Une Scène Olympique: "La Cène sur la Scène sur la Seine"

Making an Olympic-Sized Scene over an Inevitability of Culture

At first I thought it was the Last Supper.

Then, after reading and watching and scrolling, I thought it was a Greek Bacchanalia.

Then, shortly behind Alice, I fell down the internet rabbit hole and started to think it was probably some artistic combination of the Last Supper, a Greek Bacchanalia, and any number of other things.

Then - and it took longer than I want to admit - I realized that mainly I’m just annoyed by this.

The news cycle has largely moved on, and as usual, I’m behind the trend of saying something about it. There’s been so much said, but to be honest I found very little of it thoughtful or helpful. In a time when the Bishops seem very quiet about almost anything that matters, I was surprised at the number who issued public statements or demanded apologies.

It’s good of course, and it is our right (even duty) as religious people, to speak out and let others know how we’ve perceived certain things, especially when the very “source and summit” of our life as Christians is mocked. And we want people to believe us and to respect us.

I started to lose interest in this whole debate when the Olympic committee said “we didn’t mean to offend anyone” and almost the whole Catholic internet said “yes you did!” and expected it to matter. Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that I have nothing but respect and even admiration for Bishop Barron, but I thought his second video calling out the Olympic Committee’s “non-apology” was counterproductive.

From my armchair, with empty coffee cups strewn about, scrolling through post after post expressing outrage at the event itself and then even more outrage at the non-apology, I found myself shouting at Instagram: “of course they aren’t sorry! Where have all of you been living for the last 300 years?”

The Christian internet is putting malice where I think there is mainly indifference, and it’s demanding an apology from people who really don’t care.

France: Avantgarde toujours

Recall that France, the eldest daughter of the Church, in her whacky teenage years of the 1790’s, decided to leave the homestead and try things on her own; recall that France has been the center of anti-clericalism (not for no reason, by the way) and secular values for longer than almost any other European country; recall that France learned a lot of these ideals from what it observed in those other rebellious little territories across the ocean it helped defend against Britain; recall that French enlightenment thinkers thought they could manufacture a moral society without God, using reason and philosophy, and that the regime this produced chopped off a great many heads to achieve this vision.

What we’re seeing is the natural conclusion of what Fr. Giussani put into words for us when he said that (I’m paraphrasing) one of the hallmarks of secularism in the West is that it began with the Enlightenment trying to maintain the values that Christ taught us but without Christ. But is reason a good substitute for Christ? If Christianity were, as Pope Benedict denied, “an ethical choice or lofty idea,” it really wouldn’t matter whether Christ was there or not because the whole Christian system would be an outgrowth of reason. But, as Benedict did affirm, because Jesus is “a person” who arrives as a “historical event” which “gives life a new horizon and decisive direction”¹, removing him but trying to maintain what he gave us is essentially a non-starter.

The Five Withouts

Giussani maps out this removal with what he calls “The ‘Five Withouts’ of Modern Rationalism”²:

1. God without Christ. Natural conclusion: fideism that “empties the foundation of all our religious application, all the Christian conversion of our life, of life’s whole sense of God, of all our moral effort.” (62)

2. Christ without the Church. Natural conclusion: gnosticism which will “eliminate from Christ the fact of being a man, a real historical man…The elimination of carnality, which is implied in every human experience…draws Christ and the Church back into an abstraction, reducing Him to one of many religious models.” (63)

3. The Church without the World. Natural conclusion (twofold): clericalism - “the impressive effect of fixed laws controlling every detail of life, which tend to describe the attitude to have in every detail of life. (67) And spiritualism which is “faith set alongside life; therefore, faith is no longer the reason that enlightens and the strength that works in life.” Its most “conspicuous symptom” is to “speak of Christ’s resurrection in a sentimental way: the devotion of a remembrance, not the memory of a presence…If the resurrection is not present, then salvation cannot be present, and Christ’s resurrection would be like a point that speaks about a future, an unknown future.” (65-66)

4. The World without ‘I’. Natural conclusion: alienation & intersectionality. (68-69) This is the foundation of identity politics and my theory of wokeism as a kind of social currency. If Christ loses his carnality, then the Church loses its identity as being the Body of Christ, and the West devolves into a society in which all behavior is based on ideology and not an event. But in such a society, all behavior being based on ideology (political or religious or something else), what is missing in the individuality of the human person, the person’s conception of herself as an individual and unrepeatable “I”. Where does this lead? To the profound and crippling loneliness that so many are experiencing now despite living in what is supposed to be the most connected and free era in human history.

5. An ‘I’ without God. Natural conclusion: pantheism or nihilism. “The ‘I’ without God is an I that cannot avoid boredom and nausea. So…we can feel ourselves part of a whole (pantheism, among others), or else we fall prey to desperation (nihilism, also hedonism among others).” (69) Perhaps the best contemporary explanation of this point is from Monsignor Shea’ talk at SEEK24 where he said, “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe our young people are on to something? Have you ever thought that they might not just be dead wrong about how they’re feeling? Maybe feeling sad and anxious and burdened and barren is an appropriate and adequate response to growing up in a world without God.”³

Perhaps those early thinkers who believed a moral society without God or the Church was possible were able to achieve some success in this because they had been raised in something of a Christian culture. They had been given some of the tools and parts of the worldview to make living the values Christ gave us without Christ seem possible. But with each succeeding generation never being taught the principles and values, without being given the tools, and without soaking in a Christian worldview it cannot be a surprise that the values get warped.

What was once the result of an encounter with a person, an event, that provided a decisive direction for all history and behavior is reduced to ideology.

This cultural shift moved along slowly at first and then in the last sixty years or so has begun to spiral out of control; I think this shift has everything to do with the advent of technology (especially social media) and, with it, the complete revolution of what it means to exist together on this planet.

A Case Study

As I sit typing this, I am at a coffee shop near my parish where I am shamelessly eavesdropping on a very interesting conversation happening next to me. A woman is sharing her dislike for her Christian upbringing and her Christian parents; citing a niece recently coming out as bisexual as the tipping point for her finally abandoning any practice or identifying as a Christian. The Church, she’s arguing, no longer has anything to offer her and she’s blaming a lot of the woes in American life today on the rigidity of American evangelicals, like her parents.

The woman’s interlocutor, to the great delight of my prying ears, challenges some of these generalizations and assumptions by noting some of the positive qualities about her own upbringing, the relevance of faith in her life today, and also a witness of one of her own family members who identifies as gay but finds meaning in remaining a practicing Christian.

The first woman replied not with the openness I’d expect from an enlightened and free member of rationalist modernity, but with the characteristic rigidity of someone who’s “I” is alienated and behaves according to ideology: “You’re missing what I’m saying by using your Christian talking points.” And proceeded to talk about the lovely time she had at parents’ lakehouse (!).

Obviously, because of what I’m bringing to the table in terms of worldview, beliefs, and admitted biases I wanted to buy the second woman a coffee and give her a gold sticker. But someone else more in line with the first woman’s line of thinking would likely wish to do the same, and give her accolades for being assertive and calling out the use of tired old Christian witness, and maybe make some implication that the patriarchy has conditioned her to think this way.

Fr. Ryan’s Usual Lines About Social Media

But this coffee shop conversation is indicative of what the internet is doing over the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony. Social media touted itself as the new “town square” where the world could engage itself in broad dialogue and openness. But what ended up happening is the same thing that always happens when humans are left to their own devices (pun intended): division, tribalism, and nonsense.

We have locked ourselves inside unique ghettos of thought, where anyone or thing with whom I disagree is deletable. The consequence of this is obvious and only a matter of time: sincere shock that not everyone thinks or lives the same way I do or at least a general annoyance that I must share this planet with people so outrageous and out of touch as “them.”

Has anyone noticed that everyone is having the same reaction? Different words, different points of view, but essentially the same? Living like a lemming, detached from my “I” and behaving based only on the ideologies I subscribe to has made life just one big game of Mad Libs.

A Reminder for Christians to Focus

So, yeah, drag queens mocked the Last Supper and also staged a Greek Bacchanalia. That’s sad, and I wish it wouldn’t have happened. But why are we shocked? And, maybe more pressing, why are we shocked that they are using the values Christ taught us against us? Also, why are we shocked that they’re using values like tolerance and openness and freedom in a perverted way?

When, in the history of all the world’s attempts to do this without God, has it ever been different?

My real question, I guess, is more direct: where is the Christian witness? Where is the affirmation that every single one of those drag queens is known to God and is made in his image and is called to conversion? Where is the encouragement for genuine prayer first for the conversion of our own hearts and then the hearts of those with whom we disagree? Where is admonishment against the “well lets pray for them” which actually means “well let’s pray that they’re more sorry and see it our way”?

When the world tries to do what it does without God, the very things we are witnessing are the very things that happen. Why is this surprising?

If the world is trying to live the values of Christianity without Christ, it seems that many Christians are trying to live their “personal relationship with Jesus” independent of what he actually said and taught. This is not “just as” dangerous; it’s more dangerous.

He told us we’d be mocked, that the world did not know him. “He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him.” (Jn 1:10-11) “If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you.” (Jn. 15:18-19)

Isaiah’s prophetic words about the suffering servant come to mind:

“He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering acquainted with infirmity, like one from whom you turn your face, spurned and held in no esteem…Though harshly treated, he submitted and did not open his mouth…Like a lamb led to slaughter, he did not open his mouth.” (Is. 53:3,7)

Jesus told his followers that two things were guaranteed to happen to them: that they’d be mocked like he was and that they’d do “greater things than these” (Jn. 14:12). In warning them of being mocked, he told them not to worry about it because he’d already gone through it and had indeed already overcome the world.

It hurts to be made fun of, to be misunderstood, to be reviled and scorned, and to experience all this without the possibility of a meaningful apology.

So the challenge is for us, the Church, to embrace both Jesus Christ, the living person, and the values he taught so that our own hearts might be softened and converted first; then, in time, we could be better ambassadors to a world without God and find ways to console, understand, and affirm the goodness of all who don’t know him, even big Frenchman painted blue.

The goal here is not to protect the Last Supper we all love so much only so that it can be restricted. The goal here is to protect and defend it and thereby invite as many people to sit at our table as we possibly can.

1. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 2005. 1.

2. Luigi Giussani, To Give One’s Life for the Work of Another, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), 62-69.

3. Watch this talk if you haven’t.