A few weeks ago, some Catholic activists marched on the Vatican and flung statues of "Pachamama," a pagan goddess of the Andes, into the Tiber.

Good riddance.  The radical leftists in charge at the Vatican were trying to sell some extra gods to the Catholic faithful under the banner of globalism, multiculturalism, New Age–ism, and inclusion.  And while there is nothing wrong with appreciating indigenous peoples in a non-religious context, embracing them in a religious context is something else.  Here's Pachamama from the Wikipedia page.

Pachamama is a goddess revered by the indigenous people of the Andes. She is also known as the earth/time mother.^[1] In Inca mythology, Pachamama is a fertility goddess who presides over planting and harvesting, embodies the mountains, and causes earthquakes. She is also an ever-present and independent deity who has her own self-sufficient and creative power to sustain life on this earth.^[1] Her shrines are hallowed rocks, or the boles of legendary trees, and her artists envision her as an adult female bearing harvests of potatoes and coca leaves.^[2] The four cosmological Quechua principles – Water, Earth, Sun, and Moon^[2] – claim Pachamama as their prime origin. Priests sacrifice llamas, cuy (guinea pigs), and elaborate, miniature, burned garments to her.^[3] Pachamama is the mother of Inti the sun god and Mama Killa the moon goddess. Pachamama is said to also be the wife of Inti, her son.

In pre-Hispanic culture, Pachamama was often a cruel goddess eager to collect her sacrifices. After the conquest by Spain, conversion to Roman Catholicism took place and the figure of the Virgin Mary was equated with that of the Pachamama for many of the indigenous people.^[4]

As Andean cultures form modern nations, Pachamama remains benevolent, giving,^[5] and a local name for Mother Nature. Thus, many in South America believe that problems arise when people take too much from nature because they are taking too much from Pachamama.^[6]

So now, along with God, Catholics get a side order of this?

Doesn't work that way.  Plenty of stuff is expropriated from old pagan cultures into Christianity (Christmas trees, anyone?), but to hold a different faith's sacramental up to the Christian faithful as something to bow down to, untransformed, and yeah, unexpropriated, as some reports had it, is, to put it politely, unclear on the concept.

No wonder some of them went off the deep end and tossed the relic into the Tiber.

But this doesn't seem to be the end of it.

Moving away from the Catholic Church itself, seems the land of Pachamama itself, Bolivia, is getting upended over the leftist desire to shove Pachamama in people's faces, too.

I was reading Bill Ayers's blog just now (yes, you have to see what the other side "thinks"), and Ayers was mulling and mourning the booting of socialist dictator Evo Morales, who resigned this week for cheating on elections.  (He's on the side of the tyrant, of course.)

Seems the woman who took the helm from Morales after he flew off to a comfortable asylum in Mexico, a Bolivian legislator named Jeanine Añez Chávez, was making complaints about "devil worship" being institutionalized in the country.  And she wasn't the only one.

According to Ayers:

Next to her stood Luis Fernando Camacho, a member of the Christian far-right. After Evo's resignation, Camacho stormed the presidential palace, a flag in one hand and a bible in the other. "The bible is returning to the government palace," a pastor said on a video while standing next to Camacho. "Pachamama will never return. Today Christ is returning to the Government Palace. Bolivia is for Christ."

So to translate from the unpunished terrorist's thoughts: Pachamama is not popular among the people who don't like socialism in Bolivia, either.  Some of them apparently saw the need to boot Morales via protests, which the cops and army joined, as critical to their nation.  They didn't get Morales out of there, though; they also seem to have targeted Pachamama, too.  It seems to have been a twofold mission.

It goes to show how amazingly intertwined Pachamama and socialism really are.  For Christians, it seems like an awfully strong coincidence that Pachamama first got tossed into the river shortly before the socialist government of Bolivia that championed Pachamama got booted, too.  While Bolivia's Morales's ouster got all the headlines, seems there are at least some signs that the ouster of him was about getting Pachamama out with him. 

It's almost as if Morales's ouster was also a chronicle of a death of an idol foretold.

Image credit: Carlos A. Barrio via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.