THE LAST SUPPER ….October 13, 2024

is surely one of the scenes most cherished by Christians of all denominations. You might have an image of the Last Supper in your dining room. For us Catholics it is the occasion on which Our Lord instituted the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, where-by we are united with His Passion and Death, and the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

     If we are true to our Catholic Faith, then we should expect to find opposition to our mission. This last summer the inaugural ceremony of the Olympic Games, which was watched around the world, featured what appeared to be a grotesque and blasphemous parody of the Last Supper that was calculated to mock and insult not only Christians but every human being with any shred of decency. The peculiar depravity and squalor of that degenerate spectacle suggest that its inspiration was demonic.

     We might think of France as the Eldest Daughter of the Church, and Paris is a city that has produced many great saints. However, during the French Revolution a naked prostitute was declared to be “the Goddess of Reason” and enthroned on the High Altar of Notre Dame Cathedral. And earlier this year the current President of the French Republic, who likens him-self to Jupiter, marked the enshrining of the right to abortion in his country’s constitution with a ceremony that simmered with religious intensity. He announced: “Today is not the end of the story, it’s the beginning of a combat. If France has become the only country in the world whose constitution explicitly protects the right to an abortion in all circumstances, we will not rest until this promise is kept throughout the world.” Astonishingly, this announcement went well beyond even what we are sadly used to in Canada with the all-too-common government directed pollution of the moral order.

     In France, however, all is not lost. We can praise God for the eighteen thousand young pilgrims who walked on the Paris to Chartres Pilgrimage earlier this year on the Feast of Pentecost, to show their love for Christ, and especially for His presence with them in all the Masses that were celebrated along the way, and for His Real Presence with them in the Blessed Sacrament. The offending scene at the opening of the Paris Olympics conjured up an atmosphere of sterility and wretchedness – nothing could have manifested more starkly the despair that afflicts a society that has unanchored itself from its Christian foundations and from the source of all wholesome nourishment. Those many thousands of young pilgrims singing hymns on their way to Chartres, meanwhile, represent fruitfulness and hope in all their beauty.

     We should take inspiration from their zeal and dedication. Pray that our faith in Our Lord's presence, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, in the Blessed Sacrament is deepened, and that this faith may bear great fruits of hope and charity in our daily lives. It is said that the devil's greatest trick is to keep himself hidden, because then men will cease to believe in him. That gives him a definite power over us. But in our day God is allowing the evil one to reveal himself in his ugliness. That gives us power over him. We need not, must not, become discouraged. We know where and with Whom the final victory lies.

                                                                     ~ FR. PAUL DOBSON

Quotation from Benedict XVI

“Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much.

Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.”