As the first week of Olympic competition launched July 26 in Paris, Hozana, a popular free prayer app with 1.5 million users, is inviting everyone to embrace its “Rosary Olympics” challenge, a spiritual counterpart to the Olympic Games.

The "Rosary Olympics" is operating through the duration of the Olympics through Hozana's sister app, Rosario.

"An isolated Christian is a Christian in danger. If we pray together, we are stronger in our faith," said Cassandre Verhelst in an interview from Paris.

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“As the Olympic Games captivates the world with their awe-inspiring displays of human excellence and perseverance, we are thrilled to introduce our own spiritual endeavours,” Hozana said in a statement.

The challenge started July 26 with one decade of the Rosary a day, “mirroring the incremental training of an athlete,” until a full recitation of the five decades of the Rosary can be achieved by the end of the challenge on Aug. 11.

Verhelst said the coach for the Rosary Olympics is our Blessed Mother who can bring us closer to Jesus through the Rosary.

“So athletes have teammates, their coaches and they have people surrounding them,” she said. 

It’s the same for Catholics, she said, who are invited to prepare for their big event, the Catholic Mass, every Sunday.

“The Cross has a vertical part and a horizontal part. The vertical part is our relationship with God and the horizontal part of the Cross is the community,” she said.

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The Hozana and Rosario app calls people to community by making it easy for people to pray together with others around the world, and to pray for their intentions. App users can create and join living Rosary groups comprised of five people.

“We can also show our human excellence and perseverance through the Rosary Olympics,” Verhelst said. “So what the idea is is to use the same dedication that the athletes are showing in their preparation, for our prayer life.”

On the state of the Catholic Church in France, Verhelst said “compared to the French population, there are only about three per cent who are practising, which is alarming, but it’s the reality at the moment.”

However, she pointed to signs of renewal and rejuvenation with priestly ordinations continuing every year in France, and worship services geared towards youth at different parishes in Paris happening during the Olympics through the Holy Games.

“There’s not so much as we need to defend our faith. There’s more. We need to defend our ideas because a majority of people aren’t linked to the Catholic faith or to Christianity at all,” Verhelst said.

Catholics came to the defence of the faith early in these Olympics. An unlikely chorus of voices around the world, Christians and non-Christians alike, have slammed the the anti-Christian reinterpretation of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece The Last Supper by a troupe of drag performers during the Opening Ceremony. 

The French bishops, in a statement, said that while the Opening Ceremony showed a “marvelous display of beauty and joy,” it sorely missed the mark.

“This ceremony unfortunately included scenes of mockery and derision of Christianity, which we deeply regret. We would like to thank the members of other religious denominations who have expressed solidarity with us,” the French bishops said.

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Meanwhile, the Catholic Church of France is also participating in the “Holy Games” which includes participation of two Catholic bishops, 37 parishes and about 2,000 young volunteers. The Holy Games started with a Catholic Mass of the Olympic truce on July 19 in the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, where a chapel has been dedicated to athletes. An interreligious meeting has also been scheduled for Aug. 4. 

To join the Rosary challenge, the Rosario app is available at: https://rosario.app/en/. The code to join the challenge is: STRIKETHEMATCH.