The 35th meeting Meeting of Dialogue and Prayer for Peace took place this week in Rome, dealing with fraternity and climate change, and based on the 1986 meeting where Pope John Paul II permitted ‘idolatrous worship.’
Some critics of the decision to hold a pagan smoking ceremony before the start of the Opening Mass of the Austrlian Plenary Council have compared it to the Pachamama scandal that broke out during the 2019 Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region.
The altar has traditionally been reserved for the Pope alone, and unauthorized use formerly incurred excommunication. Liturgist Dr. Kwasniewski described the decision as an attempt to ‘destroy any vestige of the sacred, the set-apart, the privileged, the untouchable, the elevated, the off-limits.’
If I had read in a dystopian novel about the Neo-Church that instead of a monstrance they would use a pagan image, I would have thought, 'This author is exaggerating! Who would ever think of or do such a thing?'
'We thought Alexander Tschugguel's Pachamama action was great,' these young people, who all are around age 24, explained, 'and it showed us that it is sometimes necessary to take action and that it can also have an effect.'
Two very strange things are happening at the Vatican right now: a sort of investigation of the Congregation for Divine Worship, and the ban on individual Masses at St. Peter’s.