Vatican News portal reports on an interview with Dr. Stefano Conte, an Italian pediatrician and founder of the Zanzibar Cup, an international kitesurfing competition in Tanzania. The article presents the event as a vehicle for promoting “peace,” “tourism,” “youth sports,” and “international fraternity” in East Africa, with explicit reference to the “call for peace” of “Pope” Leo XIV. Dr. Conte, who previously provided free medical treatment to Zanzibari people, claims the competition sends a message that “people can live together as brothers and sisters without war” and emphasizes the importance of “providing young people with alternative sporting opportunities beyond football.” The article celebrates the event’s growth, its international participants, and the support of local governments and media, framing it as a model of humanitarian and social mission through sport. This piece exemplifies the post-conciliar obsession with horizontal, naturalistic “fraternity” and “peace” — concepts stripped of all supernatural content and divorced from the only true source of peace: the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the preaching of His Gospel for the salvation of souls.
The Omission of the Supernatural: A Fraternity Without Christ
The most glaring and damning feature of this article — and of the entire initiative it celebrates — is the complete and total absence of any reference to God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Catholic Faith, or the supernatural order. Dr. Conte speaks of “peace,” “fraternity,” and “unity” as though these were self-evident, self-sustaining goods achievable through human effort alone, through the mere gathering of young people on a beach to compete in kitesurfing. This is not Christian charity; it is naturalistic humanitarianism, the very spirit condemned by the Church for over a century.
Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the lie that peace can be achieved without the recognition of Our Lord’s sovereign reign over all nations and all aspects of human life. The Pope wrote with prophetic clarity: “the hope of lasting peace will not yet shine upon nations as long as individuals and states renounce and do not wish to recognize the reign of our Savior.” He further warned: “When God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The Zanzibar Cup, as presented in this article, is a textbook example of the very error Pius XI condemned: a “peace” initiative from which Christ has been entirely removed, replaced by the empty slogan of “living together as brothers and sisters without war.”
The article quotes Dr. Conte saying, “We want to send a message that people can live together as brothers and sisters without war.” But what does this mean in practice? That people of different nations can compete in a sporting event without fighting? This is not a Christian message; it is a banal observation that requires no faith, no grace, and no Church. The true Christian message, the only one that brings real peace, is the one preached by the Apostles: “There is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Without the preaching of Christ Crucified, without the sacraments, without the call to conversion and the renunciation of sin, any “peace” is a fragile illusion — a truce between sinners who have not been reconciled to God.
The “Call for Peace” of Leo XIV: Echoing the World, Not the Gospel
The article explicitly invokes the “call for peace made by Pope Leo XIV,” presenting Dr. Conte’s initiative as an echo of this call. This is a characteristic maneuver of the conciar sect: to baptize a purely naturalistic, worldly enterprise with the authority of the “pope,” thereby lending spiritual credibility to what is, in reality, a secular project dressed in the language of fraternity.
Leo XIV, as the current usurper on the seat of Peter, is the heir of the conciliar revolution that systematically emptied Catholic teaching of its supernatural content and replaced it with a horizontal, anthropocentric concern for “human fraternity,” “dialogue,” and “care for our common home.” The document on “Human Fraternity” signed by Bergoglio in Abu Dhabi in 2019 — a document that effectively placed the Catholic religion on the same level as all other religions by stating that God “wills the plurality of religions” — is the logical foundation of initiatives like the Zanzibar Cup. When the “pope” calls for “peace” without simultaneously calling for the conversion of nations to the Catholic Faith, without demanding the recognition of Christ the King, without insisting on the necessity of baptism and the sacraments, he is not preaching the Gospel; he is merely echoing the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition that “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). The entire trajectory of the post-conciliar “popes” — from John XXIII through Leo XIV — has been precisely this reconciliation with the modern world, this abandonment of the Church’s prophetic mission to condemn error and call all nations to submit to the Kingship of Christ. The Zanzibar Cup, celebrated by Vatican News as an embodiment of the “pope’s” call for peace, is a fruit of this apostasy.
Sport as Substitute for Evangelization
The article reveals that Dr. Conte’s original work in Zanzibar was medical — providing free pediatric heart surgery to local people. While the corporal works of mercy are indeed praiseworthy when performed with a supernatural intention, the article makes clear that this medical mission has now been supplemented and seemingly superseded by a sporting mission. The doctor has become a “promoter of peace and fraternity through sports.” This trajectory — from medical charity to sport-based “fraternity” — is emblematic of the post-conciliar Church’s abandonment of its primary mission: the salvation of souls through preaching, baptism, and the sacraments.
The article notes that Dr. Conte stressed “the importance of providing young people with alternative sporting opportunities beyond football,” and that kitesurfing “has the potential to attract international attention to Zanzibar while encouraging the participation of local youth in international sports.” The goals, in other words, are tourism, international visibility, and youth engagement in sport. Nowhere in the article is there any mention of catechizing these young people, of bringing them to the Catholic Faith, of providing them with the sacraments, of teaching them the truths necessary for salvation. The “humanitarian and social mission” of the Zanzibar Cup is entirely reducible to naturalistic categories: physical health, recreation, tourism, and intercultural exchange.
This stands in stark contrast to the Church’s understanding of true charity. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the greatest act of charity is to lead a soul to God, for the supernatural end of man infinitely surpasses any natural good. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, reminded the faithful that “the Church, established by Christ as a perfect society, demands for itself by a right belonging to it, which it cannot renounce, full freedom and independence from secular authority, and that in fulfilling the mission entrusted to it by God — to teach, govern, and lead all to eternal happiness, those who belong to the Kingdom of Christ — it cannot depend on anyone’s will.” The Zanzibar Cup, as presented, depends entirely on the support of the Zanzibar and Tanzanian governments, sponsoring companies, and television coverage — a model of worldly enterprise that has nothing to do with the Church’s divine mission.
The Language of the Conciliar Sect: “Fraternity,” “Unity,” “Peace”
The vocabulary of this article is drawn entirely from the lexicon of post-conciliar Modernism: “peace,” “fraternity,” “unity,” “international cooperation,” “humanitarian mission,” “social mission,” “youth empowerment,” “tourism.” These are the buzzwords of the United Nations, of NGOs, of the globalist agenda — not of the Catholic Church as She understood Herself for nearly two millennia.
Before the conciliar revolution, the Church spoke a different language. She spoke of the conversion of nations, of the salvation of souls, of the necessity of baptism, of the mortal danger of heresy and schism, of the social Kingship of Christ, of the obligation of Catholic states to profess the Faith publicly. Pius IX, in the Syllabus, condemned the proposition that “it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship” (Proposition 77). The Zanzibar Cup, by contrast, makes no distinction between faiths, professes no doctrine, and seeks no conversions. It is, in the language of the Syllabus, a manifestation of indifferentism — the error that “good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ” (Proposition 17).
The article’s celebration of “international fraternity” without any reference to the unity of the Catholic Faith echoes the false ecumenism condemned by Pius XI in Mortalium Animos (1928), where he warned that “the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it.” The Zanzibar Cup promotes a “fraternity” that requires no unity of faith, no submission to the Church, no acceptance of Catholic dogma — a fraternity that is, in the final analysis, a fraternity of unbelief.
The Silence About the Real Needs of Zanzibar
Zanzibar is a predominantly Muslim territory. The article makes absolutely no mention of this fact, nor of the urgent need for the evangelization of its population. The Catholic Church, before the conciliar revolution, would have seen in Zanzibar not merely an opportunity for medical charity and sporting events, but above all a mission field — a place where souls languish in the darkness of Islam and the denial of Christ’s Divinity, and where the preaching of the Gospel is a matter of eternal life and death.
St. Francis Xavier, St. Peter Claver, and countless other missionaries did not go to foreign lands to organize sporting competitions; they went to baptize, to catechize, to administer the sacraments, to plant the Church. The fact that Vatican News can present a Catholic doctor’s work in Zanzibar without a single mention of evangelization, catechesis, or the spiritual needs of the population reveals the depth of the conciliar apostasy. The “mission” has been reduced to its purely natural dimension — and even that is celebrated not for the sake of leading souls to Christ, but for the sake of “tourism” and “international visibility.”
Conclusion: A Worldly Enterprise Cloaked in Papal Authority
The Zanzibar Cup, as presented by Vatican News, is not a Catholic initiative. It is a secular, naturalistic enterprise — a sporting event aimed at tourism promotion and youth recreation — that has been given a veneer of Catholic legitimacy by the invocation of Leo XIV’s “call for peace.” It embodies every error of the post-conciliar period: the replacement of supernatural charity with naturalistic humanitarianism, the substitution of “fraternity” for the unity of the Faith, the reduction of the Church’s mission to social and recreational activities, and the silence about the most fundamental truths of the Catholic religion.
The true peace of Christ — “the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ,” as Pius XI proclaimed — cannot be achieved by kitesurfing competitions, however well-intentioned. It can only be achieved through the preaching of the Gospel, the administration of the sacraments, the conversion of souls and nations to the Catholic Faith, and the public recognition of the social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Until the structures occupying the Vatican understand this — or, more precisely, until the faithful who remain loyal to the unchanging Tradition of the Church reject these naturalistic substitutes for the Faith — initiatives like the Zanzibar Cup will continue to be held up as models of “Catholic” engagement with the world, when in reality they are monuments to the apostasy of the conciliar sect.
Source:
Tanzania: Zanzibar Cup promoting peace and tourism through kitesurfing (vaticannews.va)
Date: 15.05.2026