Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins slammed Christian and conservative critics for mocking “The Last Supper” depicted during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics last week.
Jenkins’ column The store has responded to those offended by the drag queen exhibit, which many say depicts Jesus Christ and the Apostles from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting “The Last Supper,” by saying there is nothing offensive about it and that the exhibit is meant to inspire viewers to empathize with others.
“All the religious police saw was a phantom affront,” Jenkins said of Christians who were offended by the staging, designed by the ceremony’s director, Thomas Jolly.
She argued that Jolie was a more Christian than those who were uncomfortable with his work, writing, “Perhaps, just maybe, Jolie is a better, truer worshipper than the critics. At least he has done what they could not: he has looked people in the face and portrayed them with interest, not hostility.”
Three drag queen torchbearers appear along the Paris Olympic torch relay route
A view of the Eiffel Tower with the Olympic rings and flags of participating countries painted on it from Trocadero Square ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, France, on July 21, 2024. (Photo by Kevin Foig/Getty Images) (Kevin Voight/Getty Images)
A brief scene at the Olympic opening ceremony in the French capital sparked outrage among Christians and conservatives around the world, with most seeing the troupe of drag queens lined up on one side of a long table — one of them wearing a halo crown and posing in the middle — as a mockery of Da Vinci’s work and a central event in the New Testament.
Prominent figures including Elon Musk and Catholic Bishop Robert Barron condemned the display, with Musk posting on X that “this is a huge disrespect to Christians.”
In a video posted to the platform, Bishop Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester added, “This is nothing less than a vicious mockery of the Last Supper.”
Jolie and the media were quick to deny the criticism, with the director arguing that the film she was screening was not “The Last Supper” but another classic that had been widely repeated in the media.
Jenkins expanded on this argument in a post on Thursday, writing, “The drag queen scene, like Delville’s, is a depiction of a Greek pagan festival, not a mockery of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, as some Christian leaders have claimed.”
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Here are some of the performers who will appear in the production of “The Last Supper” at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. (Reuters/Tingshu Wang)
She subsequently argued that the criticism was fuelled by religious hostility to “experimental art”.
“Why some church leaders are hostile to experimental art and treat it as anti-faith is an unanswerable question, but it is by no means a modern phenomenon,” Jenkins wrote, adding that “those who condemn the opening ceremony because of a fleeting pagan painting during a fascinating four-hour ceremony belong to the same dry camp as the self-appointed judges left in the dust of history, who wrongly judged the works of their time to be inappropriate objects of worship.”
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“Critics of the Opening Ceremony have undoubtedly focused on the wrong things,” she added in her concluding paragraph.
