If you are a Christian, it is Holy Week 2025 right now. Do you even remember the summer of 2024? The opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics controversy? The manufactured debate over mockery of the Last Supper? I saved this discussion for this evening to make this topic more relevant. In a time where we need to understand cultures, religions, history and beliefs this debate requires an academic review. After pausing for a few months hopefully we can now review this issue with fresh eyes and objectively understand what the opening ceremonies depicted artistically.
Paris Olympics: Catholic authorities mistake opening ceremony’s Greek gods reference for Christ’s Last Supper
In reviewing historical information on the Olympics, it sounds like this points to the gods of Mount Olympus. The so called drag queen dinner refers to the feast of the Olympian gods, a theme that inspired several paintings.
One scene from the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on Friday, July 26, has been causing a scandal ever since: The one in which singer Philippe Katerine appears almost completely naked, his body painted blue. He was accused of immodesty and obscenity on behalf of various religions, and the French Bishops’ Conference deplored “scenes of derision and mockery of Christianity.” They thought it was a parody of the Last Supper, Christ’s last meal before his crucifixion, famously depicted in Leonardo da Vinci’s mural (1495-1498), but of which there are countless other painted, drawn or engraved versions.
According to Christian tradition, this dinner – cena in Latin – brought together Christ and the 12 apostles. That number alone is enough to establish that the scene conceived by Thomas Jolly has nothing to do with the Last Supper, given the far greater number of guests. The mix-up may well have arisen from the ceremony’s staging: figures grouped behind what looks like a table, though lacking the food and drink traditionally found in images of the Last Supper.
But more than anything else, Katerine’s costume, if you can call that one, allows no hesitation about the mythological and artistic references at play here. His much-discussed nudity, his beard, his crown of grapefruits and flowers, the braid falling from his shoulder to his belly, the tray laden with fruit and flowers: Everything points to him as the incarnation of the god named Dionysus by the Greeks, who became Bacchus for the Romans. The god’s tutor is Silenus, most often depicted with goat horns and in a state of inebriation. Dionysus is associated with vines and wine and, more broadly, with nature and fertility. In Greece, he is also the father of tragedy, but that’s not what the ceremony’s artistic director Thomas Jolly had in mind.
The group of drag queens, their extravagant disguises, and their and Katerine’s body language clearly allude to this iconography. It can be found in the best-known representations of Bacchus, including the one by Caravaggio, and in those that reunite the young god with the beautiful Ariadne, whom he discovers on the island of Naxos, where she has been abandoned by her lover, Theseus. The most famous of these paintings is the one by Titian (1520-1523), at the center of which leaps a naked Bacchus, out of a red drapery, escorted by bacchantes and satyrs, scarcely more dressed than himself, to which the song sung by Katerine explicitly refers.
Is it art or is it truly a religious statement? Who is to say what is art and what is against church doctrine? Is education the problem or reason the problem?
More generally, these elements are those of the classic iconography of the feast of the gods, an Olympian gathering of goddesses and gods of Olympus. Indeed, this was the reference in the mind of the ceremony’s director, interviewed on BFM-TV on Sunday July 28: “The idea was rather to make a great pagan feast linked to the gods of Olympus… Olympus… Olympism.”
Meanwhile, today in church Pope Francis is on the mend and encouraging dialogue and understanding more than any Roman Catholic Pope ever?
Dialogue used to be the tone used when discussing the state of Israel. In 2025, the State of Israel is seeking a one state solution and the American people are supporting their mission into Palestine.
Dialogue appears to be out.