand. “My heart is, I believe, that it’s in a place of love,” Isaac said of what he shared with the pope.

In June, Pope Francis said he had watched the social unrest enveloping the United States with “great concern.”

After 35 years of deeply conservative pontificates who focused on doctrine and social issues such as abortion, Pope Francis, a Jesuit, has sought since his election in 2013 to shift the emphasis of the church toward addressing issues of social justice, such as poverty, migration and equality.

In his October encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” a reflection on fraternity and social friendship, the pope wrote that “a readiness to discard others finds expression in vicious attitudes that we thought long past, such as racism, which retreats underground only to keep re-emerging. Instances of racism continue to shame us, for they show that our supposed social progress is not as real or definitive as we think.”

He added, “Racism is a virus that quickly mutates and, instead of disappearing, goes into hiding, and lurks in waiting.”

Brown recently settled a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Milwaukee and its police department for $750,000, citing police brutality during a 2018 incident over a parking violation.

The agreement included an admission of a constitutional violation by the city and commitment to procedural changes by the police department.

Brown said he wished the meeting with Pope Francis had lasted longer. He spoke about the Bucks’ protest and Blake’s shooting more than his personal experience with police brutality.

“Nobody gets to do this from where I’m from, barely get to do it from the United States,” Brown said. “For me to be one of them, I can definitely take this and hold this and let people know I’m out here doing this to make a change, to actually get things put on other people’s minds that have influence, to a degree.”

Belinelli, a member of the San Antonio Spurs, was the only player able to speak in Italian to the pope.

More players had expressed interest in making the trip but could not because of the complications of travel in the pandemic and the holiday week. Free agency is also continuing. Training camps begin next week. “If we had more time, I would have 50 guys,” Roberts said.

The traveling party underwent a diagnostic test for the new coronavirus within 72 hours of leaving for Rome. The players had also been tested frequently in their home markets and, outside of Belinelli, who was in Italy, traveled on a chartered flight. All will be retested once back in the United States.

Pictures of the meeting depicted the group and Pope Francis without masks; the pontiff, who sat at a distance from the group, has been known to forgo them in indoor meetings. The players had masks on by the time they were taking video calls.

The players who attended described the decision to meet the pope as an easy one. “You say pope and being able to fly to Rome, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, so why not take it?” said Isaac, who paused his rehabilitation from a torn A.C.L. to take part, while Brown agreed to a free-agent deal with the Houston Rockets only a few hours before departing.

“This visit is the kind of thing that gives you, I believe, the sense of confirmation that the work that you’re doing is making a difference,” Roberts said. “The confirmation comes from someone whose life is spent giving of himself to others, saying what you’re doing is exactly what you should be doing and I encourage you to keep doing it.”

Pope Francis is a noted fan of San Lorenzo de Almagro, a top-division soccer club.

He discussed sports in terms of discipleship, Korver said, a way of modeling behavior and leading others. “It’s this beautiful opportunity that it provides, and he really encouraged us to just humbly walk into that,” he added.

Tolliver described Pope Francis as “super chill.”

“He was actually way more relaxed than I’d ever imagine a pope being,” he said, adding that he did some reading on Francis before the trip. He said the pope told the players about how he used to love watching the Harlem Globetrotters and even flashed a sense of humor.

“And you know, when the pope makes a halfway joke, it’s the funniest thing ever, right?” Tolliver said. “So when I say making jokes, anything that was supposed to be remotely funny, we made sure we gave him a good laugh.”