Vatican newspaper ignores Ecumenical Patriarchate’s condemnation of Olympic parody of Last Supper
July 31, 2024
In its July 30 edition, the Vatican newspaper, which routinely covers significant news from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, took no note of the Patriarchate’s statement the previous day against the drag parody of the Last Supper at the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
“Blasphemy towards God is not progress, nor is it a right to insult the religious beliefs of our fellow men,” stated Ecumenical Patriarchate, which holds a primacy of honor among the Orthodox churches. “The spontaneous expression of aversion and disapproval by the world, hopefully, has sent a sufficiently loud message to those responsible and is a source of hope to avoid similar actions in the future.”
The Vatican newspaper also continued to ignore expressions of disapproval and outrage expressed by Catholic bishops outside of France. Bishops in the Holy Land and Iraq have joined the French bishops’ conference and prelates from the Roman Curia, Malta, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere in condemning the July 26 parody.
The July 30 edition did, however, include an eight-paragraph article on South Sudan’s Olympic basketball team.
Earlier, in its July 27 edition, L’Osservatore Romano summarized the French bishops’ reaction in the second paragraph of a five-paragraph article—one of three articles on the Olympics in the Vatican newspaper that day. No edition was published on July 28, a Sunday.
The Vatican newspaper referred to the Olympics in two articles on July 29:
- It faithfully reported Pope Francis’s comments, delivered to pilgrims in Rome on July 28, that the production of weapons as an “outrage” that “contradicts the spirit of brotherhood of the Olympic Games.”
- In a six-paragraph front-page article, “Nessuna tregua (olimpica)” [No (Olympic) Truce], Giampaolo Mattei lamented the lack of concern from “the entire world of sport” about the deaths of a dozen youth soccer players in a rocket attack on the Golan Heights. Mattei devoted the majority of the article to “stories of redemption and hope” at the Paris Olympics—stories “which, in their essence, are experiences of brotherhood.”
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