Minnesota Bishop Robert Barron has denounced the drag queen parody of the Last Supper for the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics as a “gross mockery” of Christianity.
“France felt evidently that as it’s trying to put its best cultural foot forward the right thing to do is to mock this very central moment in Christianity where Jesus at his Last Supper gives his body and blood in anticipation of the cross,” Barron said in a video posted on X (former Twitter).
“It’s presented as this gross, sort of flippant mockery,” he added.
The founder of the Word on Fire apostolate, Bishop Barron noted that Olympic organizers would never have “dreamed of mocking in this gross public way a scene from the Qu’ran.”
On the other hand, France, whose culture is grounded very much in Christianity, “felt the right thing to do was to mock the Christian faith,” he said.
“This deeply secularist, post-modern society, knows who its enemy is, they’re naming it, and we should believe them,” he declared. “They’re telling us who they are and we should believe them.”
Bishop Barron was not alone in calling out the outrages of the Paris event.
Kansas City Chiefs star kicker Harrison Butker, a Catholic, posted a video of the scene, along with a citation from the New Testament letter of Saint Paul to the Galatians: “Be not deceived, God is not mocked. For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap. For he that soweth in his flesh, of the flesh also shall reap corruption. But he that soweth in the spirit, of the spirit shall reap life everlasting.”
Former swimming champion Riley Gaines, who has been an outspoken critic of allowing male athletes to participate as females in athletic competitions, similarly wrote in response to the performance, “Men in wigs front & center at the Olympic Games. No one ever tell me this group is ‘oppressed’ or ‘marginalized’ again.”
For her part, European Parliament member Marion Marechal, hastened to note that the insulting event was devised by France’s far-left minority, not by the French people.
“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,” Marechal posted, along with the hashtag “#notinmyname.”
The opening ceremony was presented on July 26, which happened to be the eighth anniversary of the 2016 martyrdom of French priest Father Jacques Hamel at the hands of Islamic jihadists. Father Hamel had his throat slit as he was celebrating Mass in the northern French city of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.
Thomas D. Williams is the author of The Coming Christian Persecution: Why Things Are Getting Worse and How to Prepare for What Is to Come.
