By OSV News and Lauretta Brown, culture editor
The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games – a sports festival aimed to unite all nations of the world – created shock and disbelief instead as Catholics around the world felt offended by the parody of the Last Supper, which was part of the opening ceremony.
The four-hour spectacle July 26 started with a parade of athletes down the Seine River, accompanied by music and dancing scenes on top French monuments. Notre Dame Cathedral, still under construction prior to its Dec. 8 opening, was also featured with an extensive dance segment paying tribute to the construction workers who are rebuilding the icon of Paris following a 2019 fire. Dancers appeared to do aerial work on the scaffolding. The bells of the cathedral rang for the first time since the 2019 fire that nearly destroyed the building.
However, as the show progressed, television cameras showed drag queens, one of whom wore a crown, seated at a table. The shape of the crown brought to mind a monstrance. The scene was immediately interpreted as a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic wall painting in Milan’s Dominican convent of the Last Supper. The French bishops issued a statement deploring the scenes at the opening of the Olympic Games. While the ceremony was a “marvelous display of beauty and joy, rich in emotion and universally acclaimed,” they said, it “unfortunately included scenes of mockery and derision of Christianity, which we deeply regret.”
Bishop Andrew H. Cozzens of Crookston, Minn., chairman of the board of the National Eucharistic Congress, spoke out against a “heinous” depiction of Leonardo Davinci’s Last Supper at the Paris Olympic opening ceremonies.
He issued a special call to prayer for the faithful based on his prayer at the 10th National Eucharistic Congress just one week prior. “Jesus experienced his Passion anew Friday night in Paris when his Last Supper was publicly defamed,” he emphasized. “As his living body, we are invited to enter into this moment of passion with him, this moment of public shame, mockery, and persecution. We do this through prayer and fasting. And our greatest prayer — in season and out of season — is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.”
He concluded with some advice to the faithful about discussing the incident, encouraging them to do so “with love and charity, but also with firmness.” The French bishops also issued a statement on July 27 condemning the mockery of Christianity at the opening of the Olympic Games. They praised the “marvelous display of beauty and joy” that was part of the ceremony but decried the “scenes of mockery and derision of Christianity.”
