Vatican City, 04 November, 2019 / 10:14 am (ACI Africa).
In a video uploaded on YouTube Nov. 4, a young man from Austria claims that he was one of the two men who took five controversial statues from a church near the Vatican and threw them into the Tiber River.
“I came to a conclusion together with a friend of mine… we should go to Rome. We should get the statues out of the church. They do not belong in a Catholic church,” Alexander Tschugguel said in the YouTube video Nov. 4.
In the five-minute video, entitled “Why we threw the Pachamama idols into the Tiber river,” Tschugguel describes how he came to see the carved images in Santa Maria in Traspontina as a violation of the First Commandment.
The statues, which were identical carved images of a naked pregnant Amazonian woman, had been displayed in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria in Traspontina, close to the Vatican, and used in several events, rituals, and expression of spirituality taking place during the Oct. 6-27 Amazonian synod.
In the video Tschugguel said that he spoke with volunteers within Santa Maria in Traspontina on several occasions. They explained to him that that statues were “signs of fertility, of Mother Earth, and integral ecology.”
