The Summer Olympics open today in Paris, with a flotilla along the Seine reported to be replacing the traditional parade of nations into the main stadium. Very bold, very French. And this is before we get to the entertainment, which is always avante-garde no matter what country it’s in.
Another Olympic tradition seems to be popular cynicism. By the time we reach the opening ceremonies, the advertiser hype has already been cranked up for a year and the networks have been hard at work pre-curating our viewing experience. (It’s not enough for the Olympics to showcase elite international athletic competition—they have to create Memories that Will Last Forever and canonize a new crop of household heroes, every night at 9:38 p.m., live on tape.) And it wouldn’t be an Olympic year without fresh cheating and judging scandals that mar the purity of the Olympic ideal.
For Catholics, it seems like the Olympic ideal itself might suffer under scrutiny. Were not the modern Games, originated in 1896, based on competitions in ancient pagan Greece, with their very name taken from the mountain where Zeus & co. lived? Is not the conceit of the Games’ supposed transcendent ability to unite peoples a weak imposture of the only thing that can so unite them: Christ and his universal Church?
I would say to both: yes, kind of. Certainly, the lore of the modern Olympics reaches back to ancient predecessors, who were pagan. And you can detect a hint of something quasi-religious about the glorification of athletic bodies (ever-more-immodestly clad with each iteration!) and about the idolization of sport as global Redeemer and Savior.
That said, I don’t think Catholics need to frown on the Olympics or avoid watching them (though I recommend skipping beach volleyball, or at least squinting heavily). In fact, there is much in this biannual festival for Catholics to admire and support.
The ancient Olympians were pagans, but the founder of the modern Olympics, a Frenchman named Pierre de Coubertin, was a devout Catholic. He set out not to revive worship of the Greek pantheon but to recapture what was worthy in classical culture. He saw in sport not a rival religion but a substitute for war; and in the striving for athletic excellence—with neither victory nor profit first in mind but effort and sportsmanship—he saw a chance to build virtue and perfect human nature in its unity of flesh and spirit.
The Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius (“Faster, Higher, Stronger”) was devised, it should therefore not surprise us to hear, by a priest of the order whose philosophers emphasized that unity: the Dominican Henri Didon.
The twentieth century gave us not just the modern Olympic phenomenon but the Church’s premier athlete-pope in John Paul II. During his papacy, the zealous soccer player and skier offered numerous official greetings and blessings to Olympic organizers and competitors and to other athletic bodies. In his message on the opening of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, he endorsed both the virtue of athletic competition and the Olympics’ symbolic value for fostering international accord. “This great event,” he wrote,
has significance not only for the world of sport as the expression of friendly athletic competition and the striving for human excellence but also for the future of the human community, which through sport gives external expression to the desire of all for universal cooperation and understanding. I offer my heartiest congratulations to the men and women who are representing their countries and I hope that at this world-wide encounter they will be worthy models of peaceful harmony and human fellowship.
If the Olympics are pagan, they’re pagan in that grand, humanistic, admirable sense that the best of classical culture was—a sense that’s better than ninety-nine percent of the profane pablum that mean, mediocre modernity offers in its place. Despite all their imperfections, may they continue to inspire a natural standard of virtue and peace that, someday, grace may perfect in human hearts.