“Leo Didn’t Worship Pachamama, He Just Offered to Her”

Reinaldo Nann tried to rescue Leo XIV from the 1995 Pachamama photographs. Instead he admitted the facts, compared Mother Earth to the saints, and exposed the rot Trad Inc. would rather ignore.

The defense that handed away the case

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.

The book caption already settles more than the defenders want to admit

The original problem is not built on internet rumor. LifeSite reported that the image appears in the published proceedings of the 1995 Augustinian symposium in São Paulo, later printed in the 1996 volume Ecoteología: Una Perspectiva desde San Agustín. The caption identifies the event as a celebration of the rite of Pachamama, described as an agricultural rite offered by South Andean cultures in Peru and Bolivia. A second group photograph in the same volume places Prevost among the symposium participants. Later reporting added that color footage from an OALA video appears to show the same rite continuing, including participants moving into prostration during the ceremony.

So the dodge about not seeing a statue in one frame is laughable. Since when did a Catholic need the camera angle to do the theology for him? The rite is named. The setting is identified. The participants are there. Nann himself admits the ceremony to Mother Earth and admits the kneeling. Once those admissions are made, pleading that the photo does not show enough wood carving in the foreground becomes the ecclesiastical equivalent of arguing over shadows while the house burns.

Once you say “offering” and “dialogue with the earth,” the line has already been crossed

Nann’s language is devastating precisely because it is so revealing. He says a representative of Andean culture makes an offering to the land and enters into dialogue with the land. That is a religious act directed toward a creature under a sacralized description.

Even the Conciliar Catechism teaches that the First Commandment forbids venerating other divinities, and that idolatry includes honoring or revering a creature in place of God. Catholic teaching goes further: the martyrs refused even to simulate such worship. The defenders keep trying to shrink the scandal down to a question of interior intention, as though the Church has always taught that outward participation in false rites is spiritually neutral so long as one privately means well. She has never taught that. She taught the opposite strongly enough that Christians died rather than perform the gesture.

And that is where the whole Nann defense becomes so grotesquely ironic. He thinks he is making room for nuance. He is actually abolishing the category of scandal. Under this logic, almost any syncretistic act can be laundered after the fact. Bowing, kneeling, offering, chanting, sacred objects, a named pagan rite, a circle of religious participants, all of it suddenly becomes harmless once a cleric assures you that the intention was noble and ecological.

The comparison to the saints is probably the stupidest part of all

Then comes the line that should have ended the discussion by sheer embarrassment: Pachamama can be treated the way Catholics treat the saints. Nann says Catholics can speak to her as they speak to the saints and kneel before her as before the saints, provided she is understood as a creature and not a goddess.

This is theological collapse in public.

The saints are not nature spirits. They are not metaphors for ecosystems. They are not the soul of a hill, a tree, or the earth. The saints are holy human persons in glory, alive in Christ, contemplating God, praising Him, and interceding for the faithful on earth. The Catechism says we ask their intercession for that reason. It also says that the honor given to a sacred image passes to the prototype, meaning the person represented, and that adoration belongs to God alone. Francis himself stated in a 2021 audience that the saints are not adored, but venerated, and that they lead us to Jesus Christ. None of that can be stretched into permission to kneel before “the soul of the earth.”

Notice the irony. Catholics have spent centuries explaining to Protestants why kneeling before a saint’s image is not idolatry. Why? Because the honor is relative, the saint is a glorified member of Christ’s Mystical Body, and the gesture terminates in God through His friends. Nann arrives, sweeps aside the distinctions, and says the same logic can be extended to Pachamama. In one stroke he manages to insult Catholic theology, vindicate the Protestant caricature, and baptize a pagan symbol.

“Intention matters” is true, but it does not work the way these people want

Of course intention matters. Intention always matters. But intention is not a sacramental bleach wipe. It does not neutralize the objective meaning of a religious act performed in a religious setting. It does not make it safe for a Catholic cleric to join an interreligious offering to Mother Earth. It does not convert scandal into catechesis. It does not erase the fact that people watching the act are being taught, by the act itself, that this sort of thing is spiritually permissible.

The Church has always known that external gestures teach. That is why liturgy matters. That is why the martyrs refused false rites. That is why Catholics do not casually join the sacred actions of pagan cults and then hide behind the privacy of their own intentions. Nann’s formula would make public religion impossible to judge at all. Once interior sincerity becomes the only real standard, every external abomination gets an alibi.

And notice how selective this becomes. Traditional Catholics are lectured day and night that gestures matter when it comes to liturgy, obedience, ecclesial communion, optics, posture, and tone. But once Leo is found kneeling in a Pachamama rite, suddenly gestures mean nothing. Then we are told to look away from the body and into the soul. That trick would have been laughed out of the room if Francis’s enemies had tried it in reverse.

Dragging St. Francis into this is another act of vandalism

Nann also tries to shelter the whole affair beneath Franciscan spirituality. Since Saint Francis spoke of Brother Sun and Sister Moon, he suggests, maybe speaking to the earth as a creature with a soul falls inside the same family of thought.

That move borders on theological illiteracy. Saint Francis praised God through creatures. He did not teach Catholics to enter rites of offering and dialogue directed toward Mother Earth. The direction of worship remains vertical. God is Creator. The creature gives occasion for praise. The creature is not treated as a personal recipient of ritual homage.

That distinction is elementary. Lose it and Christianity begins to dissolve into religious poetry without dogmatic fences. Which, of course, is exactly the postconciliar temptation: keep the Christian vocabulary, keep the soft affective tone, keep the Franciscan charm, then quietly rewire the act underneath.

The Francis precedent makes the whole thing even more damning

The deeper irony is historical. In 2019, the Vatican gardens ceremony became a global scandal because Catholics instinctively understood what they were seeing. Francis later referred to the retrieved figures as “statues of the pachamama” and said they had been displayed without idolatrous intentions. That was already a disastrous line. Nann’s defense of Leo now repeats the same pattern almost word for word: the object may be Pachamama, the rite may be Pachamama, the gestures may be reverential, but calm down, because interior idolatry has not been proven.

So the old Trad Inc. fantasy that Leo represented a clean break from Francis takes another hit. The problem was never merely one old Argentine pope with a talent for scandalous symbolism. The problem was the religious culture that made such symbolism normal, defensible, and eventually banal. If the 1995 photographs and footage are genuine, then the Vatican Gardens were not an isolated outburst. They were an eruption of something that had been incubating for decades.

And what about Trad Inc.?

(I called it, didn’t I? Sad but true!)

Compare the reaction to the current scandalous story with the fury of 2019. Compare the repetition, the outrage, the moral clarity, the sense that the line had been crossed and could not be uncrossed. Compare that with the hedging, the minimization, the cautious throat-clearing, the studied reluctance to make this the defining scandal it obviously is. The asymmetry tells its own story. When Francis did it, Pachamama became the symbol of the whole conciliar implosion. When the evidence points to Leo, too many conservative and traditional gatekeepers suddenly discover anthropology degrees, contextual nuance, and a profound concern about “hatred.”

That silence is not accidental. It is the sound of a class protecting its investment. Too many people sold their audiences a restoration narrative. Too many promised a calmer, cleaner, less embarrassing pontificate. Too many told the faithful to be patient, prudent, open, respectful, restrained. Then the old religion reappeared in a 1995 photograph, kneeling in plain sight.

The hard truth they are trying not to say

Nann wanted to defend Leo from the charge of idolatry. What he actually defended was participation in a syncretistic rite, ritual reverence toward Mother Earth, language about the soul of the earth, comparison of Pachamama to the saints, and the principle that public religious gestures can be excused after the fact by private intention. That is not Catholicism. That is the postconciliar project speaking with unusual honesty.

And that is why this episode matters. Not because one defender wrote something stupid on a website. Catholics have grown used to stupid defenses. It matters because the stupid defense revealed the real operating theology. The rite may stay. The symbols may stay. The offering may stay. The kneeling may stay. The only thing that must disappear is the Catholic instinct to recoil.

Once that instinct is gone, everything else follows. The pagan symbol becomes a cultural bridge. The false rite becomes dialogue. The scandal becomes hatred. The priest becomes a missionary of inculturation. The Catholic who objects becomes the fanatic.

That inversion has done immense damage to the Church. Nann did not create it. He merely said it out loud.

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