Sodom and Gomorrah: Open letter to the artistic director of Opera Ballet Flanders

Mr. Vandenhouwe,

For a woman like me, with a sharp awareness of the society in which we live, it is not surprising, but for a Christian sustained by sincere devotion, all the more shocking: the latest production by Opera Ballet Flanders, titled Sancta - a work unworthy of that name and one that perverts it into its very opposite. For what unfolds here may well be the most sickening figment our artistic circles have produced in a long time. So hereby I send you an open letter as artistic director of Opera Ballet Flanders

In a world that is increasingly detaching itself from the sacred, where God is reduced to a fable, the word blasphemy has lost its meaning. It no longer resonates in consciences where sensitivity to the transcendent has vanished. Likewise, the term perversity has become an empty shell in an era in which castrated transvestites tell children that gender is a choice, under the guise of education. In the United States this is already normalised; progressive Flanders seems determined to follow the same path.

Flemish Opera Ballet

And so we are presented with an opera in which nuns, people who dedicate their lives to asceticism, contemplation, and the mystery of the divine, are reduced to caricatures of existential confusion: they question their gender, long for sexual “liberation,” are spanked by a grotesque depiction of Jesus, and use crucifixes, the symbol of suffering, redemption, sacrifice—as phalluses. The relic is degraded into a fetish.

A blasphemy which, if it were directed at the desert cult, might well end in a bloodbath that would make the terrorist attack commemorated on March 22 pale in comparison. Christians, of course, are a safe target. Mocking them carries no risk; their outrage remains limited to words, to columns like this, perhaps to prayers, but rarely to actions. It is a comfortable form of rebellion: kicking at those who will not physically retaliate.

And as if the provocation were not enough, the premiere of this tastelessness is scheduled on the holiest day of the Christian liturgical year: Good Friday. The day on which an innocent man with a radically good message was executed, and in the most sadistic way ever devised by humanity. He suffocated, nailed to a cross, drenched in the blood of his wounds, abandoned by his disciples, mocked by onlookers.

And Opera Ballet Flanders joins in the mockery. Not only of the figure of Christ, who brought nothing but truth, love, and moral clarity, but also of millions of his followers who experience this day as a moment of introspection in their soul’s pain and as a declaration of love for the Immanuel, the God-with-us, who can heal it.

And precisely there, on that altar of human vulnerability, you place this “opera.” Are you proud of it?

Perhaps these words mean nothing to you, nor to other moral relativists and Ropsians who believe that pornography is the essence of mysticism, who no longer distinguish between the sacred and the banal, who elevate the vulgar to the sublime. Perhaps for you they are archaic terms without ethical gravity.

And yet I will use them.

Your opera is blasphemous. Your opera is perverse. Your opera is obscene. Your opera is cowardly. Your opera is hypocritical. Your opera is rotten. Your opera is, at its core, thoroughly ugly.

And that is not an aesthetic judgment, but a moral verdict.

Alexandra S. Villers

Image credits: Kenny Filiaert via Unsplash