Reinaldo Nann worked in Peru as a Fidei Donum missionary from 1991 in Lima, Trujillo, and Iquitos. In 2017, he was appointed bishop of the Prelature of Caraveli. He resigned in 2024 to marry a year later.
Reinaldo Nann’s March 22 defense of Leo was supposed to calm the scandal. It did the opposite. On Religion Digital, he flatly acknowledged that the young Robert Prevost participated in the 1995 ecology and theology symposium, that the event included a ceremony to Mother Earth, and that Prevost knelt in that setting. He then described the scene as an interreligious act involving an offering to the earth and a dialogue with the earth. Even en.news, in summarizing his argument, captured the absurdity of the whole thing with a headline that boiled the defense down to this: Leo did not worship Pachamama, he merely offered to her. Religion Digital’s own author page says Nann was appointed bishop in 2017, resigned in 2024, and married in 2025.
Read that again slowly. The “defense” does not deny the rite. It does not deny the kneeling. It does not deny the Mother Earth framework. It does not deny the offering. It does not deny the dialogue. It merely tries to place a soft pillow under the scandal and ask Catholics to call it inculturation.
That is how rotten the postconciliar reflex has become. A priest is found kneeling inside a ceremony explicitly tied to Pachamama, and the counterargument turns out to be that perhaps this was not idolatry in the strictest imaginable sense because the earth was being addressed as a creature with a soul rather than as a goddess. Far from a rescue, that is a confession written in therapeutic language.
Continue reading at Hiraeth in Exile