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New Vatican coin of mother earth | Pachamama in St. Peter's Basilica, Oct. 2019

ROME, Italy, October 15, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — The Vatican issued a coin depicting a mother carrying the earth in her womb. The issue of the coin comes almost one year to the day when the idol Pachamama was worshipped in the Vatican gardens in the presence of Pope Francis as part of the opening ceremony of the Amazon synod.

“The Vatican City State Mint will issue a 10 euro silver coin made by Maestro Oldani, depicting a mother carrying the earth in her womb, to whom we owe care and love as if it were a daughter, with long ears of wheat in her hair, in a reference between past and future that becomes timeless, and therefore eternal,” states the official description of the coin.

“The celebration of life on earth is a commitment to take care of the planet, a project to which the Church intends to offer its support, a grandiose and complex work that aims: to promote international action to guarantee everyone a future, the food that is needed, both in quantity and quality, so that economic advancement may be accompanied with social development, without which there is no real progress.”

Various media outlets, including the news website owned by the German bishops, made a connection between the coin and the Pachamama statues used in the context of the Amazon synod last year, even though the appearance of “Mother Earth” on the coin differs from the statues used in 2019.

“The coin recalls the Pachamama statues set up at the Amazon synod in the previous year, which according to the prefect of the Vatican communication dicastery, Paolo Ruffini, ‘stand for life, fertility and mother earth’ and should bring the culture of the Amazon region also objectively to the synod,” wrote katholisch.de.

In the fall of 2019, Alexander Tschugguel, a young Austrian Catholic, had thrown a number of the controversial Pachamama statues into the Tiber in Rome after they had been prominently featured in a church in Rome for days.

Similar statues had also been used in a religious ceremony in the Vatican gardens on October 4, 2019. Even Pope Francis blessed one of the statues. At the ceremony, people were bowing down to the ground worshiping the statue. Additionally, the Pope prayed in front of a Pachamama statue at St. Peter’s Cathedral on October 7 and then accompanied it in procession into the synod hall.

The Pope confirmed later that the statue was called “Pachamama” and apologized for the Pachamama statues being thrown into the Tiber river.

Tschugguel himself tweeted earlier today, “We cannot buy those coins and throw them all in the Tiber, we have to fight this on a spiritual level! And we fight it by publicly opposing this #idolatrousness! #Staycatholic #staytrue #fightevil!”

Tschugguel related recent societal ills to the Pachamama ceremony.

“We are currently going through a terrible year. 2020 is the year of #Corona, #BLM + #ANTIFA riots and violence, #Euthanasia introduced in many countries, #abortion pills made legal or more easy accessible in many countries,” he explained.

“Migration problematics everywhere. This all started or got worse with last years [sic] #Pachamama ‘worship’ in the #Vatican gardens. If you venerate pagan idols no wonder that terrible things are going to happen. We all knew it and still know it! And now the #UFN releases 2 new coins to remember this terrible #heresy? Catholics resist!”

In response to the ceremonies in the Vatican Gardens, Bishop Athanasius Schneider at the time called on all Catholics — bishops, priests and laity — to offer acts of reparation, protest and correction for the use of the Pachamama statues, which he called a “new golden calf.”

In an open letter forcefully condemning the use of the Pachamama statue at the Amazon Synod in the Vatican, Bishop Schneider wrote, “In front of the eyes of the entire world and in the presence of the Pope, there were conducted clear acts of religious adoration of symbols and statues of the pagan, indigenous, South-American religions, the so-called ‘Pachamama.’”

“Such conduct of the highest Church authority which does not only not forbid the symbols of pagan religions and their worship, but, rather, even justifies them, causes a great damage for the salvation of souls, because thereby the First Commandment is being undermined and in practical terms is being rescinded,” Schneider said.

Pope Francis seemed to double down on the claim voiced by a number of Catholics that there was nothing wrong with the statues in section 78 of his post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Querida Amazonia, published earlier this year.

In it, Pope Francis stated that people should “not be quick to describe as superstition or paganism certain religious practices that arise spontaneously from the life of peoples.” In section 79, the Pope continued that it is “possible to take up an indigenous symbol in some way, without necessarily considering it as idolatry,” adding that a “myth charged with spiritual meaning can be used to advantage and not always considered a pagan error.”