The Gospel reading for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost (Vetus Ordo) was from Luke 10. It begins with verse 21 in which the Lord rejoices in the Holy Spirit and thanks His Father in Heaven. However, when we read our readings during the week before Mass, and for a few days after Sunday to refresh and deepen, we should also include context, that is, start reading a bit before and a bit after the assigned reading (pericope).
In Luke 10, the 70 Christ had sent out have returned. The Lord says:
17 The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” 18 And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.
As I sit in an airport lounge waiting for my next flight, I pick up this on Twitter. Mind you, I did not watch the closing of the Olympics (first time in my life I didn’t watch any):
It’s no surprise the 33rd Olympic Games in Paris closed with a ceremony dedicated to the rebirth of Lucifer, the ‘light-bringer’ of enlightenment.
The show started with ‘The Golden Voyager,’ descending from the sky, like Lucifer’s fall from heaven, leg bent and positioned like… pic.twitter.com/AC6u6jbaa3
— HereComesTrouble (@KaraHelenMosher) August 11, 2024
I’m sensing a theme with the opening blasphemy.
Coincidence?
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Seventy or Seventy-two? Douay-Rheiems, NASB, NIV and others has it at 72 while King James, ASV, Aramaic and some others have it at 70?
https://biblehub.com/luke/10-17.htm
Wiki says it depends on the manuscript: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventy_disciples
USSCB surprising aligns with Douay-Rheims (72):
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/luke/10#:~:text=The%20Mission%20of%20the%20Seventy%2Dtwo.&text=1After%20this%20the%20Lord,place%20he%20intended%20to%20visit.&text=2He%20said%20to%20them,out%20laborers%20for%20his%20harvest.
Does it have important symbolic meaning to try to get it right? Does the actual number matter? Would like your much more expert opinion Fr. Z!
Just FYI, she’s probably right about this instance of demonic imagery, but this account (and other accounts associated with it) is/are viciously anti-Catholic. But even an anti-Catholic crusader is right on occasion!
This was no simple co-incident, but an orchestrated wrap-around theme. My wife and I have not watched TV in over 15 years now– almost wish we did for our then being able to have boycotted the whole event of these “games.” I pity the moral contestants who had their efforts darkened by this evil.
I would not invest much effort arguing it, but I will take the counter position.
When watching the opening ceremony, I did not see anything that I took as a Last Supper parody until someone else pointed it out. Similarly, if I did not read a priest steeped in this kind of symbolism, I would have drawn no connection to a possible reference to evil.
Certainly, I grant that if either reference is intentional, it is an offense against God and an insult to Christians, but if the allusions are such that they are easily missed by someone not looking for them, what use are they to the devil? The offense to God remains, but we trust He is capable of responding for Himself in His own ways. The viewer, not seeing the possible evil references, commits no sin and does his soul no damage enjoying the spectacle taken at face value. When the offense is essentially an inside joke that the average viewer misses, that seems like rather an awful amount of work for such a small payoff.
Perhaps there is evil at work here, but it is in trying to stir up animosity where there should not be any.
We will not be sure this side of the grave. I doubt we will much care from the other side.
Agreed, Arthur, and also feel that moral contestants should have gone home after the opening ceremony. We didn’t watch any of it, and had looked forward to the Olympics as a brief respite from life made bizarre, each day competing with the day before in weirdness. But no. This is debatable, and I get it, sacrifices and hard work, but if decent people had actually gone home, imagine the impact. We’ll never know, because Christians and semi-christians don’t operate like that, our priorities are not as vividly clear as with other groups. We tolerate. Pretty much anything.
Nations make clear who and what they are by stuff like this. We should take them at their word. It was Solzhenitsyn who said we make a grave mistake when we “push away the warm hand of God”.
One can only imagine [shudder] what obscenities Los Angeles will give us in 2028.
Seems interesting that Lucifer is NOT depicted by drag queens.
Is it any wonder Our Lady’s Cathedral burned? I almost feel like now it makes sense.
I wonder if they’ll invite all the politicians who lauded the drag queen last supper to the first Mass on the Immaculate Conception?
PatS,
If you will excuse an inexpert oar being shoved in, I see that C.F. Wemyss Brown’s 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia article, “St. Hermes”, notes “Pape says he was one of the seventy-two disciples of Our Lord” (giving Wilhelm Pape’s Wörterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen (1863-70) as source) while “Migne (P.G., 4 November) says he was one of the seventy disciples, along with Patrobas, Linus, Gaius and Philologus”. The Orthodox Wiki article, “Seventy Apostles” (as “last edited on September 30, 2022”), says, among other things, “In the ninth century St Joseph the Hymnographer composed the Canon for the Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles” which “is commemorated on January 4” and that “the memory of each of them” is also celebrated “during the course of the year”. It lists all Seventy with “Feast Day” and “Biblical Reference” for each, adding “Two additional apostles are sometimes numbered with the Seventy, bringing the total to seventy-two” with their details. Curiously, the article “Apostles” there (as “last edited on October 26, 2022”) by contrast says “It is difficult to determine a comprehensive and accurate list of the Seventy, but here are some of their names” followed by a long paragraph full of names with links to their articles.
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Maybe the theme is the birth of the Antichrist? The world is increasingly becoming worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. The difference is, or maybe it’s an assumption, the people in Sodom and Gomorrah knew they were committing abominations. Today, most people don’t seem to recognize what is sin or why it’s sin. These people at Fishwrap, or any other group who defended the opening ceremonies, would probably condemn God in the Old Testament. They would be the first to say Jesus reinterpreted Scriptures and sin and everybody else is rigid or phobic. What madness the creation has become.
Watched this with a friend and neighbor from Paris. She remarked at the time that it was a reference to the Genie de la Bastille statue. I don’t know Paris very well; only been there once. But I think the devil allusion theory is a stretch.
A few minutes ago, going to see whether we can easily see for ourselves, I found on the YouTube channel entitled “Olympics” a video entitled “THANK YOU PARIS! Closing Ceremony Highlights | #Paris 2024” which has a length of (only) 21:31. The same channel also, as of 12 August, has a video entitled “Full Opening Ceremony [then, an emoji] | Full Replay | Paris Replays” with a length of 4:04:54. I have not yet tried to watch either.
The English Wikipedia article, “2024 Summer Olympics closing ceremony” (as “last edited on 17 August 2024, at 05:30 (UTC)”) includes “In the wake of the opening ceremony controversies, executive director Thierry Reboul stated that the team had been asked to review and revise the closing ceremony a number of times in order to ensure that no scene could be misinterpreted in an offensive manner.”
That, after saying “As with the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony was directed by Thomas Jolly; he stated that the ceremony would be a ‘visual, very choreographic, very acrobatic show with an operatic dimension’, with a storyline ‘in which the Olympic Games disappear once again, and someone from far comes along and founds them’.”
The “cultural segments” description includes “a golden-winged humanoid alien named the Golden Voyager (after the French-made Voyager Golden Record brought aboard the two Voyager program space probes, the first man-made objects to leave the heliosphere […]; the organizers also said it represented “the spirit of the Bastille”)” and “The cultural segment tells the history of a future dystopian world without the Olympic Games”. I have not checked the source-links for further details, but note the Wikipedia article, “July Column” ( as “last edited on 23 May 2024, at 01:41 (UTC)”) – which is not linked.
This includes “The July Column (French: Colonne de Juillet) is a monumental column in Paris commemorating the Revolution of 1830. It stands in the center of the Place de la Bastille and celebrates the Trois Glorieuses — the ‘three glorious’ days of 27–29 July 1830 that saw the fall of Charles X, King of France, and the commencement of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe, King of the French.” And says it “is surmounted with a gilded globe, on which stands a colossal gilded figure, Augustin[-Alexandre Dumont]’s Génie de la Liberté (the “Spirit of Freedom”). Perched on one foot in the manner of Giambologna’s Mercury, the star-crowned nude brandishes the torch of civilisation and the remains of his broken chains. Formerly, the figure also appeared on French ten-franc coins.”
“Perched on one foot” is probably one of the few salient resemblances to Giambologna’s “Mercurio volante” – for instance, Alfred Gilbert’s 1892 “Anteros” for the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain in Picadilly Circus, London looks in some ways more like Dumont’s statue. The Wikipedia article “French francs” includes a photo of the 1988-2001 10-franc coin.
Pace Thierry Reboul, one may well think the “winged humanoid alien” (as described above) is correctly interpreted as deliberately playing with the legends of Dionysus as ‘culture-bearer’ and so confidently underlining the blasphemously offensive licentious replacements – and mockeries – of the opening ceremony. The Serpent’s false presentation of himself as something of a “Spirit of Freedom” in Genesis 3:5 – “eritis sicut dii” (“you shall be as Gods” in the Challoner Douay-Rheims translation) – comes aptly enough to mind.