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

(LifeSiteNews) — 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.