Six years ago today
Three of the demonic Pachamama idols were thrown into the river Tiber by Alexander Tschugguel & other courageous Cristeros
Earning the thanks of faithful Catholics throughout the world
Bergoglio apologised for the 'desecration' of his idols pic.twitter.com/Y5TzlKdmDn
— Deacon Nick Donnelly (@ProtecttheFaith) October 21, 2025
Ideally they should have been broken and/or burned and then thrown into the river. That’s what you do with items of black magic or demon worship.
And Francis ordered that a bowl of the same demon-cult be placed on the main alter of St. Peter’s Basilica. Think about that.
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One of the more miraculous aspects of that whole ordeal was that Rome later claimed to have fished out at least one of the idols from the Tiber and rescued it.
(Smug face)
Yeah. That’s what happened. I’m sure there wasn’t a broom closet packed to the gills with those things and they just whipped one out and claimed it had been rescued.
Can you, Father, (or anyone else in the reading audience) perhaps comment on the similarities of this trajectory and that of Old Testament Baal/Asherah worship? (Highlighted magnificently in the tale of Elijah and the prophets of Baal.) Because this slide into sexual immorality, simultaneous with idol worship and infant immolation just … doesn’t seem like a coincidence. It feels like history playing out all over again.
Ahab and Jezebel worshiped Baal (bull god of lightning) and Asherah (sometimes called Ishtar/Inana; a Mesopotamian fertility goddess) and they sacrificed their own children to them in fire as a sacrifice (it is believed). Sexual immorality was part of this worship schema, as was an admixture of Jewish worship. It was its own “novus ordo” of the traditional sacrifice at the Temple of Jerusalem, but took place in Samaria (the capital of the Northern Kingdom).
Meanwhile, in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, Temple sacrifice went on in Jerusalem basically as it had for centuries (though some of the idol worship had also crept in there as well).
One nation (Israel), two kingdoms, two separate modes of worship, one faithful, the other not. The similarities between Israel’s religious trajectory and the current state of the Church are just fast and furious (though not exact). It has always made me wonder if — since the Old Testament so frequently prefigures the New — that the lessons to be learned from Samaria v Jerusalem can also be applied to the current Crisis in the Church. One “nation”, and one big spiritual divide.
If that is indeed the case, we have reason to hope that, like the prophets of Baal, these papal pushes towards idolatry and false ecumenism will be wiped away by the Hand of God through the faithfulness of His steadfast servants (though hopefully not with bloodshed as when Elijah slew the prophets of Baal — though I definitely would not rule out the faithful being martyred by apostate Rome; we daily see how little they care for us and how much they hate the TLM).
This is not a call for vengeance or spiritual pride — if anything it’s a call to SUPREME HUMILITY AND HOLINESS. Attending the TLM does not make you a saint! Doing God’s will in all things does. And we should fast and weep for anyone who worships idols — especially a priest or cardinal! But it’s spooky how close the parallels are.
Anyway: food for thought. Responses welcome. God bless you.
~Avey Rose The symbolism that one finds when looking at fertility/agricultural paganism is that a thing must die in order for there to be new life. It is common that the first child born must die (in whole or in part) in order to procure the blessing/favor of the gods (demons). When you look at scripture, the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham is initally patterned after the fertility/agricultural worship of that time period and should be read as God saying, “I am not like the other gods.” It is a theophany. The Mithraic cults at the time of Christ followed this pattern of the fruit must die and go into the ground in order for there to be new fruit. There is a recognition that fertility/fruit comes from the gods and that fruit must be offered in sacrifice both as thanksgiving and to procure new fertility. Paganism, in its more robust form, demands blood sacrifice as part of the fertility/agricultural cult. Blood is the fruit that must be shed in thanksgiving and for future procurement. (side note: abortion, as it is structured, is simply the bloodshedding of the fruit of the womb to procure future material blessing and is no different in intent than pagan fertility worship. It is simply the offering to complete the bargain. “If you kill the child, you will have prosperity and happiness” is what they argue — it is a superstitious occult bargain that is being made.)
Pachamama, in either the Andean form or in the new age form that was presented at the Vatican, is no different. It is a pagan blood sacrifice ritual that is rather universal because the demons can only copy and corrupt true worship. The problem with syncretisms and idolatry is that they assume that the corruption has anything to say and anything that can be joined with true worship as revealed by Christ.
Personally, the bowl on the altar is the more blasphemous because it is the completed ritual (if I remember right, there is a fleshy bloody thing in there), and placing it on the altar is metaphorically saying “this bowl is true worship” and very much a doubling down of the bad behavior in the garden after being called out for it.
When you have a pope publicly violating the First Commandment while attacking the ancient liturgy, you know the Church is in an unimaginable crisis.
For Avey Rose….
Thinking logically, with all the Biblical and Traditional belief that Catholics hold, it seems to me, without trying to focus too much on the Demonic:
Lucifer (Satan) and 0.33333… of the Angels rebelled and were cast out of Paradise, with the Earth as their playground. Lesser demons have their “roles” (as a defiled mirror image of the roles of the Angels who serve God); over the years humans have been tempted and commune with, worship even these demons. Some have names, the most famous being ones like Ba’al and etc. etc.
I suppose even the old “gods” from Greece, Rome and Egypt could have been demons in some way (although Greek gods were more metaphorical); the gods of Egypt were particularly…. striking in their purported abilities through myth and legend. They were demons.
Anyway, to get to the crux of the matter. Demons are immortal. The same demons exist now as back then in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Akkadia, etc. Different names. Same…. proclivities and tendencies.
One demon for anger, one for lust… one for murder, one for sexual degeneracy, one for…. you get the picture.
Satan the head honcho of them all…. Prince of Lies. In the shadows, letting his minions do the dirty work… the one behind the curtain, so to speak. Particular hatred of mothers, I suspect.
The “old gods” reborn as it were with new names… new degeneracy in humanity.
That’s how I see it.
May St. Michael pray for us.
Somehow it feels like it was a lifetime ago AND also yesterday.
As to the topic of conversation in the comments so far… Pachamama is a much closer equivalent to Gaia in the Greek pantheon than Old Testament idols –it’s a personification of land and earth as sustaining place in time and space, only received animal and vegetal sacrifice, mostly around rivers and creeks, and was not represented in statuary much if at all. The Incan pantheon also like the Greek one underwent a phase of… modernism? if that’s the word? By liberal, masonic governments and culture in the 19th century (notoriously, there’s more depiction from that era than anything else).
Now, the horror of the whole event eclipses everything else, but I don’t think people unfamiliar with the region catch the whole extent of the incongruity of an Amazon thingy featuring Pachamama, an Andean thingy, as a central feature. It’s as if a Mediterranean culture event featured prominently Alpine elements. Sure, the Alps are somewhat close to the Mediterranean sea, but the cultural connection is tenuous if it exists at all. The statues themselves look a lot like tourist trap souvenirs -as a sort of indigenous looking version of the fad of buying statues of naked black women as decor, which was popular in many places 20-30 years ago (and the same kind of extremely poor taste, btw.). So I’ve always had my strong suspicion that those weren’t really “religious” sculpture at all with any significance to any Amazon people, but the con artistring between some gift shop carver and an inescrupulous clergyman.
The bowl thing, on the other hand… well…
First to get it out of the way: I agree the statues should never have been in St. Peter’s and it was a sacrilege to put them on the altar, only commenting as to the specifics of the history of the Pachamama cult and Catholicism is a bit more complex than some commenters mention.
[It’s demonic.]
For what it’s worth: the existence of the Pachamama cult is generally considered as one of the reasons the Andes so quickly converted to Catholicism after the Colombian encounter. It was a very easy thing to map onto the Virgin Mary, and that’s one of the reasons why South American countries have more black Madonna’s than you’d expect. This is valid inculturation and was almost certainly intentionally done by the Spanish to aid in conversion.St. John Paul II even referenced the existence of the cult and its veneration as a form of care of nature as a “Work of God” (par 10: https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/es/homilies/1988/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19880511_cochabamba.html )
Yet you have the issue that in historically poor and rural areas it’s still maintained as a superstition and pagan god, but often combined with Catholic rituals. Essentially in some parts of the Andes the mapping of the fertility cult onto the Blessed Virgin as a part of normal inculturation didn’t get completed. Mix that with the fact that instead of it being a fertility cult in more urbanized Andean regions it *is* used to described a demon (though more in the sense of kids talking about big foot — I know a 15 year old who won’t stop shrieking about the Pachamama’s hiding in caves…) renders it one of the more historically problematic examples of incomplete inculturation precisely because it’s so prominent.
At the same time, the idea was absolutely used by early missionaries as a means of showing Catholicism was approachable and it’s particularly odd relationship with Catholicism to this day explains why you have things like JP2 praising the idea (in order to round it back to Christ in the next paragraph.)
Tl;dr: the history of the relationship between Catholicism and this cult is extremely complex and can’t be simplified to just pure inculturation gone wrong on our end or pure fertility cult on the other if people are trying to understand the history. It doesn’t make putting pagan idols in St. Peter’s okay, that’s obviously a sacrilege.
[It’s demonic.]
That travesty does highlight the historical complexities the Church has dealt with over the last 500 years on this specific topic, though. You have people who are baptized Catholics still superstitiously doing rituals with pagan fertility and earth goddesses. What does the priest who has 90% of his parishioners doing this do?
[Tell them it’s demonic. There. I fixed it for you.]
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It has been six years, but we* haven’t forgotten. We likely never will.
(* I rarely presume to speak for others, but I think it is safe to do so now.)
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R2D: the actual demonic statue wasn’t put on the High Altar over Peter’s grave: it was the “bowl” of whatever herbs, or plants – or whatever.
Anyway, it was still a grievous desecration. For which, as far as I know, there hasn’t been an actual excorcism. Yeah, there’s been a more obvious one recently but… yeah…