PAUL C. writes:

Regarding your entry on “Olympic Decadence,” you might have read that the 2024 Olympic Torch Relay included a Pentecost Sunday stop at the Lourdes Sanctuary this May.

From the shrine’s official announcement: “The Olympic flame passed through the Sanctuary of Lourdes today, the day of Pentecost. A symbolic date for pilgrims who also celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit on earth and on the Apostles, thus laying the cornerstone of our Church.”

As I’m sure you know, the flame tradition began with the ancient Olympics where the Games were held in honor of Zeus, king of all gods. The Greeks considered the Olympic fire to be sacred, letting it burn on the altar of Hestia, virgin goddess of hearth and home. In our time, the flame is said to symbolize friendship among nations.

The lighting ceremony, of course, still occurs at Olympia, amid ruins of a temple devoted to Hera, queen of the gods. Women representing a high priestess and vestal virgins light the flame according to the ancient method, focusing sunlight with a parabolic mirror. The Olympic torch is then presented to the first of many relay bearers.

I think an interesting survey could be conducted among people identifying as Catholic: “What do you think of the Lourdes episode?” I imagine a scale running roughly along these lines:

• Lighten up, it was entirely innocent, done in good faith, and maybe marginally beneficial to the extent it draws attention to Lourdes. The Olympic flame has pagan origins, but so do any number of our cherished Catholic traditions, like votive candles, incensing altars and Christmas trees. That vestal virgin stuff is obviously nothing but role playing, like actors in a producton of Medea. Did anyone hear Pope Leo XIII or Pope St. Pius X criticize the Games or its theatrics after the modern version began in the late 19th century? Lourdes welcomes busloads of non-Catholic tourists all the time and this was just cheerful hospitality.

• Distasteful but probably inadvertent.

• An insult, but what else is new? At least it represented harmony among nations and is orders of magnitude beneath any number of travesties in the Novus Ordo today. Yesterday’s news, move on.

• Don’t be naive. The pagan exercises involved trappings of “sacred” fire, the veneration of a virgin and of a supreme queen. It occurred at a principal shrine to our Virgin Mother, on Pentecost Sunday itself, as the Church celebrates Our Lady’s gathering with the apostles amid the true sacred fire of the Holy Ghost. This was Satanic profanation, whether most of the participants knew it or not, and calls for reparation.

By the way, here’s the flame arriving in Paris on Bastille Day.

— Comments —

Tony S. writes:

The entire West is one, big, satanic carousel ride. I find just about everything in media, politics, entertainment, sports, advertisements, and much more to be an attack on the Catholic faith/Christ.

Besides frequent prayer, what can one do in such a situation?

Laura writes:

It is gross.

But we can love the good and the true all the more. A single flower or a single star puts all the ugliness, lies and decadence to shame. Every baby is a rebuke to the falsity.

People who exult in perversion and alienation have so very little to call their own. They are riding on air. I pity them. All the beauty and love they have thrown away will likely never return to them. They are mere, windblown specks before the immensity of God’s love and the grandeur of His creation.

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