Chris Jackson
Aug 26, 2026
A Vatican doctrinal official offered coca leaves to Mother Earth in Cusco. Francis defended her idols. Robert Prevost once knelt inside her rite. Vatican media buried the evidence.
Watch the footage before reading another word.
A woman stands over an arrangement on the floor in Cusco. Coca leaves have been passed around. The participants close their eyes and breathe as instructed. August, she tells them, is the special month of Mother Earth, who loves them, feeds them, and must be thanked. Each person is to breathe three times over the leaves and place them in the offering. Later, “Grandmother Fire” will carry their messages and return wisdom.
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Then the clergy take their turns.
Bishop Lizardo Estrada Herrera, auxiliary bishop of Cusco and secretary general of CELAM, walks forward with the leaves cupped in his hands and deposits them in the vessel. Immediately behind him comes Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, an official of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and a pontifical commissioner entrusted with some of Rome’s most sensitive investigations in Latin America. He makes the same offering. Bishop Miguel Ángel Cadenas of Iquitos was also present at the gathering.
The footage records neither Catholic prayer nor blessing nor invocation of the Trinity. Christ is absent from its words and gestures. The gathering’s spiritual opening belongs to Mother Earth and Grandmother Fire. InfoVaticana published the video. It is ugly, plain, and hard to explain away.
This happened on August 13 and 14 at the Southern Macro-Regional Meeting in Cusco, called “Weaving Voices for Dignity: For Human Rights and the Common Good.” The meeting formed part of the preparations for Leo XIV’s November visit to Peru.
So the path was opened for Leo with an offering to Pachamama.
The Rite Vatican News Made Disappear
Vatican News published a long, polished account of the meeting on August 14. Readers were given the approved vocabulary: dignity, justice, peace, listening, reconciliation, bridges, shared agendas, the common good. Bishop Estrada was quoted at length. The report described the event as part of the preparation for Leo’s trip.
The coca leaves vanished.
So did the payment to the earth, the three ritual breaths, the food offerings, Mother Earth, Grandmother Fire, and Bertomeu himself. The doctrinal official who had walked forward in the video somehow ceased to exist in the Vatican’s written account.
That omission matters more than another clumsy defense would have. A defense at least admits that Catholics see a problem. The Vatican newsroom treated the rite as editorial debris, something to crop out while retaining the pleasant language wrapped around it. Either its editors could no longer recognize pagan worship, or they recognized it perfectly and understood that ordinary Catholics would recoil. Both possibilities are damning.
The rest of the gathering deserved the same sunlight. The organizers included Peru’s Episcopal Commission for Social Action and the National Coordinator for Human Rights, or CNDDHH, an organization whose public advocacy includes abortion and LGBT ideology.
A photograph showed participants holding a transgender flag.
Workshop materials discussed “comprehensive health” for transgender and nonbinary people.
The final declaration demanded gender-equality policies and “comprehensive sex education” in schools, pledged to safeguard Pachamama, and asked Leo to carry these demands to Peru’s government and other public authorities. The document was formally transmitted to him, according to the declaration read at the meeting. Michael Hichborn assembled the receipts, including the organizers’ own posts and video.
The pagan rite gave the room its sacred atmosphere. A political program followed under episcopal sponsorship, sliding sexual ideology and classroom indoctrination toward Leo beneath the seal of “human dignity.”
That combination is the story.
The Photograph Rome Will Not Discuss
The black-and-white photograph of Robert Prevost kneeling at a Pachamama rite comes from the official proceedings of an Augustinian theological symposium held in São Paulo from January 23–28, 1995. The volume was published the following year under the title Ecotheology: A Perspective from Saint Augustine.
Its caption supplies the identification the apologists wish it lacked:
“Celebration of the Rite of Pachamama (Mother Earth), which is an agricultural rite offered by the cultures of the South-Andean region in Peru and Bolivia.”
LifeSiteNews reported that three Augustinian priests independently identified the kneeling man as Prevost, though none of the three had attended the rite. Other photographs in the same proceedings place Prevost at the symposium, and comparisons with contemporary Augustinian publications support the identification. The Vatican Press Office was asked for comment. It gave none.
Prevost was 39. He had already earned a doctorate in canon law. The Vatican’s own biography says that during this period he served in Peru as a formator of Augustinians, a seminary professor of canon law, patristics, and moral theology, a judicial vicar, and a parish administrator. This was no bewildered teenager dragged into a folk dance. He was responsible for teaching future priests.
Yet the Catholic press corps appears incurious. Months have passed since the photograph surfaced in March. The obvious question remains unasked in any public exchange with Leo: What were you doing there, Father Prevost?
Public scandal calls for public repair. Silence leaves the external act standing before the world.
Francis Supplied the Alibi
The Cusco organizers did not invent this ecclesiastical immunity. Francis demonstrated it in Rome.
On October 4, 2019, wooden figures of naked pregnant women occupied the center of an indigenous ceremony in the Vatican Gardens as the Amazon Synod approached. Participants knelt and prostrated themselves around the display. Francis remained seated, yet his role was decisive: one of the figures was presented to him and he made a blessing as it was held before him. The images later appeared in processions and inside Santa Maria in Traspontina, a church near St. Peter’s.
Two men finally removed the figures and threw them into the Tiber. Francis responded personally after Italian police recovered them. His officially transcribed words deserve to be remembered exactly. He called them “statues of the pachamama,” declared that they had been displayed “without idolatrous intentions,” asked pardon from those offended by their removal, and greeted their recovery as good news.
Notice the inversion. The papal apology went toward the defenders of the figures. Catholics scandalized by their entrance into a consecrated church received lectures about intolerance. God, whose first commandment had been treated like an embarrassing footnote, received no public act of reparation from Francis.
“Without idolatrous intentions” became the master key. Once intention is made sovereign, almost any external act can be laundered. Bow, breathe over the leaves, invoke Mother Earth, ask Grandmother Fire for wisdom, and then explain that your heart meant dialogue.
Even the current Vatican catechism blocks that escape route. It teaches that the morality of an act depends upon its object, intention, and circumstances; a benevolent intention cannot make an intrinsically disordered act good. Its treatment of the First Commandment says plainly that man may neither believe in nor venerate other divinities. Saint Paul was blunter: “The things which the heathens sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God” (1 Corinthians 10:20).
The Roman martyrs understood this. A pinch of incense looked trivial to the magistrate. To the Christian it carried an objective meaning, regardless of whatever private reservation he tried to preserve in his mind. Rome’s new theologians have rediscovered Caesar’s argument: perform the gesture, keep your personal interpretation, and stop making trouble.
How Pagan Worship Became “Culture”
Here lies the deeper sickness.
The Bergoglian system reaches first for anthropology. A false god is softened into a cultural symbol; the offering gets filed under ancestral memory. By the time someone says “cosmovision,” the religious character of the invocation has already been rubbed away. Catholic judgment arrives late, if it arrives at all, because judgment itself is suspected of colonial violence.
That framework reverses the missionary command. The old Church entered every nation believing that its people possessed real natural goods, real customs worthy of preservation, and real errors that Christ came to conquer. Inculturation meant the conversion and purification of a culture. It never meant asking pagan powers to escort a Catholic meeting into its agenda.
Modern synodality changes the direction of authority. Bishops gather “voices,” allow themselves to be “challenged by reality,” and turn demands into a shared agenda. Christianity enters the room as one faith community among many. It loses the right to name idols. Pachamama, meanwhile, can preside over the opening because she is presented as belonging to everyone’s ancestral earth.
The First Commandment becomes awkward under these conditions. It divides. It declares that one God is true, that false worship is evil, and that every culture stands beneath the judgment of Jesus Christ. No listening session can amend it. No oppressed identity receives an exemption.
That exclusivity embarrasses men trained to regard inclusion as the highest pastoral good. They fear being called colonialists, racists, or enemies of Indigenous peoples. Fear of offending God has faded far down the list.
“Human Dignity” Without the Rights of God
The language of human dignity performs another trick. Catholic teaching grounds dignity in man’s creation by God, redemption by Christ, and supernatural end. At Cusco the phrase operated as a large, empty vessel. Every participating movement poured its program into it.
Thus an organization that promotes abortion can stand beside bishops and speak of life. Transgender activists can demand access and comprehensive sex education while the Church lends institutional legitimacy. Marxist political currents arrive as defenders of the excluded. Their contradictions disappear because “the marginalized” have acquired a kind of collective infallibility.
The rights of God disappear first.
This explains why Vatican News could describe the meeting in glowing terms while removing the rite that opened it. In the newsroom’s moral universe, exclusion produces scandal. An offering to Mother Earth registers as local color. The editor can write six paragraphs about listening and never feel the hole where the First Commandment should have been.
Francis governed through that moral hierarchy. His fierce condemnations usually fell upon rigidity, proselytism, backwardness, and ecological indifference. When a pagan figure entered a church, he defended intentions. When Catholics removed it, he apologized to those offended.
Leo inherited the machinery and the people formed by it. His latest message for the World Day of Prayer for Creation calls for “authentic ecological conversion” and speaks of the “ecosystems” of creation, human relationships, and the human heart. None of those phrases commands idolatry. The institutional ecosystem surrounding them still produces Pachamama rites, then edits them out of the news.
There is a revealing complication. In August 2025, a telegram issued in Leo’s name told Amazonian bishops that creation must never reduce man to a “slave or worshiper of nature,” since created things exist to help us praise God and save our souls. Good. Use that standard in Cusco—first on Estrada and Bertomeu, and finally on the photograph Leo still refuses to explain.
A sound sentence in a telegram cannot substitute for government. Doctrine printed on Vatican stationery means little when officials violate it on camera and keep their posts, the official newsroom conceals the act, and the man whose name appears beneath the doctrine declines to address his own documented participation in the same rite.
The Question Arrives by Itself
Catholics are often told to treat each episode as a discrete abuse: a badly planned ceremony, an overenthusiastic official, a communications mistake, an unfortunate photograph from long ago. At some point the pile becomes a structure.
Francis defended the Pachamama figures by name. His successor appears in the published record of a Pachamama rite decades earlier. Under that successor, a DDF official and a CELAM leader repeat the offering at a Church-sponsored gathering tied to his trip. Vatican media remove the incriminating facts and sell the event as Catholic social action.
For Catholics already driven toward a sedevacantist or sedeprivationist conclusion, this pattern goes straight to the nature of the Church. The problem reaches beyond personal sin. A claimant to the Roman See, his doctrinal apparatus, his episcopal network, and his communications organ all move in the same direction: pagan worship receives protection, while resistance to the conciliar settlement receives investigation, restriction, or the charge of schism.
The usual “recognize and resist” formulas strain here. Papal indefectibility cannot mean that Catholics must watch Rome host, defend, repeat, and conceal rites to a false deity while insisting the institution remains a perfectly trustworthy rule of faith. The faithful are being asked to supply Catholic meaning to words whose administrators repeatedly enact the opposite.
Leo can begin repairing this scandal today. Remove Bertomeu from office pending an investigation. Require public explanations from Estrada and Cadenas. Reject the Cusco declaration’s attack on Catholic moral teaching. Order a public act of reparation. Then answer the question attached to that old photograph: Was Father Robert Prevost’s participation in the 1995 Pachamama rite a sin against the First Commandment?
If the answer is yes, let him say it and repent before the whole Church. If he refuses, Catholics must draw the conclusion his silence warrants. The institution now seems more frightened of Catholic scrutiny than of the public insult offered to Almighty God, and every new bowl of coca leaves makes that judgment harder to escape.
Source:
The Pachamama Church Prepares for Leo XIV