This summer has thrown up a festival of sport to watch and enjoy. Part of the enjoyment flows from someone who represents you winning glory. The question of who represents us, however, has clearly got more complex given recent events.
During Euro 2024, the final between Spain and England was presented in some quarters as a Catholic versus Protestant match. For there are areas of the beautiful game where the Catholic/Protestant-based team allegiance divide is still a thing.
There is a very sharp <em>YouTube</em> skit from a few decades ago where a Rangers football scout brings in a young man, who appears and amazing talent and has scored seven goals in the first half of his last game, to be signed up with a five-year contract for the club. Only as the ink dries do they realise, to their horror, that he is a Catholic.
While the Wimbledon final came down to being a contest between the Serbian Orthodox champion versus a Spanish Catholic new kid on the block.
This begs the question: should any sense of a fourth crusade or recognition of the <em>Filioque</em> theological formula that spilt the Western and Eastern churches play any part in who a good Catholic might want to support?
But then we had <em>that</em> opening ceremony in Paris. The Olympics themselves, but especially the opening ceremony, are intended to be a spectacular event portraying the most inspirational of the values celebrated by the host nation, interwoven with the spirit of the Olympic Games and international athletics.
So the now infamous section of the opening ceremony was an unwelcome surprise to Christians all over the world, when a group of drag queens offered a mocking pastiche of Leonard’s Da Vinci’s Last Supper.<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/mounting-catholic-pushback-against-olympic-games-opening-ceremony/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Mounting Catholic shock and pushback against Olympics’ ceremony</mark></a></strong>
Upon being faced with a wall of protest, the first response was to pretend it had nothing to do with Jesus, the apostles or Leonardo. The plump lesbian at the centre of the tableau cracked early, however, and gave the game away, saying that of course that was the intention.
The insult was problematic at a number of levels. Why use drag queens in particular? Why did one of them expose his testicles peeking provocatively outside his shorts while standing behind the statutory drag-queen-show-imported child. (What is it about drag queens and children and the current obsession in parts of society to throw them together?)
There was also a range of responses from the Church, starting with a steady initial silence from the Vatican, mild rebuke from the French bishops (who are perhaps only too used to this sort of thing); but the American bishop Robert Baron, master of the media and public debate put together a robust rejection of the mockery which went viral.
He made two points which were both unusual in their asperity and energy.
The first was that if this piece was emblematic of the secular spirit of the age – with the power of its conviction strong enough that it would abuse the hospitality of the Olympic stage in its antipathy to Christianity – then Catholics could take some slight comfort in being the target of the mockery. Because it demonstrated the perverse preoccupation of a hyper-sexualised society with the Catholic Church and its moral teaching.
The image they chose to desecrate was a piece of Catholic art, made for a Catholic order by a Catholic artist. Its power both as symbol of the Last Supper and as a piece of art derives its authenticity from its Catholic nature. It portrays the juxtaposition of the institution of the Mass with the realisation that apostolic betrayal is to act as a catalyst for the coming Crucifixion but also the coming Resurrection.
The transubstantiation of the bread and wine will become the means for transforming the human heart of the disciple. It was no accident that the group that chose to mock this symbolism did so because they had embarked on a different "trans" project – the artificial transition of a man into a woman for the purposes of sexual gratification.
So in their protest, the process of "trans" became contested. Two miracles, one to do with bread the other to do with the human heart, were traded for a sexual and existential adventure into decadence.
Bishop Barron rightly identified this preoccupation with the institution of the Mass, in the context of betrayal, as constituting an underlying dynamic that exercised sufficient threat to the human conscience that it provoked a defence mechanism that resorted in mockery.<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/bishop-barron-slams-gross-mockery-of-last-supper-and-christian-faith-during-olympic-games-opening-ceremony/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Bishop Barron slams ‘gross mockery’ of Last Supper and Christian Faith during Olympic Games opening ceremony</mark></a></strong>
“They are afraid of us”, he suggested. On reflection, we begin to see that perhaps they are more afraid of us than we are of them? Our sensitivities and affections are wounded, but their project is alarmed and gripped by a fear that another kind of "trans" is operating; while in their case, they know they are setting out to "trans-gress".
We should make the most of the fact that this mockery is grounded in an antipathy energised by fear, and raise our voices. We might raise them first of all in protest to let the world know that our love of Jesus has been wounded, and by way of appeal to anyone and everyone who appreciates the depth and calibre of wounded love to stand by it in solidarity.
But in raising our voices we can do so not so much in condemnation, there is plenty of that already lurking in the lower reaches of every transgressors’ psyche already, but raised so that the transgressors hear something surprising about the promise of forgiveness. We have to bypass the grip of the super ego and let it be known that God is not a moral policeman; that the tableau used by the drag queens was the emblem of a love story. It was the message that there are no lengths to which our creator will not go to find and forgive us.
St John Paul II wrote very movingly and with refreshing clarity about the difference between nationalism and patriotism. And it might have been that the conversations about who Catholics should support in sporting contests in the past could be directed by issues of congruence between national culture and the Catholic faith.
But the offence intentionally generated by the Olympic tableau should have brought home to us that the luxury of choosing our allegiances from within what was once a Christian culture, may have been lost. And that what faces the Church now is the task of wholesale re-evangelisation of a freshly emerged pagan culture.
Time, as Bishop Barron said, to raise our voices.<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/that-unholy-parody-why-the-its-just-jolly-dionysus-claim-makes-things-even-worse/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">That unholy parody: Why the ‘It’s just jolly Dionysus’ claim makes things even worse</mark></a></strong>
<em>Photo: The Olympic Flag is presented at Place du Trocadero by the mysterious ‘horsewoman’ figure who played a central role during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, Paris, France, 26 July 2024. (Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty Images.)</em>
.jpg)
.jpg)
