Our Lady of Outrage

The 2024 Paris Olympics are over but the marathon of outrage is the race that never ends. 

The starter’s pistol sounded with the opening ceremony and the drag parody of Leonardo’s “The Last Supper,” which may well have been a tribute to Dionysius, the Greek god of wine-making and performative partying. Never mind such distinctions. Culture warriors with an ax to grind along with many Christians of good faith were triggered. They immediately swamped social media with rage-posts and viral videos and appeals to “repudiate this deliberate desecration,” as the Catholic archbishop of San Francisco—a city that knows from cross-dressing—tweeted.

The ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, denied that da Vinci’s 15th-century fresco (which, by the way, is in Italy, not France) was his inspiration for the scene and said that he did not intend “to be subversive” or “mock” or “shock.” Instead, he said, “We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.” The critics weren’t buying that and the next day a spokesperson semi-apologized saying “if people have taken any offense, we are really sorry.”

That only fanned the flame of Olympic anger. “Give me a break,” said an exasperated Bishop Robert Barron. Barron is the head of a small diocese in Minnesota but he is best known for his global media ministry, Word on Fire, that combines a celebrity-branded Catholic apologetics and culture war messaging. Barron was the first out of the blocks with the complaints and he continued to set a furious pace. 

But his competitors would not go quietly. “The Catholic League was the only Catholic organization to register a formal protest,” crowed the league’s longtime head, William Donohue. “Moreover, by supplying contact information, we were the only one to give Catholics a voice in registering their objections. And unlike others, who did next to nothing, we didn’t try to hustle our supporters by asking for a donation.” (The Catholic League takes in millions each year, and Donohue has earned close to $1 million annually.)

Catholics in Africa and Latin America joined church leaders in North America in denouncing the opening spectacle. Evangelicals in the United States were especially triggered, which was especially odd given that “The Last Supper” is by a Catholic artist and depicts the institution of a Catholic sacrament—the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ—that Protestants reject as blasphemous.

The ecumenism of outrage was so powerful that Christians even welcomed Iran’s diplomatic protest over the parody and Catholics cheered when Turkish strongman— and Muslim leader—Recep Erdoğan personally lobbied Pope Francis to speak out. (They could have at least thrown in a request for Erdoğan to reverse his 2020 move to turn the Hagia Sophia into a mosque or to push to mitigate policies against Christians suffering in Turkey and elsewhere.)

The pontiff had resisted the pressure to pile on; that’s not his thing, and he preferred to let the balanced and constructive response by the French bishops take precedence. Besides, the Christian campaign of protests had already sparked massive online abuse and even death threats against Jolly and others associated with the opening ceremony, and that’s not something a Christian leader ought to add to.

But the grievance lobby is nothing if not insistent, and the Vatican caved. Late on Saturday, a week after the opening ceremony, the Holy See released an unsigned statement in French saying the Vatican was “saddened” by the parody and wanted to join “voices that have been raised in recent days to deplore the offense given to many Christians and believers of other religions.” Hoo-boy. “Are we only ‘saddened’ by public mockery of someone we love?” fumed Philip Lawler, a longtime conservative Catholic commentator in the United States. “[T]he fact remains that an insult to our Lord Jesus in the Eucharist has been met with silence from his Vicar in Rome.”

Not to be outdone, Bishop Barron picked up the baton again as the Games neared their end, and in a withering column in Newsweek wrote that the organizers “are trying to mock and bully us into irrelevance. I say to my fellow Christians: Speak up, resist, and get in their way.” To the barricades! As Jean-Pascal Gay wrote in La Croix, it was all so predictable. “Contemporary controversies involving Catholicism have something slightly ridiculous about them. The script is written; each actor seems to want to deliver only a literal interpretation of it and finds a kind of morose delight in performing this predetermined role.”

Yet on it went, a relay of grievance that blinded angry believers to the daily stories of triumph and inspiration and expressions of faith so numerous that a Guardian article was titled “How God struck gold in Paris.” Rage blinds, but it also leads to overreading as much as overreaching. For the prophets of despair, the opening ceremony demonstrated not just a regrettable instance of poor taste but another sign of “the decline and decay of the West,” the return to “the pagan mindset” and “bullying a minority” of French believers who have remained faithful despite the godlessness all around them. Elon Musk (yes, I know) warned that Christians needed to fight back or “Christianity will perish” (so much for the Gates of Hell), and Barron added the “that the Christian faith can be lost in a single generation, if Christians aren’t vigilant.”

These voices would be easier to take seriously if we all hadn’t watched, just five years ago, the outpouring of anguish and support as Notre-Dame burned at the start of Holy Week. Tens of thousands of Parisians poured into the streets around the cathedral that day with tears in their eyes and singing the “Ave Maria,” a hymn to Our Lady that sprang so easily to their minds and lips. The French government vowed to rebuild at all costs, and French citizens and millions around the world pledged billions of dollars to the effort.

So did France, and the West, flip from Christianity to pagan secularism in a few years? Hardly. For one thing, more than 60 percent of French adults still identify as Catholic. That is, by the way, about the same percentage of Americans who identify as Christian. Practices may change, and have, but culture is more stable than we realize. As the late Jesuit historian John O’Malley said, “Even the most radical discontinuities in history take place within a stronger current of continuity. France, for example, was still France after the French Revolution.” Guillaume Cuchet, a historian of Christianity, noted after the Notre-Dame fire that “even if the practices have largely disappeared, the [French] culture has, at least for now, outlived the erasure of religious practice. That might not hold indefinitely, but it doesn’t disappear in two or three generations either.”

France has long been called “the eldest daughter of the church,” and though she has often been a problem child that lineage doesn’t change overnight. If the structure of American culture is Protestant, as Robert Bellah argued, then the shape of French culture is thoroughly Catholic. In France the God that atheists don’t believe in is a Catholic god, and the church they don’t attend is a Catholic church. In France they still believe there is one true religion, and it’s the religion they say they don’t believe in.

French Christians knew that. Hence the measured lament and forward-looking response to the Last Supper scene from the French bishops, and their focus on the many other initiatives they helped sponsor. The grand Church of the Madeleine, for example, was turned into a hub of activities both spiritual and cultural for believers and non-believers alike, and parishes across Paris organized Olympic style competitions for the poor and homeless and victims of sex trafficking. The churches also took part in supporting the Paralympics that took place concurrently, and the much smaller evangelical Protestant churches partnered in numerous initiatives to show their support for the Games and the common good.

The good news did not seem to penetrate the thunderdome of outrage and ignorance that dominated so many Christian responses to the Games. Those disposed to take a more open mind toward faith in modern-day France, and the rest of the West, may find it helpful to recall the story of Pope Pius VII, who came to Paris in 1804 to crown Napoleon, an intransigent foe of the pope and the church, as emperor. Before returning to Rome after the coronation, Pius visited Versailles and was surprised to find himself warmly welcomed by a large gathering of faithful Catholics. “So is this the people of France, who are said to be so irreligious?” the pope declared.

Napoleon was furious with Pius and in 1809 annexed the papal states and sent the pope into exile in France. (Napoleon in 1798 had taken Pius’ predecessor, Pius VI, captive and the pope died a year later in France.) Pius VII remained Napoleon’s prisoner until 1813, and witnessed the emperor’s ignominious downfall a year later. He even outlived Napoleon by two years. This December, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and just in time for Christmas, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris is scheduled to re-open for religious services and to the public. The great and the good will all turn out, as well as ordinary believers and the usual tourists. Plus ça change, as they say.