Priest: Watching Kids Sing “Imagine” at the Olympics Was a “Sad Spectacle”

Monsignor Charles Pope, the pastor of Holy Comforter–St. Cyprian Church in Washington, D.C. who said people were “cowering in fear” of COVID only to catch COVID himself, wants you to know about an “empty, dark, unrealistic, and dystopian” experience that a group of kids recently went through.

What was this horrifying and traumatic event?

During the Opening Ceremonies for the Tokyo Olympics, a children’s choir sang John Lennon‘s “Imagine” and… that’s it.

… While some just think of the song as “pretty” the radical atheist/globalist words are a direct attack on things central to the existence of any civilization. Lennon imagines, with approval, a world without God, religion, or country. In effect no piety, no loyalties, and nothing worth dying for. He also dismissed the idea of heaven, hell, and more than implies that religion, faith and God are the source of violence, greed and disunity.

…

… The song implicitly endorsed atheistic Communism, or at least Socialism in its dream of “no possessions.” Imagine, was perhaps the most secular and radical of popular songs ever written, dripping with contempt, deconstructionist, revolutionary, and reductionist, a Magna Carta for secular humanism, and Communism.

I knew it was a good song, but I didn’t know it was that good.

His criticisms aren’t anything new. But he’s also wildly misinterpreting the meaning of the song. Pope points out the apparent irony of the lyric “Imagine there’s no countries” sang during the Olympics, but that’s not ironic. The song is about imagining a world where the most divisive things no longer exist and we could be united. That’s (theoretically) the purpose of the Olympics, too. The fact that Pope doesn’t get that tells you he’d rather create unnecessary chaos than work towards any kind of unity.

The song is a classic for a reason. The song being part of the Opening Ceremonies makes sense. It takes someone warped by years of religious delusions to see kids singing it and consider it a problem in need of a solution.

By the way, singing this song isn’t even new. It’s been performed at multiple Olympics. The sky didn’t fall after those performances, either.