The International Olympic Committee offered a sincere apology over the weekend, but it wasn’t for insulting Christians. Instead, the IOC apologized for misidentifying South Korea as North Korea during the opening ceremonies.
Anyone who knows anything about South Korea knows there were also plenty of people in that country upset at a portrayal of The Last Supper using drag queens, children and a man’s testicles hanging out.
Christians around the world were furious with the presentation of the opening ceremonies and the open mockery of their religion. The Olympics is supposed to be about bringing the world together and those opening ceremonies did anything but that.
“Our subject was not to be subversive. We never wanted to be subversive. We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together,” Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the opening ceremonies, said over the weekend. “We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that. In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom.”
No one is arguing against artistic freedom, but there are plenty arguing against a tasteless display meant to provoke outrage. As American Catholic Bishop Robert Barron said, he loves the Olympics and he loves Paris and France, where he studied for years, but what he saw while watching the Olympics was too much.
“What do I see but this gross mockery of The Last Supper?” Barron said. “Would they ever have dared mock Islam in a similar way?”
Many defenders of the Olympic ceremony and the depiction of The Last Supper as a gaudy drag show have pointed to Charlie Hebdo to say that, yes, France would. For those with short memories, Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical weekly publication that was attacked by Muslim radicals in January 2015 over cartoon depictions of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam.
The two brothers behind the attack killed a dozen people and injured more.
Charlie Hebdo was famous for its brutal satirical attacks on all forms of organized religion and across the political spectrum. The difference here is Charlie Hebdo is not the French state, it is not the Paris Olympic organizing committee, it is not the IOC.
There is no way on God’s green earth that the IOC or the Paris committee would have looked at a production that mocked Islam in the same way and approved it. Perhaps if someone had come up with something really nasty about Jewish people or Israel, they may have approved it, but not Islam.
Christians have every right to feel offended, to feel like the organizers of the Paris Games are excluding them while making statements about inclusion. Yet, somehow, the organizers claimed that they never meant to insult any religious group, but to promote tolerance.
“We believe that this ambition was achieved. If people have taken any offence, we are, of course, really, really, sorry,” spokesperson Anne Descamps said on Sunday.
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If your view of tolerance insults millions of people around the world, then you are doing it wrong.
True tolerance doesn’t require one group to be mocked to make another group feel accepted. If the organizers wanted to play into the image of “gay Paris,” there were plenty of ways to do that without taking the iconic image of Leonardo DaVinci’s The Last Supper and turning it into drag time story hour.
There were parts of the opening ceremonies that were fascinating, magnificent and awe-inspiring, such as Celine Dion’s performance from the Eiffel Tower while suffering from stiff person syndrome. Dion united the world in the way the Olympics, including the spectacle of the opening ceremonies, are supposed to unite us.
Too bad the producers had to set off a stink bomb in the middle of the garden party on the Seine.