“Pachamama, a nude, red-wombed pregnant Amazonian woman, faces the Virgin Mary in the image FI used atop its email greeting.”
(Martin M. Barillas – LifeSiteNews) A Christmas greeting from Franciscans International (FI), a human rights group formed by various Franciscan orders, depicted the Andean earth-goddess “Pachamama” alongside the Blessed Virgin Mary.
In an email to a concerned Catholic obtained by LifeSiteNews, FI executive director Fr. Markus Heinze OFM defended doing so.
“Regarding your accusation of the message of the Christmas Card, I don’t want to go into details, I just don’t understand why it you see it as a sacrilege to bring Mary together with the pagan symbol for mother earth while we are all used to put a donkey next to the newborn Jesus,” he wrote. “The donkey is the symbol for the pagans. And we do this because we believe that God came into our world in Jesus to meet all people including the pagans.”
“So the sacrilege is not to meet pagans, the sacrilege is when we don’t meet them with respect as Christianity did in the past when they killed hundreds of thousands of indigenes and destroyed their land and culture,” Heinze concluded.
Research
HT Pulpit & Pen