Pope Francis, Idolatry, Syncretism, and Pachamama (2)

Fr Hunwicke concludes his thoughts on Francis and the creeping syncretism he seems to enable with the worship of Pachamama in the Vatican. (Part One)

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

The essential error in Syncretism is that it is a denial of the central principle of all the millennia of our Faith History: the truth that YHWH is our God and that he admits no other. How often do we clergy, as we say our Divine Office, use phrases like "DOMINUS deus noster"; our God is DOMINUS=YHWH. 

From his call to Our Patriarch Abraham, through his Revelation to Our Teacher Moses, he alone is our God. To have anything to do with other legomenoi theoi or legomenoi kyrioi (I Cor 8:5: so-called gods or so-called lords) is to go a-whoring after idols. It merits the sternest punishment of our Covenant God.

But in the Greek and Roman World, there were so many gods and 'lords' on offer. And 'ladies'! And there was a particular fashion for the deities of the 'Mystery Cults' ... which tended to move over from the East ... Isis ... Mithras ... Osiris ... Sabazios ... so many of them (and, to the syncretist, all of them available because they are all essentially the same). So many 'names', onomata. To many in a mobile and unstable society, these Oriental deities seemed more interesting that the ancestral civic deities worshipped in the older temples up the hill. They had traction. 

And they provided a real smorgasbord of Pick-n-mix!

I suspect that this is why, even in Jerusalem, the Apostle (Acts 4:12) felt he should emphasise that oude onoma estin heteron by which one can be saved. Every time we say the Gloria at Holy Mass, we make the same point: tu solus Dominus, tu solus altissimus ...  (thoughtful worshippers must often have stifled a puzzlement here: surely, the Father and the Spirit also merit the titles 'Lord'; 'Most High'? But, in the theic economy of the ancient world, the text does not mean "only the Son, but not the Father, is Lord"; it means "only Jesus Christ, and not the kyria Isis or the kyrios Mithras, is Lord").

I know, because of his actions, that Pio Nono, who had the Isiac imagery scraped off the magnificent pillars in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, Deipara Virgo trans Tiberim, was not a syncretist idolator. Deep in my heart, I work hard to feel confident that our Holy Father PF is also not a syncretist idolator.

But the Pachamama episodes ... what he allowed in his garden and what he did in S Peter's ... his Abu Dhabi document ... continue to put my confidence severely to the test.

Is this really the sort of peirasmos which a Roman Pontiff ought to put before souls for whom Christ died? 

The sort of skandalon he ought to place before their feet?