Fr. James Martin: Catholics Who Threw Pachamamas in Tiber Have ‘Hatred of the Foreigner’

Who actually hates the foreigner? The men who destroyed the idols and want the natives to be saved, or Martin and his ilk who want the idols saved and the natives left to go to hell in their ignorance?

From LifeSiteNews

By Dorothy Cummings McLean

VATICAN CITY, October 22, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Pro-LGBT Jesuit priest James Martin accused those who threw the Amazon Synod’s controversial statues of an unclothed pregnant female, also being referred to as the pagan idol “Pachamama”, into Rome’s Tiber river of “hatred.”

The U.S. celebrity priest who is editor-at-large of America magazine also falsely accused the unknown Catholic men who took the fertility symbols from Santa Maria in Traspontina yesterday morning of “breaking into” the church.

“The hatred unleashed by the Synod, which led to breaking into a church, is hatred of the ‘foreigner,’ hatred of a Christianity that seems different from your own, when in fact Christianity has always inculturated itself,” he said on Twitter. 
“The ‘Roman Church,’ after all, began in the Middle East.”

Martin included an odd message from someone calling himself “etspesnostra” who identified with the men who threw the “ugly piece of firewood” in the Tiber and said “we are coming for you.” 

However, the men who removed the four simulacra of a naked pregnant woman did not break into the Carmelite church but walked into the open building as at least one worshipper prayed there. They later provided a statement saying that they acted because Jesus Christ, His mother and His other followers “are being attacked by members of our own Church.” 

“We do not accept this! We do not [sic] longer stay silent! We start to act NOW!” they continued.

“Because we love humanity, we cannot accept that people of a certain region should not get baptised and therefore are being denied entrance into heaven. It is our duty to follow the words of God like our holy Mother did. There is no second way of salvation. Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat !

An Amazonian took to Twitter yesterday to celebrate the removal of the figures, whom he identified as the region’s version of the fertility goddess many identify with the “Earth Mother.” 

“I am from the Amazon (Belém, PA, Brazil) and I say with all authority: Amazonian Catholics are celebrating the destruction of the 'Pachamama' pagan idol,” wrote Lucas Klautau. 

“Cry, modernist. In the Amazon we have only one queen: Our Lady of Nazareth, the horror of the pagans.”

Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, the Archbishop of Durban, South Africa, did not share Fr. Martin’s vehemence. In response to a National Catholic Register piece about the statues being tossed into the Tiber, he quipped over Twitter, “I guess that could be the fate of some of the theories being floated about the Synod!”  

The ‘Pachamama’ statues were part of a display about “Amazonian spirituality” in the church. Both the figures, which the Vatican identified as fertility symbols, and a poster showcasing a 1992 photograph of a naked indigenous woman breastfeeding a wild boar have excited much controversy during the Synod. 
Meanwhile, Venezuelan Cardinal Jorge Urosa Savino, archbishop emeritus of Caracas, has said that “syncretism” evident at the “pagan” ceremony witnessed by Pope Francis in the Vatican Gardens on October 4, in which several Catholics prostrated themselves before two of the ‘Pachamama’ statues, should have been “avoided entirely.”