Dorothy Cummings McLean
REGENSBURG, Germany, November 14, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – German princess Gloria Thurn-und-Taxis withdrew her signature from a petition that protested the use of the Pachamama statues in Vatican celebrations during the Amazon Synod last month.
Princess Gloria, 59, released a statement saying that her bishop had convinced her to remove her signature.
“In light of the reaction of the bishop of Regensburg, my local bishop, to the ‘petition against recent sacrileges,’ I see myself compelled, convinced of the viewpoint of the Regensburg bishop, Prof. Dr. Rudolf Voderholzer, to withdraw my signature under this petition,” she wrote in a statement published by the German Kath.net.
Princess Gloria, a good friend of Pope Emeritus Benedict, is well-known for her devotion to traditional Catholicism and to the poor.
On November 12, a hundred priests and laypeople of letters published a statement accusing Pope Francis of “sacrilegious acts” by participating in, and supporting, ceremonies involving carvings of pregnant women identified by the pontiff as “pachamamas” during October’s Synod of Bishops for the Amazonian region. “Pachamama,” or Earth Mother, is still worshipped in some parts of South America, including the pontiff’s native Argentina. The signatories asked Pope Francis to “repent publicly and unambiguously of these objectively grave sins and of all the public offences that he has committed against God and the true religion, and to make reparation for these offences.”
The group also asked the bishops of the Catholic Church “to offer fraternal correction to Pope Francis for these scandals, and to warn their flocks that according to the divinely revealed teaching of the Catholic faith, they will risk eternal damnation if they follow his example of offending against the First Commandment.”
The letter caught the attention of the secular press. The UK’s Telegraph called the document “one of the strongest attacks yet” on Pope Francis while acknowledging that the statuettes that the pontiff had endorsed were of “the goddess Pachamama.” The Daily Express wrote that the protest statement was an indication of “division” in the Catholic Church.
The odd and offensive imagery displayed in Rome during the Synod, most notably the Pachamama figures and a poster featuring a naked indigenous woman breastfeeding a wild piglet, stole the wider Catholic community’s attention from the concerns that spokespeople for indigenous people of the Amazon brought to Rome. In response to the clearly pagan origin of the fertility symbols, a young Austrian Catholic named Alexander Tschugguel removed the objects from Santa Maria in Traspontina and threw them in the Tiber river.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/german-princess-withdraws-signature-from-statement-urging-pope-to-repent-for-pachamama-idolatry
