Bishop Robert Barron has gone online to lambast what he calls the “gross mockery” of the Christian Faith that occurred during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
The ceremony on 26 July, during which the involvement of drag queens appeared to be a recurring theme, featured a scene where a group of drag queens and a notably rotund woman wearing an aureole halo crown posed themselves at a table in a style parodying the iconic image of the Last Supper.
It left Barron both baffled and incensed – amid growing international outrage – at the behaviour of a country and capital city that, as he emphasises, he cares deeply for having spent three years there as a doctoral student.
“France felt evidently, as it’s trying to put its best cultural foot forward, that the right thing to do is to mock this very central moment in Christianity,” Barron says in a roughly two-minute video posted to the social media platform X in which his sense of indignation, if not genuine hurt, is palpable.
He explains that in addition to the “gross, flippant mockery” of the Christian Faith, it’s made all the worse given the fact that “France used to be called the elder daughter of the Church”.
This is a country that has sent Catholic missionaries all over the world, Barron highlights, while Paris, a city he emphasises that he loves, is where St Thomas Aquinas taught and where the likes of Vincent de Paul lived.
Barron also notes that “France, whose culture, and I mean the honouring of the individual, human rights, freedom, is grounded very much in Christianity”.
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The bishop, who is one of the biggest and most well known Catholic voices in the US – a latter-day Internet-based Bishop Fulton Sheen – sets the incident in the wider context of what is happening in the world.
“This deeply secularist, post-modern society knows who its enemy is; they’re naming it and we should believe them, they are telling us who it is,” Barron says.
As a result, he adds, “Catholics must not be sheepish” and need to “resist” and to make their voices heard.
He highlights “would they ever have dared mocked Islam in a similar way?” or “would they ever have dreamed of mocking in this gross public way a scene from the Quran?” before adding the obvious:
“We all know the answer.”
The incident follows, somewhat ironically, the Vatican’s athletic department calling for a cessation of all global conflicts and wars for the duration of the Olympics, while urging participants in the Games to promote inclusion and fraternity.
The French politician and member of the European Parliament Marion Maréchal, and who is the niece of Marine Le Pen, responded on X to the controversy:
“To all the Christians of the world who are watching the #Paris2024 ceremony and felt insulted by this drag queen parody of the Last Supper, know that it is not France that is speaking but a left-wing minority ready for any provocation.”
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Photo: The Last Supper parody sketch during the Olympic Games ceremony; screenshot from @libsoftiktok
