*youth pastor voice* so you think Dionysus is cool? have you heard about...

i swear i'm not responding to another Catholic internet thing

As the Olympics are ending, let’s go back (sorry) to a few weeks ago, when Catholics got very upset about a Last Supper-inspired image of a Dionysian banquet being portrayed in drag at the Olympics Opening Ceremonies. Even the Vatican weighed in.

And I suppose I should start this by saying that all feelings are valid. You can’t control your feelings. I can understand why someone would be upset about something they don’t understand, especially if they feel it mocks something so crucially important to them.

But, walk with me along this journey, for the next therapy step after that is to try to understand where those feelings come from—what narrative they’re trading off of—and what that narrative’s relationship to reality is. In other words: how useful is the narrative that is supporting your feelings in helping you navigate the world in a peaceful, harmonious and realistic manner? Is it connecting you to a shared reality that others can make sense of and participate in as well? Is it helping you achieve your goals and live your values?¹

This particular editorial on the opening ceremonies by Bishop Robert Barron seemed to me particularly unwise. In it, he dismissed the protestations that the Dionysian Banquet is not a representation of Jesus as “gaslighting.” That, to me, seems a high degree of certainty about what the art was and was trying to say. To accuse someone of gaslighting—or even just plain old lying—means you have to be very certain about their intentions, and Bishop Robert Barron gives no proof of his certainty besides his own interpretations of the performance (which are certainly valid) but intention and interpretation are two different things.

Furthermore, as a recent book on the phenomenon of gaslighting argued: “gaslighting” is the wrong word here. Gaslighting is fundamentally about an interpersonal dynamic. Olympic organizers an ocean away from you who you have never interacted with may fudge the truth or dissemble in a prepared statement, but that’s not gaslighting. Gaslighting, also, trades off power: who holds power in the relationship and has the power to determine what the subordinate party believes to be true about themselves. There is no substantial power differential between the organizers of the Olympic opening ceremonies and a bishop. Particularly one who runs a media company worth $35 million.

So, just for the record, in terms of intention: it’s entirely possible to be alluding to the silhouette portrayed in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (which is copied by endless undergraduates in Notre Dame’s dining hall, without much thought to The Sacred, and has received interpretations in secular culture before) in one’s performance without thinking about Jesus qua the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. We live in a disenchanted and un-catechized culture. It seems safer to presume ignorance or misinterpretation of the Sacred than active disregard.

(And, I would wager art history classes are more common than theology classes in French schools, and so the theology or religious meaning behind The Last Supper is less clear to people who may very well recognize Da Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper.)

Secondly, if bishops—from the Bishop of Winona-Rochester up to and including Pope Francis himself—are interested in honing their rhetoric of moral outrage about the Olympic games, they should read John Chrysostom. And, if we were to consult the fourth-century Bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, about what he thought of the Olympics, he would ask: what did you think would happen at The Games? Chrysostom is constantly pleading with his congregation not to go to the theatre or to the races at the agora. He’s asking them to think of Christ: to think of the poor, to spend time in prayer and spend time among the suffering. It’s a tough ask, and one gathers from the ferocity of his rhetoric that his plea was falling on the deafened ears of a crowd who loved the theatre and the circuses. Many of us would rather spend time at the theatre (I know I’m one of them!)

Finally, and most importantly, the outrage is a tired and unhelpful technique. I ask every bishop who is participating in our current reactive culture of scoring points and “calling out” rather than dialoguing: what good is outrage? What is the end game? Who does outrage help and who is it being performed for? What concrete outcome is produced, except to further isolate you from the rest of the world? I get the temptation, when faced with something that seems so explicably unacceptable to you, to respond with huffing and puffing. I’ve often tried it! Let me tell you, results. may. vary.

How many people are being converted with huffing and puffing? Where is the humility to engage in dialogue? Has anyone tried? A drag queen Last Supper that’s also a bacchanal? Now, we can work with that—what an opportunity for dialogue.

Perhaps an opportunity to discuss the long textual history depicting Christ as the true Dionysus (a textual analysis that developed because Christians were dialoguing with the culture around them; because they believed that seeds of truth—the seeds of Christ the logos or organizing principle of the universe—could be found in the culture around them.) As for Christ, he turns water to wine (like Dionysus) but Christ calls himself the true vine (John 15:1). What if the bishops tasked with preaching Christ’s Gospel to all creatures took the Gospel seriously enough to have the humility to dialogue even with those who find religion no more relevant to their lives than the silhouette of a 600-year-old fresco?

In fact, in a world in which the headlines surrounding the Catholic Church have been (rightfully) poor, what does it say that Da Vinci’s The Last Supper is still so universal an icon that American audiences recognize it instantly even after a four-hour broadcast? Isn’t that nice that there’s still some cultural relevance that’s positive? I think so. I mean, the drag Dionysian banquet was (I believe) calling for love and acceptance, which seems to me to be much more of a piece with what we’re going for as a religion. Much better than invoking the image of The Last Supper or something holy to call for violence or murder or greed or exploitation or destruction of God’s creation. Just my two cents on that. There are some symbols that we hold in common with those with whom we do not hold faith in common with. Perhaps we could take that commonality as a starting place for Evangelization rather than some kind of invitation for offense. This is hard, especially after the internet has formed us into call-and-response machines (even I am doing it, here).

Bishop Barron worries in his editorial that if we make the Christian faith irrelevant (more on that below and exactly who might be responsible for that state of affairs) young people will no longer know the story of the Good Samaritan. I have some sad news for him: two years ago, James was talking with a young college graduate at the New York Catholic Worker who had never heard the story of the Good Samaritan. Perhaps if bishops spent more time talking about the Good Samaritan than sex, we could ameliorate that sad situation.

I must say, it is really hard for me to watch shepherds of Christ’s Church take the time to call a middling art performance offensive when it—honestly—matters so very little. Drag performance is many things, but it is not—by definition—a mortal sin. No matter how you want to cut it, or whether you like it or not, maybe you think it is more appropriate for Christmas pantomimes or Shakespeare plays than every Sunday at brunch, okay. That’s fine. But drag is just not a grave offense against God. There’s no textual evidence to support that claim. You don’t have to like drag and you don’t have to embrace it or make space for it in your culture, but, again, if you’re going to decide to address it, maybe try some other form of dialogue than pure condemnation.

What grave sins should the leaders of Christ’s Church be concerned with? What events happening in their country should Christians lose sleep over? What should we take offense at in world gone mad? I have some ideas:

What should be offensive to Christians is that we live in a country that contains prisons where women are serially raped by police officers. What should be offensive is our fellow Catholics suffering torture and kidnapping just a few miles south of our own border because we will not allow six more children into a school of 1,000. What’s offensive is that our country is arming and funding a nation who has been torturing innocent men in prison and torturing an entire people for months while the rest of the world stands idly by, scrolling through one Instagram tile after the other, paralyzed with the inability to change what horrifies us. That’s offensive.

I have just finished reading The Vatican Diaries, by John Thavis (former Vatican correspondent for the U.S.-based Catholic News Service). Thavis’ book covers a chapter about the Legion of Christ and the Marcial Maciel scandal(s): systematic preying upon young seminarians under his authority, rape, multiple secret families with young children he also sexually abused, and the many popes and Vatican authorities who protected him and left innocent people open to such evil is sickening. As a Christian, I find the story of a man who lived in luxury—and received the protection of John Paul II’s Vatican—and preyed upon innocent men, women and children very, very offensive. I felt sick to my stomach multiple times reading a story I had known the outlines of but was too young and sheltered to know each damning detail.

I agree with Bishop Barron that Christians should “speak up,” “resist” and “get in [the] way” — but not because of a drag performance in France, but because of the sins of our own country and our own church. The detractors of religion are not our legebatique neighbors trying to “silence” Christians. “Detractors” mean ones who give something a bad name, who drag its good name through the mud. Who cause scandal. Scandal may cause the faithful to weaken “their resolve to be faithful to the demands of the Gospel,” the U.S. bishops pointed out in their 2021 document on “The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church.

To that I say: my sweet brothers and sisters in Christ, I cannot count the headlines I have seen about a priest embroiled in some kind of sex abuse scandal that hit my inbox over the past year. It’s at least one a day. Who is giving what a bad name now?

One only has to read the story of Marcial Maciel and how the Vatican handled that one with what seems like less than no regard for the victims. Who, I ask, is the one who is making our religion seem irrelevant and a thing of derision in the eyes of the world? Who is the one making a mockery of the cross of Christ? Of his breaking bread with his disciples at the Last Supper?

I would say the detractors of religion are those who, as Peter Maurin would say, “sit on the lid” of the Gospel’s social message, because of their own worries about losing power, privilege, or wealth. Preaching the Gospel means living the Gospel. And living the Gospel—sorry to inform folks—is not supposed to net you $35 million. It’s supposed to make you poor. The Son of Man walked the earth with no where to lay his head. But the only times he expressed outrage was with the money lenders in the temple and the religious teachers who preached laws without any love for their neighbor.²

These are the injustices that keep me up at night. We should take offense that our brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow humans, are treated so cruelly. We should take offense that our brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow humans, are capable of such cruelty: particularly—particularly—the men who claim to be Christ’s successors.

Until we are outraged by what is truly outrageous in our own Body of Christ, the world will not care about Christians’ outrage.

And, finally, the Roman pagans did not say of the first Christians: see their outrage at us. They said: see how they love one another. Perhaps it is hard for current pagans to say that when the leaders of Christ’s church have done such harm, and no repentance, healing, or change has occurred since then. If the past twenty years of (continuing) scandal is an example of Christians’ love for one another, no wonder the world prefers Dionysus.

1. Note: I am not a therapist, so therapist friends do not come after me for messing up all the therapy steps for the sake of making a point in a blog post. Ily.

2. Oh and with that poor fig tree (Mark 11:12-25).