Now that the Olympic Games have come and gone and now that things have simmered down, one can revisit the event in the opening ceremony that caused a stir amongst many Christians. This was a tableau by LGBTQI persons, which according to the artistic director was a representation of the feast of Dionysius but which may have resembled a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's last supper. Many Christian and other religious people took this as an offence and registered their disapproval with the respective civil authorities who were quick to remind them that France was a fiercely lay state and acted independently of any religion. This article is not to find fault with those who felt aggrieved but to maybe explore other avenues of how we may have looked at the situation.

This was not the first secular tableau which I had seen of Leonardo's last supper. I vividly remember one with Marilyn Monroe and some of Hollywood's finest actors, another of Elvis Presley and other famous singers, one of the Beatles and other well-known singers. I even remember one with Mickey Mouse and all well-known Disney characters, not to mention one with the Minions.

Therefore, what was it that rankled the ire of many? I do not ever remember anybody ever complaining about the other tableaux! Could it remotely and subliminally be because of the fact that the representation was composed of people from the LGBTQI community? Why was the representation of da Vinci's last supper taken to be an offence to the Divine Eucharist and to religion? Could one look at this event from a different perspective and still take it in as a devout Catholic or that of other religious denominations? Could we learn anything from this event to help us in the development of our respective faiths such as tolerance?

The well-known protestant theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr's (1894-1962) classic book which I recommend to everyone, Christ and Culture, could perhaps point the way towards a different interpretation of this event. Prior to recent Church history, especially the Second Vatican Council, there tended to be a view that the world around us was the evil enemy while the Church should remain as a good spiritual counter-weight to the bad world. There was an us-and-them mentality with the world very much the enemy. This was very much in line with a dualist dichotomy between the soul and the body seen in Socratic/Platonic philosophy. Niebuhr reminds us that this approach to the world was very much a false heretical Gnostic one. The gnostic Manichees very much believed that anything to do with the world was evil and to be avoided and anything to do with the church and spirit, good, leading to the withdrawal of good religious people, the church, from the world.

St Augustine was perhaps Manichaeism's greatest son before his conversion to Christianity but his dualistic Platonic philosophy, remained discernible in his theological outlook even after his conversion, brilliant man that he was. Even St Paul in his letters often tends to refer to the Platonic dualism between the good soul and the evil body, brilliant man that he was. For Niebuhr, the perfect essence of Christianity was reflected in St Thomas Aquinas' synthesis of the medieval world of his times and religion. The world was not the enemy. Thomas was able to revive and develop into Christian thought, the teachings of Aristotle from the translations of the Arabs, which the Latin world had lost. Aristotle rejected Socrates' dualism and for him, body and soul consisted in one hylomorphic union forming one substance not two separate realms. Thomas believed that it was this synthesis between religion and the then medieval world of his time that was the correct way for the faith to develop.

When Christ met the Syrophoenician woman in what is now Lebanon in St Mark's gospel, or in St Matthew's on his way to Lebanon, and she asked Him to cure her daughter of a demon (it could have been an illness or some sexual vice), He referred to the non-Jews as "domestic house dogs" and saying that it was not right for the food that belonged to the Jews to be given to the pagans or those of mixed race. It was a demeaning insult of the highest level directed at the woman who did not seem to be the least perturbed in answering that even domestic house dogs ate from the crumbs that fall from the table, to which comment, Christ praises her for her persistent faith and instantly cures her daughter. There are different exegesis for this difficult part of the Gospel.

The first is that Christ having two natures in one substance, one human, the other Divine, which human nature was at times in the process of learning, (we do not know when He actually stopped learning and there were times it seems that His human nature was not always able to immediately comprehend His Divine nature) learnt from the Syrophoenician women, that the kingdom of God was to be opened at this point in time, also to non-Jews. The other exegesis towards which I lean, is that he learnt from His Divine nature that it was time to teach His disciples that His kingdom, that had previously been revealed only to Jews, was now also to be revealed to Greeks and pagans. In fact, the early church was made up of both Jews and Greeks. God wants the call to His Kingdom to be universal and to also include people from the peripheries!

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) emphasised that the body was the primary site of knowing the world, as opposed to placing consciousness as the source of knowledge and that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled. A transgender person within my perception gives me phenomenological informative truth of what that person really is, even though it may not be the complete picture. A picture I ought to respect. Just as a foetus perceived in a womb gives me phenomenological information which reflects much truth (epoche) as to what the foetus' body actually is, a human being. Gabriel Marcel (1989-1973), was a Catholic transcendent phenomenologist (he disliked the word Christian existentialist and was originally an agnostic before converting to Catholicism in 1929) who using philosophy and his understanding of building a "we" from an "I" and a "him/her", that is his recognition of community in the other person I perceive, as that reflective force which on mutual reflection and understanding and constituting the virtues of faith hope and love in the relationship, had ultimately to lead to God. He used to say that a reflection on a reflection inevitably opens one to faith. He vehemently opposed Jean Paul Sartre's atheistic existentialism.

Prior to the Second Vatican Council, the Church used to preach the Extra Ecclesiae Nulla Salus doctrine. There is no salvation outside the Church. But in the 1950s and after the Council, both Henry De Lubac and Karl Rahner helped bring in the concept of Anonymous Christianity as being solely sufficient for salvation. Being a good person is what matters to God. Even Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and yes, atheists and agnostics may be saved even if not baptised, if they embrace the fundamental option. Benedict the XVI in fact even removed the doctrine of Limbo from the church. Good people like Simone Weil could be saved even if not formally baptised (there is in her case, however, a rumour of a baptism in extremis)! Modern society is not the enemy! We must embrace what is right in modern society such as the practice of tolerance particularly in art and reject what is bad. That is the place of the church today in a secular modern world. We are all children of the Father and His greatest gift to us all is, as Josemaria Escriva used to love to say, Divine Filiation! There are no children of a lesser god!