The Paris Olympics: Caligula Redux

'[T]he opening ceremonies at Paris celebrated ... the end of Christianity, in particular, and of Western Civilization, in general.'

From Crisis

By Fr John A Perricone, PhD

The tragedy was not the outrageous blasphemy. It was the absence of howling outrage.

I demur. The Opening Ceremonies of the Paris Olympics last Friday would have been an insult to Caligula. He merely stood for perversity, sadism, and debauchery, while the opening ceremonies at Paris celebrated much, much more. They boldly trumpeted the end of Christianity, in particular, and of Western Civilization, in general. With their Last Supper blasphemy festooned with deviant LGBTQ+ burlesque, they intended nothing less than a battering ram against Christianity and the civilization to which she gave birth.  

Aside from a handful of outrages, the general reaction ranged from mild amusement, to “ho-hum pass the salt,” to passionate agreement, to muted displeasure.  

And therein lies the nightmare. 

Not in the debased performance, but rather in the chic acceptance. Even a Caligula would have been embarrassed. His depravity would never have dreamt of mocking the firmament of Roman gods, or dislodging the foundations of the Roman Imperium.

More than a few were probably haunted by the premonitory verses of Yeats in his “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

The tragedy was not the outrageous blasphemy. It was the absence of howling outrage. No such supine reaction would have met such an attack on Islam. For all its wild aberrations, it does not lack the manliness of instantaneous fury. Not so the once chest-thumping Catholicism of the saints and martyrs. Sixty years ago, that millennial Catholic trademark was thought embarrassing for a Church in a hurry to make friends with the world. Historic Catholic boasts such as the Crusades, the vanquishing of the Old Pagan gods, and the conversion of the nations have been quietly shelved for a more user-friendly Catholicism. Anathemas have been traded for something called “dialogical listening” and certitude by sensitivity to “difference.” Some members of the hierarchy have censured “proselytism,” a slur on bringing men to the Catholic Church. 

Catholics are now incessantly drilled on the one and only sin “crying out to heaven for vengeance”: “passing judgment.” (For you youngsters, there were once four such sins. Look it up.) Of course, that is precisely what the Decalogue is all about. Exactly the reason why religion classes no longer teach them. Well, some of them do. But you can count them on one hand.

This new irenicism-on-steroids is daily reinforced by liturgies eliciting as much fervor and passion for God as the weekly Ladies Auxiliary canasta club. It reminds one of Huxley’s Brave New World’ s daily doses of the “feelies” to maintain the proper insensate torpor. This whole dreadful picture is daily propped up by a clergy quite pleased with the standard of a decaying secularity rather than the Standard of Christ the King. Don’t believe me? Look at their seminaries-turned-ghost-towns, testament to aggiornamento gone awry. A recent Order of nuns called a festive dinner to celebrate the announcement of their demise. 

Yes, you say, but wasn’t there the American bishop who registered a gentle reservation? Yes, true enough. But his gray suit and Roman collar seemed to dilute the effect. Call me old fashioned, but a priest in a gray suit does not make hearts race as does the sight of St. Francis Xavier in cassock holding high the cross.

Shall we dare a more provocative question? If the Holy Roman Church were as strong now as it was in the times of the Roman persecutions, the Middle Ages, or in the pontificates of Blessed Pius IX or St. Pius X, would this kind of blasphemy have shown its face? The secular world would not have dared. Yes, those historical periods dealt Mother Church its share of ignominy, but never did they threaten the very cornerstone of her doctrinal patrimony. None would have mocked the very foundations of the moral law, indeed of the divinely established order of sexual difference. And if they had, they would have been met by all the ferocity of her thundering condemnations.
Those manic forces were kept at bay by the might of the Church. And that doctrinal roar bellowed with no uncertainty, and with one universal voice. The World would find no cracks in the solidity of the Church’s voice in those sturdier days. Contrary voices would indeed bay, but they had no illusions about the impregnable bastions of the Catholic Church. They might have found shelter in a renegade priest or shepherd here or there, but those of that ilk were conspicuous in their paucity.  

Blasphemy on such a grand scale as the Opening Ceremonies of the Paris Olympics would have been unthinkable. Yes, Napolean kidnapped Pope Pius VII in 1809, dragging him across the Alps in precarious health to Fontainebleau. And the Italian armies captured Rome in 1859, forcing Blessed Pius IX to flee the Eternal City to the city of Gaeta. But all these depredations could not approach the collapse that the Opening Ceremonies presage. While the Church was assaulted and the popes harassed, the foundations of human dignity and Western Civilization were not threatened. The Church, even with her popes in captivity, would see to that.

Enemies of all that is good and true and beautiful have found their opening in the decades-long attenuation of the Church’s voice. They have seen all too clearly the Church’s détente with the spirit of the world and exploited a perfect opportunity. It was the victory they awaited for so long, and now it was handed to them on a silver platter. How else to interpret Archbishop Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, defending the Olympic Last Supper depiction “as revealing a profound question: everyone, absolutely everyone, wants to sit at that table where Jesus gives life to everyone and teaches love.”  

This is ambiguity and cowardice writ large.

Mankind’s only wall against the encroachment of the barbarian is the Catholic Church. She alone can return a voice to the oppressed of the Woke Leviathan.  

In A.D. 452, it was only one year after Pope Leo the Great valiantly defended the hypostatic union of Christ our Savior against the heretic Eutyches.

With that monumental task barely completed, he confronted still another crisis besetting the Roman world: the attack of Attila the Hun. His frightful hordes had decimated much of the former Roman Empire, with its legacy of high civilization and culture. Now that barbarian was at the very gates of Rome. All seemed to be lost. Pope Leo the Great, in solemn procession with priests, deacons, and acolytes swinging golden thuribles, went out to meet the bloodthirsty chieftain. Face-to-face, they spoke. After a brief conversation, Attila turned around and commanded his troops to retreat. Rome was saved. Christianity was saved. Civilization could breathe again.

And Leo became known to the ages as “the Great.”

Only the Catholic Church can save mankind from the barbarians—whether it be from Attila or the Parisians of the 2024 Olympic Games.

So, we wait.