I am a woke Catholic, I’m sorry to say, and likely so are you.
We are woke because we take personal offence from attacks on Christianity, such as the recent opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics.
We are woke when we look at this mockery from an all-too-human point of view: It offended me. It’s them against us again. What are we going to do to stop it or to get even? What is our next move? How can we make them see they have offended us?
But this woke-Catholic view is a woke-Marxist view that sees life as a struggle between the victim (us, of course) and the perpetrators (them). This is not a Christian outlook. It is a Catholic version of the Marxian power dynamic.
This idea has been revealed to us by public figures such as Bishop Robert Barron and Father Chris Alar, MIC, of the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy. While they did not actually put it in those terms, they did very vigorously and seriously speak about the Olympics incident as being, primarily, a blasphemy against Our Lord.
The International Olympic Committee has indeed admitted to re-imagining the Last Supper as a gathering of drag queens. It issued a quasi-apology that says in trying to “celebrate tolerance,” it “never intended to show disrespect to any religious group.”
The 2.6 billion Christians in the world seemed to have slipped its mind.
Bishop Barron called the apology a “masterpiece of woke duplicity,” saying it amounts to: “If you are so simple-minded as to be offended, we are sorry.”
Again, it is not about us, but about a direct attack on Jesus himself. Father Alar pointed out it is blasphemy, the very worst of sins. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, every sin is slight compared to this one.
Bishop Barron sees the opening ceremonies as proof that our “deeply secularist post-modern society knows who their enemy is and they are naming it.”
Then again, maybe we aren’t woke-Catholics at all, and we don’t see the point of wasting our time worrying about an opening ceremony that really won’t affect our lives. So we don’t get angry. We don’t bother thinking about it and are not offended.
Yet, there is a middle way between personal outrage and a nonchalant attitude. It is righteous anger.
Father Alar quoted St. Thomas Aquinas, who taught that anger can be justifiable and, in fact, it might be a sin not to get angry in a right-ordered way.
Then Father Alar asks, “What are we going to do?” Burning and rioting are not the Christian way, he says, yet we are called to defend God and our faith. What is the right-ordered way?
Part of it is voicing our concerns to the appropriate parties. We can take a minute and email the IOC at pressoffice@olympic.org or www.olympics.com/ioc/contact-us or phone 011 41 21 621 61 11.
Additionally, Bishop Barron and Father Alar stress prayer, penance, and reparation. Bishop Barron also suggests invoking St. Michael.
Both priests especially emphasize prayer. Father Alar said, “If you don’t pray every day, you dim. You lose the light. You lose your faith.” He gave the example of a priest who, when asked why he had “fallen from grace,” simply replied, “I stopped praying.”
Any type of prayer is good, but given the nature of the offence, it seems appropriate to spend some time in front of the tabernacle where Our Lord is present. Some parishes, like St. Pius X in North Vancouver, have organized an entire day of adoration in front of the Blessed Sacrament specifically to make atonement for the Olympics offence. Other churches are open several hours every day for us to stop by.
However we do it, let’s make a resolution to raise our voice to the IOC, and to God – because we are sorry He is offended.
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