Man claims responsibility for throwing Pachamama Tiber

A young Austrian claims he was one of the two men who took five Pachamama statues from a church near the Vatican and threw them into the Tiber River.

Alexander Tschugguel says he thought the statues did not “belong in a Catholic Church.

“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,” Tschugguel says in a YouTube video he uploaded this week.

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.”

He says he thought displaying the statutes went against the first commandment: “I am the LORD your God. You shall have no other gods before me.”

Tschugguel’s opinion of the statues was echoed by many others at the synod.

Right from the beginning of the synod they aroused controversy among traditionalist and conservative Catholics, who saw their presence in the church as symbols of pagan idolatry.

However, Tschugguel’s compatriot, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, described the theft of the statues as “scandalous” and “outrageous.”

Schönborn says the statues of a pregnant woman in the Synod assembly hall were the expression of indigenous people’s sensitivity for the holiness of life and was in keeping with Church teachings.

“Whoever is ‘prolife’ should recognise a clear sign in favour of life,” he said.

Even if one were offended by a statue of a naked pregnant woman, it should not have been thrown in the Tiber, he said.

About Alexander Tschugguel

Tschugguel converted from Lutheranism about 10 years ago. He recently established the St. Boniface Institute, an organisation for conservative Catholics.

He was described to journalists as “an Austrian anti-abortion activist and a pretty fanatical one at that,”.

He is allegedly closely aligned with an official of the Freedom Party, a right-wing populist, national-conservative political party, which is controversial for denying the Holocaust.

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