Pachamama. Mamapacha. One knows when things get to a point of desperation when one wishes that he were one of the populi Romani who ditched the fertility idols into the Tiber. Their mistake is that they did not use weights to make sure they sunk into the muck of the Tiber. Even the liberal press in the United States is embarrassed by the spectacle of the Pope and Cardinals and bishops staring at the fertility images in the Vatican Gardens as if this were something serious being contemplated. This is one time when I am grateful to the New York Times for not highlighting the idiocy into which those who are running the Catholic Church have fallen.
Apparently the Reverend Cardinals and Bishops sitting in the Vatican Gardens staring at the Pachamamas with the Bishop of Rome in a spirit of deep openness to the Indigenous Other have not read, at least recently, the Old Testament, which at least partly is a history of the Israelites and their serial denial of their God in Covenant by adopting the worship of wooden and stone idols of the peoples among which they lived. The triumph of Elijah over the priests of the idols and false god Baal did not come to their collective minds as they sat there and contemplated the fertility goddess Pachamama.
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