FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Annihilation of Olympia

Rant Number 499    30 July 2012

The bells of London churches pealed for the Games. A hallowed way of celebrating joyful events. Huh! They should rather have rung the death-bell. But ‘for whom the bell tolls’ throughout this carefully orchestrated media hysteria? It tolls for the Church. Because the Olympics are really a funeral. The funeral of British Christianity.

Are these Olympics a pagan affair? Sort of, but also an insult to paganism. (There are three types of paganism. Let me begin with the first, old one.) The gods’ old votaries evinced some spirituality. Pagans visited shrines, prayed, made offerings and sacrifices. Though misguided, the people of antiquity yearned for something higher. Besides, no religion which included worthies like Virgil, Seneca and Emperor Julian could be condemned wholesale. Nor were the Greek Olympics even remotely comparable to the modern spectacle. Only free Greek males could take part. Females, except the priestesses of Demetra, were banned, even as mere spectators. If a Hellenic athlete came back from the dead, he would gape and turn up his nose at the motley crews massed in East London. ‘A gathering of repulsive barbarians’, he would shudder. Nonetheless, when in AD 394 Theodosius the Great suppressed the Games he sent out a powerful message. Christianity, a universal faith, could countenance neither polytheism nor ethnic exclusivity. A Christian ruler, as the sword of the Church, must uphold and defend her teachings and norms. Quite right. Note how British secularist regime today does the very opposite.

Emperors Diocletian and Decius persecuted Christians ferociously. Yet, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. Scores of witnesses embraced torture and death rather than worshipping the Emperor and at last the Cross triumphed over the idols. The secularist regime today is smarter. ‘Just ignore them. Churches are moribund, anyway. Fill the people’s heads with garbage and trivia, panem et circenses, bread and circuses – that will suffice.’ A phrase from poet Juvenal, the Roman satirical genius. In their decadence the Roman people were content with being tossed food and shows. From MacDonald’s to Big Brother: what’s new?

For the second type of aggressive paganism fast forward to the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Cinematically, those memorable Games’ emblem is forever Olympia, the film commissioned by Hitler and shot by Leni Riefenstahl. Susan Sontag, the Jewish radical critic, called Olympia one of the greatest documentaries ever made. (The other wasTriumph of the Will, on the Nuremberg Nazi gathering.) Olympia is about beauty, strength, health and life. It is also an unashamed pagan celebration. Riefenstahl’s movie is pure Nazi aesthetic in celluloid. The cult of youth and of the male body, heroism made into a fetish, the dissolution of the self through ecstatic absorption into the Volk, the emphasis on racial purity. A superb movie, Sontag grants, but also a most dangerous one.

Hitler’s neo-pagan leaning and policies further resulted in the overt denigration of the Old Testament and the absurdities of a ‘positive’, Aryan Church. Then the Church – her best leaders - responded. Intrepid Christians like Martin Niemoeller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Archbishop Von Galen and, above all, Pope Pius XI in his 1937 encyclical letter, Mit Brennender Sorge. Pope Pius warned the all-powerful Fuehrer that man by virtue of his God-created origins has natural rights that can be overridden by no human authority. (Topical stuff, if you consider the iniquitous laws enacted by the British regime...). Thus, the Christian Church did challenge Nazi neo-paganism – she could do no less.

The third, modern type of paganism is unlike both the classical one and the Hitlerian type. Direct persecution is not its method, not yet, anyway. Its strategy is more insidious. It consists in gradually and systematically replacing religious values and institutions, centred on transcendence, with purely immanent, horizontal criteria. It seeks to undermine and destroy Christian life on all levels, economic, financial, political, artistic, ethical and spiritual. Its obsessive plugging of sports like football is part of that strategy. Football and sport in general are now the new opium of the people. The London Olympics are the apotheosis of that and insipid ‘heroes’ like David Beckham its celebrated icons...

The English, formerly a hardy, empire-building Anglo-Saxon stock, brimful with a’asabiya, the virile quality Ibn Khaldun thought essential to a people’s success, prove how national character can change - for the worst, Ibn Khaldun would say. Or maybe was it all Danny Boyle’s fault? The director of Slumdog Millionaire in his ludicrous opening ceremony turned England into another Mombay-looking mess. Indians were rightfully angry at such depiction of their city’s horrors. The English’s sense of humour and moderation will restrain them from venting a similar anger at Boyle’s grotesque installation meant to represent England. Or is it perhaps down to lack of a’asabiya? 

The regime’s media blab of sport as contributing to ‘harmony’ in society. In fact, last year’s fearful riots showed how thin, how false is the appearance of harmony in the ‘communities’. Many city centres and districts succumbed to violent, rampaging mobs, looting and burning. Suddenly, the pretence of civilisation was stripped off. Life plunged back to Hobbes’ state of nature, in which man is wolf to the man. The regime and its minions have since rushed to swear up and down that all is well. The riots were a simple aberration. No! The hot summer of 2011 told the truth. It is 2012 that lies. The Olympics razzmatazz is partly an attempt to make people forget that. Nonetheless, pace media propaganda, something is rotten in the state of Britain.

The Church fought and eventually overcame paganism’s previous incarnations. Will the leaders of Christianity today show the brains and the guts for taking on the beast’s current avatar? The signs are not encouraging. Passing by a church near Earl’s Court this morning I saw a sign: ‘Come in and watch the Olympics Games from our church.’ Fools!  They don’t realise it is to the Church’s funeral that they are inviting the good folks!

Still, God’s promise is one of hope, so don’t despair, after death

comes the Resurrection.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli