Elementary Pastoral Sense Absent From Amazonian Statue Controversy

National Catholic Register, 22 October 2019

Since symbols convey so much more than words, Vatican officials should have clarified exactly what the statue means, before allowing it to be deployed in a paraliturgical context.

The disputed Amazonian statue might be dismissed as a small distraction, but it is an important thing made more significant by a lack of elementary pastoral sense.

As Catholics ought to know better than anyone else — all the more so Vatican officials — symbols convey much more than words. That’s why the liturgy is a ritual employing symbols rather than an essay employing syllogisms.

That provides the proper lens through which to see what will become a lasting image of the Amazon synod, the wooden statue of the naked pregnant Amazonian woman, first deployed in the curious tree-planting ceremony in the Vatican gardens, latterly resident at the church of Santa Maria in Traspontina and carried in procession during the Amazonian via Crucis, and now floating out to sea in the Tiber, where it was thrown by anonymous thieves who thought it had no place in a Catholic church.

The theft and throwing of the image into the river was wrong. But I don’t share the view of papal biographer Austen Ivereigh that it was the akin to ISIS terrorists destroying statues of the Blessed Mother, precisely because even at this late date, no one can say what exactly the statue is supposed to be or what religion, if any, it belongs to.

In light of the recent theft and aquatic disposal, Ivereigh has downgraded the Marian-theme to a “mother-nature effigy.” The same “effigy” theme was picked up by editorial director for all Vatican news, Andrea Tornielli, who spoke of it as an “effigy of motherhood and the sacredness of life” that is “a traditional symbol for the native people which represents their tie to what St. Francis called ‘mother earth.’”

Hence the confusion endures. St. Francis praised God “through our Sister Mother Earth.” The tie was to God, not to the earth. St. Francis himself would have insisted that an image used in prayer be a sacred one, the Blessed Mother, not motherhood in general nor mother earth.

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