Paris Is No Stranger to Sacrilege

The latest sacrilegious controversy from France had the contradiction of an extremely bold anti-Christian symbolism joined with outright official lying about it. Although it has been common to call the drag show dramatization “blasphemous,” I understand that blasphemy is usually verbal or written, while sacrilege has to do with physical acts about religious persons, places, or things. The offensive tableau was sacrilegious. 

The official denials of the offensiveness of the presentation were in the face of overwhelming obviousness of the connection with the Last Supper. Even though participants attempted to erase their comments admitting the sacrilegious nature of the show, the pathetic official denial was surprising in its implications: they knew they had gone over the line, and the deletions of Internet excretions by participants trying to fix the situation only emphasized that. This has not always been the manner of French extremist opponents of the Faith, who usually had the courage of their bad convictions.

When the radicals of the French Revolution wanted a national drama of replacing the Christian Faith by the Cult of Reason, they commandeered Notre Dame Cathedral and replaced the high altar with one dedicated to Liberty and had actresses stage a mock enthronement of Reason in the sanctuary. Robespierre opposed the Cult of Reason with his Deistic Cult of the Supreme Being, and both new religions were eventually banned by Napoleon, who also held two popes prisoner. Much worse than the ceremony was the sacrilegious martyrdom of priests and religious in the bloody Reign of Terror. The slaughter of men and women consecrated to God precisely because of their consecration was sacrilegious.

Not eighty years after the burlesque of Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral, the Paris Commune contributed to the history of Paris’ infamy. The radicals who took power in Paris after the defeat of France by Prussia revived some of the Jacobin anticlericalism. The archbishop of Paris (Msgr. Darboy), his vicar general, and the seventy-five-year-old priest-confessor of Empress Eugénie were arrested, and there followed “a round-up” of priests according to the historian Alistair Horne. The insidiousness of the persecution and its absurd hatred of religion is evidenced in the record of the arrest of a Jesuit priest and his interrogation by the rabid anticlerical Rigault:

Rigault: What is your profession?
Priest: Servant of God.
Rigault: Where does your master live?
Priest: Everywhere.
Rigault (to a clerk): Take this down: X, describing himself servant of one called God, a vagrant.
(The Fall of Paris by Alistair Horne, p.337)

The archbishop was shot by a firing squad with five other priests. According to Horne, “the National Guards’ aim was ‘as inaccurate as ever’” and after the first volley of shots, Msgr. Darboy remained standing. This caused one of the revolutionaries to shout, “Mon Dieu, he must be wearing armor.” Darboy fell after the second volley, himself the second archbishop since the original French Revolution to be murdered. His predecessor was shot while trying to negotiate a truce on the barricades with the revolutionaries of 1848.

Darboy’s death was a partial fulfillment of a dark prophecy of St. John Bosco, based on a dream the saint had on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1870, months before the havoc of the Franco Prussian War. A friend of mine recalled the words of St. John Bosco because of the controversy of the Olympics this year: 

Paris! Paris! Instead of fortifying yourself with the Lord’s name, you surround yourself with houses of ill repute…Your enemies will plunge you into anguish, famine, terror, and the contempt for my law, says the Lord…From afar your enemies will see your palaces in flames, your home in ruins, soaked in the blood of your heroes who are no more.

The life of St. John Bosco has enough supernatural events to make a modern liberal Catholic cringe to the point of going to an Urgent Care facility. Bosco’s prophecy of the violence of the Paris Commune was expressed in biblical allusions, but it was an amazing prediction because, at the beginning of the year, no one would have expected such dramatic events. I think my friend sent me the prophecy with a not-so-secret wish that the sacrilege in France would be punished by divine intervention. He is not alone.

But there was an even greater offense against God perpetrated in France on March 8 of this year. March 8, the International Day of the Woman, was originally a Soviet celebration about a demonstration by women in 1917, the year of the Communist Revolution in Russia. It was celebrated by Communist countries and has become a worldwide commemoration. President Macron chose that day to enshrine the “right to abortion” in the French Constitution. But there was an even greater offense against God perpetrated in France on March 8 of this year. President Macron chose that day to enshrine the “right to abortion” in the French Constitution.Tweet This

No doubt Kamala Harris and company would like to do the same with our Constitution. But the French have opted to declare that the right to abort a fetus is a “fundamental freedom.” Liberty, Equality, Fraternity…and Abortion? Macron was pandering to the Left in France and to feminist (falsely understood) fantasies of the downfall of “patriarchy.” This is no doubt related in the freemasonry of the sexual liberation with the sacrilegious representation of Christ and the Apostles in what was purportedly an homage to the Ancient Greek origin of the Olympic contests. But his sin in this regard overshadows the shabby entertainment of the Olympic Opening. His sin, and that of France.

It is a sacrilege to elevate abortion to a fundamental right. There is even some question whether its enshrinement in the Constitution of France will make criticism of abortion a contradiction of the principles of the nation. Free speech, but are you allowed to call out abortion as the sacrilege of desecrating human life, the image and likeness of God?

Where will this end? The Neo-paganism evident in the expensive show put on for the opening of the Olympics was just another example of official French ultra-secularist de-Christianization. It was mockery of Christ to further push the Faith to the margins of culture. Bishops around the world have responded to the outrage of the Olympics “opening act,” but the Vatican was silent. This was strange. Even the pathetic Archbishop Paglia saw the “derision and ridicule of the Last Supper” in the event broadcast around the world. 

By now most have heard how President Erdogan of Turkey influenced the pope to register a rather mild protest about an offense given to Christian beliefs that was viewed by millions and probably cost millions of Euros. What is hard to understand is why the Muslim leader would be more upset about the mockery of the Last Supper than the Holy Father. The Vatican, urged by some bishops also, finally sent out a statement on Saturday night about being “saddened” by the burlesque of Jesus. “You made me feel bad or uncomfortable” is what people say when they can have no recourse to objective reality. Feelings are what are important, and “you made me feel sad.”

There is an unmistakably liberal tone to the half-complaint. Is the pope afraid to appear intolerant, to “look bad” in front of his friends like Dr. Jill Biden who loved the sacrilegious spectacle of Paris? He only shows his wrath to conservatives. The Holy Father chose the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola to visit a nun who works with transvestites at a “theme park” near Rome. The gesture had much to do with “looking good”—St. Francis kissing the leper, kodak moments to avoid clarifying the demands of truth by giving hugs. 

Sometimes I think the pope is at such pains to appear “compassionate” that he forgets the appearance is not always the same as reality (Cicero’s esse quam videri). It is not compassionate to ignore bad ideas or to give their purveyors the impression that we are indifferent to them. Overlooking scandal for fear of sounding censorious makes people wonder how seriously we take real ideas with real consequences.

That is not the modus operandi that prophets and saints were famous for. It convinces me that we are in need of a saint like St. John Bosco—or perhaps a cohort of the same—to break through the conspiracy of silence that gives consent to the poison of this world’s culture. Heaven help us.