Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor–News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

Arch­bish­op Ja­son Gor­don has weighed in on the con­tro­ver­sial Last Sup­per rep­re­sen­ta­tion at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the Paris Olympics, con­demn­ing it for mock­ing the re­li­gion.

Dur­ing the four-hour long epic Olympic Games open­ing, a con­tro­ver­sial drag queen per­for­mance that mocked Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s icon­ic Last Sup­per paint­ing caused glob­al out­rage among Chris­tians.

The Paris 2024 or­gan­is­ers apol­o­gised for the scene two days af­ter the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny, while the artis­tic di­rec­tor be­hind it said he was not in­spired by Da Vin­ci’s bib­li­cal paint­ing.

How­ev­er, there is still a furore with­in the Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty, which is con­tin­u­ing to lob­by the In­ter­na­tion­al Olympic Com­mit­tee on the is­sue.

In a re­cent video which he post­ed to his Face­book page, Gor­don is seen ad­dress­ing the is­sue at the end of one of his morn­ing Mass­es.

In a cap­tion to the video, the Arch­bish­op wrote, “What we’ve seen in this year’s Olympic Games open­ing cer­e­mo­ny is un­for­tu­nate­ly a state­ment on how France sees civil­i­sa­tion. If we be­lieve there’s a God—the cre­ator of all things, then we are not free to do what­ev­er we want or de­sire.”

In the video it­self, he said, “The re­al con­text of the Last Sup­per, re­mem­ber, was that Je­sus was about to be tak­en to be whipped, to be mocked, to be hand­ed over, to be ridiculed, and to be giv­en over. That’s the re­al con­text of the Last Sup­per, and that con­text is back with us again to­day.”

He added, “We lived in a cul­ture, this is the grand­par­ents of my gen­er­a­tion, that could have as­sumed Chris­tian­i­ty as the foun­da­tion of the cul­ture. To­day, we are liv­ing in a cul­ture where we can as­sume that the cul­ture is against the Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion. When you make fun of a bil­lion peo­ple in an Olympics, when you ridicule what is most sa­cred to them in an Olympics, there is some­thing fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong.”

De­spite this, the head of the Ro­man Catholic Church in T&T praised the or­gan­is­ers of the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny for an oth­er­wise spec­tac­u­lar dis­play of cul­ture “in on­ly the way the French could do it.”

He said, “Every time there is an Olympics, you see the cul­tur­al cre­ativ­i­ty of that na­tion com­ing to the fore, and you see es­pe­cial­ly in the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny, artistry like you don’t see it any­where else. And all of that was true of the open­ing of the Paris Olympics.

“It was artis­tic in ways that were mind-blow­ing as on­ly the French could do, and then in the midst of it, they had this tableau which was clear­ly a de­pic­tion of da Vin­ci’s Last Sup­per with drag queens and the like parad­ing as The Last Sup­per and that is a par­o­dy.”

The seg­ment of the Ju­ly 26 cer­e­mo­ny de­pict­ed the bib­li­cal scene of Je­sus Christ and his apos­tles shar­ing a fi­nal meal be­fore his cru­ci­fix­ion with drag queens, a trans­gen­der mod­el and singer dressed as Diony­sus, the Greek God of wine and plea­sure.

The Vat­i­can re­leased a state­ment on the de­pic­tion, say­ing, “The Holy See was sad­dened by cer­tain scenes at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the Paris Olympic Games and can­not but join the voic­es raised in re­cent days to de­plore the of­fence done to many Chris­tians and be­liev­ers of oth­er re­li­gions.”