“No one could possibly imagine that the Last Supper would be singled out for such grotesque disparagement as it was in Paris last week by people who actually believed that the central figure in the Last Supper really was whipped almost to death and nailed upon a cross until he died. No one, no matter how depraved or degraded, could possibly find such a horrible event remotely amusing. The agreeable aspect of it, the ‘fun’ that our media detected in it, was the pitifully adolescent thrill of a send-up of a starkly mortifying event that more than a billion people unselfconsciously consider to have been one of the most notable encounters there has ever been between man and his Creator. The thrill and the fun are to be found in rendering repulsive and perverted an occasion that a vast number of worthy and in very many cases, exceptionally accomplished and intellectually sophisticated people regard as a sacred moment when the divinely inspired missionary of the deity was among us and about to make an overwhelming sacrifice for the moral betterment of mankind. It is intellectual vandalism, iconoclastic churlishness, like the young mountebank Mussolini looking heavenwards like King Lear and bellowing to an appreciative crowd ‘I say you don’t exist; if you do strike me down, God.’ (Possibly the Duce remembered this as he and his mistress were executed by communist guerrillas prior to being hung upside down by their ankles and their corpses desecrated in a gas station in Milan in April 1945.)”
Conrad Black in National Post August 3, 2024