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[Catholic Caucus] Catholic clergy should be destroying idols like Pachamama, not taking part in their rituals
LifeSite News ^ | March 19, 2026 | Steven Mosher

Posted on 03/21/2026 3:29:01 PM PDT by ebb tide

[Catholic Caucus] Catholic clergy should be destroying idols like Pachamama, not taking part in their rituals

It would be refreshing if Pope Leo simply admitted that he had made a mistake. But I rather suspect that the Vatican will instead try to explain it away.


Andean man performing ceremony of payment to the land, payment to the Pachamama

A 1995 picture of the future Pope Leo XIV taking part in a Pachamama ritual came out this week.

It brought back unpleasant memories of his predecessor, Pope Francis, doing much the same thing in the Vatican gardens at the Amazonian Synod in 2019.

UNEARTHED: 1995 photo shows Pope Leo XIV participating in Pachamama ritual

We don’t know if the younger Augustinian priest blessed an idol, as Pope Francis was to do in 2019.

But his presence at this pagan ceremony was bad enough.

One would expect a member of the Catholic clergy — whether it be a priest or the pope himself — to speak out against idols and call for their destruction, not honor them.

That is certainly how they have behaved in past ages.

St. Gregory the Great, for example, who reigned as Pope from 590 to 604 A.D., insisted on the destruction of pagan idols. After sending St. Augustine of Canterbury to evangelize the then-pagan Anglo-Saxons in England, he instructed him to cleanse the temples of idols:

… I have decided after long deliberation about the English people, namely that the idol temples of that race should not be destroyed, but only the idols in them. Let blessed water be prepared, and sprinkled in these temples, and altars constructed, and relics deposited. For if these temples are well built, it is essential that they should be transferred from the worship of devils to the service of the true God.

St. Augustine of Canterbury did as he was told, destroying the pagan idols the temples contained while converting the temples themselves into Christian churches. Destroying an idol reveals to everyone — in a way that nothing else does — the utter powerlessness of demons in the presence of Christ.

That a pope or a priest — an alter Christus — would take part in a pagan ceremony suggests the opposite.

READ: Taylor Marshall: Cardinals elected ‘idolater and syncretist to the papacy’ if photos legit

Some would argue that Pachamama, represented by a statue of a pregnant, kneeling woman, is not really a pagan idol.

Speaking as an anthropologist, I strongly disagree. Pachamama is quite clearly a fertility “goddess.” Similar idols of naked and very pregnant women are worshipped in the fertility cults of many, many primitive cultures around the world.

Even more to the point, they still are in parts of Peru where Pope Leo was stationed as a young priest.

Note also that not a few such fertility goddesses demanded human sacrifice as the price of their favors. In the Incan version of the South American Pachamama cult, which was centered in Peru, child sacrifice was practiced in the past.

It would be refreshing if Pope Leo simply admitted that he had made a mistake in participating in a pagan worship service of a fertility goddess. But I rather suspect that the Vatican will instead try to explain it away, as they did when Pope Francis blessed the Pachamama idol.

At that time, some in the Vatican first claimed that the statue represented Our Lady of the Amazon. This was not only clearly false, it was a grievous insult to the dignity of the Mother of God.

The Vatican press office quickly went into damage control mode. The pagan Pachamama goddess had absolutely no connection to the Queen of Heaven, it said.

Matters took a turn for the worse when Andrea Tornielli, then editorial director for the Vatican Dicastery for Communication, called the statue “an image of motherhood and the sacredness of life, a traditional symbol for indigenous peoples representing the bond with our ‘mother earth’ …”

READ: Pachamama idolatry returns: Cardinals who condemned Francis’ scandal now face Leo’s

In other words, Tornielli was admitting that the statues representing “fertility, life and Mother Earth” are exactly what they seem to be: Pachamama idols still worshiped by the primitive peoples of the Amazon as a fertility cult.

In fact, worship of this pagan deity is so important to Amazonian tribes that, even to the present day, they sacrifice animals to her, even if they no longer sacrifice children.

Pope Leo, who spent many years in Peru and has visited the Amazon, must be very familiar with the Pachamama cult. And Pope Francis himself did not hesitate to identify such statues as “Pachamamas.”

Listen to what secular social scientists have to say about the Pachamama cult found in modern-day Peru. “Pachamama is,” one anthropologist noted, “a non-human sacred/social person with whom a relationship of reciprocity must be maintained.”

In other words, Pachamama is not just a symbolic representation of Mother Earth, but is, in the minds of its followers, a pagan deity that one must be careful to propitiate, not anger.

One way to propitiate such demons, of course, is to bow down and worship them.

It is not surprising that such cultish rituals continue in places like Peru.

The only surprise is that now we learn that not just one, but two, popes have participated in them.


TOPICS: Catholic; Current Events; Religion & Culture
KEYWORDS: ah8ebby; francisii; idolatry; pachamamapopeii; paganism
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1 posted on 03/21/2026 3:29:01 PM PDT by ebb tide
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To: ebb tide

Your mama


2 posted on 03/21/2026 3:31:29 PM PDT by bunkerhill7 (Don't shoot until you see the whites of their lies)
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To: Al Hitan; Fedora; irishjuggler; Jaded; kalee; markomalley; miele man; Mrs. Don-o; ...
Ping

The only surprise is that now we learn that not just one, but two, popes have participated in them (Pachamama worship).


3 posted on 03/21/2026 3:32:35 PM PDT by ebb tide (Francis' sin-nodal "church" is not the Catholic Church.)
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Pope Leo is the same pope who recently approved the little pervert, Tucho Fernandez's, degradation of the Blessed Mother of Jesus Christ with his hertical Mater Populi Fidelis.

That's what happens when one worships false gods.

4 posted on 03/21/2026 3:40:02 PM PDT by ebb tide (Francis' sin-nodal "church" is not the Catholic Church.)
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To: ebb tide

Sedevacantism


5 posted on 03/21/2026 3:48:43 PM PDT by ClearCase_guy
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To: ebb tide

Here is a good message: Do not fall prey to Devil’s schemes

https://youtube.com/shorts/hi6NavCM8OI?si=5OCKB722mR0RULHp


6 posted on 03/21/2026 4:15:17 PM PDT by Mark (DONATE ONCE every 3 months. Is that a big deal?)
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To: ebb tide

Bad theology. Bad optics. Bad shepherding of the flock. Imho this pipe has a problem.
Perhaps he might read a Bible (like, where Abraham smashed his father Terah’s idols — or where Moses destroyed the golden calf).


7 posted on 03/21/2026 4:32:06 PM PDT by faithhopecharity ("Politicians aren't born, they're excreted." Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BCE))
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To: ebb tide

They were too busy trying to destroy America and make serious BANK shuffling in these illegals...


8 posted on 03/21/2026 4:42:08 PM PDT by mythenjoseph (Islam is not compatible within a free society.)
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