Pope Francis sent warm greetings to participants in the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games that are about to open in Beijing on 4 February and 4 March, respectively.Speaking during the Wednesday General Audience, he sent wishes for success to both the organizers and the athletes.
“Sport, with its universal language, can build bridges of friendship and solidarity between people and peoples of every culture and religion.”
“I therefore appreciate that the International Olympic Committee has added the word ‘Communiter,’ meaning ‘Together’ to the historic Olympic motto ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’, that is ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’: so that the Olympic Games may nurture a more fraternal world,” he said.
The above comes from a Feb. 2 posting on Vatican News.
Defenders of persecuted Uyghurs point to human rights
“Enabling China to host the Olympics and to use it as a promotional event without addressing its human rights crises sends a signal to China that the international community will not hold it accountable,” Koen Stoop, the E.U. policy director for the World Uyghur Congress, told Breitbart News in a recent statement. “This will only encourage the Chinese regime to continue its crimes against Uyghurs and others.”
From an August 28 story in Breitbart News.
This is like Nazi Germany hosting the 1936 Olympics. Why are so few speaking out? Why is the Church silent? Too many Catholic clergy were complicit with the Nazis.
Why is the predator McCarrick’s deal with the Communist Chinese dictators still a secret when Pope Francis promised the most transparent Vatican in the history of the Church?
Maybe it’s why there is still silence from the Pope and most bishops about the devout Catholics Mr. Biden, Ms. Pelosi and others furthering our own mass killing of now more than 63 million babies in our nation (since Roe v. Wade). Do we want to see a Catholic preside over the killing of more than Mao, Stalin or Hitler?
Someday, we will know. Our Lord promises that. “What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops.” (Luke 12:3)
i don’t watch the olympics anymore who cares
I’d rather watch the Freedom Truckers in Ottawa than the Olympics.
ESPN credits a Catholic with an almost successful boycott of the 1936 Nazi Olympics.
The Games are now best remembered for the brilliance of Jesse Owens — who won four gold medals — and the success of the Nazis’ propaganda machine. For the first time in the history of the modern Olympics, the Games were held hostage by the political goals of the host nation.
What’s largely forgotten is the fact that a powerful American movement to boycott the Nazi Olympics nearly succeeded. The final vote of the AAU’s delegates was 58.25 to 55.75 in favor of participation. If three more delegates had voted to boycott the Games, the Nazis would have presided at a meaningless event.
The most vigorous and effective proponent of an American boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Germany was not a Jew. Instead he was a devout Irish-American Catholic known all his life for his stubborn opposition to racial and religious discrimination. Born on Manhattan’s East Side in 1878, Jeremiah Titus Mahoney worked his way through New York University — where he played football, baseball, and lacrosse and high-jumped — and then NYU’s School of Law. In 1923 Governor Alfred E. Smith appointed him to the state Supreme Court, where he served for six years before returning to private practice.
By 1935, Mahoney had ascended to the presidency of the Amateur Athletic Union, making him responsible for the selection of America’s Olympic team. After long reflection, he came to the conclusion that American participation in Hitler’s Olympics would serve only to legitimate a wholly evil regime, a regime that was discriminating against its own Jewish citizens as it chose its Olympic teams. “There is no room for discrimination on grounds of race, color, or creed in the Olympics,” Mahoney said.
The story is linked below:
https://www.espn.com/olympics/news/story?id=4396362
At least some in the mainstream media (CBS, NBC, USA Today and the Washington Post) are at least mentioning the genocide of the Uyghurs in their coverage of the Olympics, now often called the genocide Olympics. Maybe the Vatican and USCCB press offices, as well as Ms. Pelosi, could do the same?
And a new slogan is born, “Fraternity through Tyranny”.
I read in the news, that one of the two Olympic athletes to light the Olympic torch at the Olympic Games in China, was a woman of Uyghur descent. Reporters suggested that this was a very tragic Chinese PR stunt. The Pope really should speak out against the evil Chinese persecution of the Uyghurs.