Olympics 2024 and Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Straw
The opening ceremony at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris is what we Catholics would call a “sign of the times” if ever there was one. Christians must resist the urge to play it cool in order to avoid seeming unsophisticated or “touchy.”
We Christians have been conditioned to lay low and maintain a sophisticated front. Centuries of propaganda against “primitive superstition” have ingrained in us a defensive posture: “Don’t give the bullies more excuses to attack.”
Why? Because the stuff that makes up the make-or-break heart of Western Civilization is unsophisticated. It’s common blood and common gods. It’s the shared, primitive rituals of the polis, the home, and battle that affirm our unspoken pledges of honor to one another, to our heritage, and to our children.
Rituals like those surrounding the Olympic Games.
Cultural revolutionaries of the kind who pulled the “Last Supper” stunt at this year’s opening ceremonies have understood for years this central fact of our nature: We are social animals bound together by ritual. The revolution will come when they bend and break those rituals without compunction.
In 2016, Colin Kaepernick began his “peaceful protest,” igniting a half-hearted hubbub throughout the United States. Athletes swept up in an ideological fad (superficially, “anti-racism”) disrupted American baseball and football games by refusing to stand for the national anthem.
I say the response was half-hearted, because while some conservatives let their guard down enough to be “primitive” about it, others tried instead to prove themselves sophisticates above the fray.
“These athletes are entitled to their sincere beliefs, and anyway these silly old rituals are hardly so important as to start a culture war over,” they said. Of course, such arguments ignored the inorganic nature of the stunts. The “take-a-knee” trend was directly produced by the heavily moneyed project of the ruling classes known as “Black Lives Matter,” and carried out by a core group of devoted cultural Marxists.
But today the cultural revolutionaries’ malevolent designs on the Western world are even more unmistakable. They are not disrupting the U.S. national anthem or American baseball games by “taking a knee” and sending a few hashtags online. They have clambered over and above the symbols of American solidarity and breached Olympus itself — the height of Western civilization's shared sense of the transcendent and the sacred.
And what rough new ritual did they slouch toward Paris with? One premeditated to uproot and replace Christ.
Thomas Jolly’s drag troupe showed a perfect grasp of what matters most to a civilization: its God and its rituals. Given a budget of $130 million and an audience of billions, what did the cultural revolutionaries choose to do?
Mock, pervert, and disrupt the most iconic image of Christianity’s central ritual.
If there’s a silver lining to this flippant little abomination, perhaps it’s that now Christians will feel less shame and hesitancy about fighting back.