1995 photo shows Pope Leo XIV participating in Pachamama ritual

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UNEARTHED: 1995 photo shows Pope Leo XIV participating in Pachamama ritual
Exclusive to LifeSiteNews, this explosive revelation will feature prominently in Fr. Charles Murr's forthcoming book on the new pontiff.



Fr. Robert Prevost (now Pope Leo XIV) present at a Pachamama ritual in 1995
LifeSiteNews

Mar 18, 2026
(LifeSiteNews) — In an explosive revelation that will feature prominently in his forthcoming book on the new Pontiff, Faith & Reason co-host Father Charles Murr has confirmed that Pope Leo XIV – then Father Robert Francis Prevost, OSA, actively participated in a pagan Pachamama “Mother Earth” agricultural ritual while attending an official Augustinian theological symposium.

The story was first brought to light by Fr. Murr, who has spent months meticulously compiling documentation for his upcoming book on Leo XIV. Three Augustinian priests have now independently confirmed to Fr. Murr that Robert Prevost is clearly visible among the kneeling participants in the central photograph. Although none of the three were present at the 1995 ritual itself, they immediately and unmistakably recognized their confrere from the published image.

The image appears in the official proceedings of the IV Simposio-Taller “Lectura de San Agustín desde América Latina” (São Paulo, January 23-28, 1995), published as the book Ecoteología: Una Perspectiva desde San Agustín (México, 1996). The official caption beneath the photo of kneeling participants reads:

Celebración del Rito de la pachamama (madre tierra), que es un rito agrícola ofrecido por las culturas del Sur-Andino en el Perú y Bolivia.

Celebration of the Rite of Pachamama (Mother Earth), which is an agricultural rite offered by the cultures of the South-Andean region in Peru and Bolivia.

The same volume includes a large group photograph explicitly captioned “Foto de todos los participantes del Simposio Sao Paulo Brasil,” placing the future Pope squarely among the attendees of an event that openly celebrated the Pachamama ritual as part of its “ecotheology” program.

Fr. Murr told Faith & Reason: “The man who is now Leo XIV was documented kneeling in a pagan earth goddess ritual in an official gathering of his own religious order. The implications for the direction of the Church under this pontificate are profound.”

Fr. Murr has obtained high-resolution scans of the proceedings (including the clear kneeling Pachamama photograph) from the Salesian Central Library in Buenos Aires, Argentina (stamped call number 276.04 ACU :504 / 30.161, Biblioteca Central Salesiana, No. 30161).

This Faith & Reason exclusive marks the first public presentation of evidence that will form a central chapter in Fr. Charles Murr’s forthcoming book on Pope Leo XIV.

Another image from the book shows that in addition to the Pachamama ceremony, the participants celebrated a Mass, and Prevost (Leo) can be seen standing and holding hands with other participants in the same spot where the Pachamama ritual took place.

Yet another photo from the event, showing all the participants of the symposium, also confirms Prevost’s attendance.

LifeSite confirmed the photos of Leo at the ritual were in fact him by comparing images from the same period found in the Augustinian Spanish-language magazine OALA, where he is named “Roberto Prevost.”

On the Faith & Reason episode today, Fr. Murr noted how this violates the First Commandment and how the martyrs of the Church gave their lives rather than participate even slightly in ceremonies to false gods.

The Vatican Press Office was approached for comment but has not yet responded.

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LEO KNEELS AND PROSTRATES HIMSELF BEFORE PACHAMAMA IN 1995; Trad Inc. Ignores the Story!

A 1995 Augustinian photo, two feeble reactions, and a wall of silence showed how fast conservative Catholic courage disappears when Leo XIV is the problem.

Chris Jackson via Hiraeth in Exile | Mar 19, 2026

(Photos courtesy of Novus Ordo Watch- Robert Prevost participating in a Pachamama ritual on 1995)

March 18 Was Not Just Another Bad News Cycle

What broke on March 18 landed like a second Amazon Synod, except this time the issue was not whether Leo XIV would tolerate Pachamama theater somewhere in his orbit. LifeSite News broke that Robert Prevost himself had participated in a Pachamama rite decades earlier, at an official Augustinian symposium, in a setting preserved in a printed proceedings volume with a caption that did not bother to hide what it was. Novus Ordo Watch swiftly followed up with more independently researched information confirming the story.

Catholics had already been dragged through the 2019 Vatican Gardens debacle. They had already watched the defenders of the conciliar order smirk, minimize, rename, reframe, and gaslight the faithful as if kneeling before pagan imagery at the heart of Rome were merely an unfortunate communications problem. But March 18 hit harder because it suggested something more corrosive than Francis-era permissiveness. It suggested continuity. It suggested that what later appeared in Rome was present in seed form long before, inside the very world that produced Leo XIV.

And just as revealing as the story itself was the reaction that followed.

Or rather, the lack of one.


The Caption Is What Makes the Story Deadly

The whole reason the usual apologists are so uncomfortable is that this controversy does not depend on a rumor floating around X. At the center of it is a proceedings volume tied to a 1995 Augustinian symposium in São Paulo. The caption under the disputed photograph identifies the ceremony as the “Rito de la pachamama (madre tierra),” an agricultural rite associated with Andean cultures in Peru and Bolivia.

That matters because it cuts off the normal exits.

They cannot lazily mutter that this was probably just a misunderstood cultural display. The caption already names it. They cannot tell you that overexcited traditionalists are inventing the Pachamama angle after the fact. The label is right there on the page. They cannot hide behind the vague language of ecology, symbolism, fertility, or respect for indigenous peoples, because the document itself is far more candid than the men who now have to explain it away..

The artifact is real. The symposium is real. The caption is real. The theological world that made such a scene possible is real. And when multiple outlets say that Augustinians recognized Prevost in the image, the burden shifts quickly. The crisis is no longer borne by internet skeptics who say, “Nothing to see here.” The crisis belongs to the men in Rome who now owe Catholics an answer.


Why This Feels Worse Than 2019

In 2019, conservatives could still console themselves with a familiar script. Francis was reckless. The synod organizers were ideological. The Amazon spectacle was ugly and confusing, but perhaps it could be isolated as a moment of bad judgment, bad optics, bad symbolism, bad management. All the usual euphemisms were there to keep the structure intact.

March 18 made that script much harder to maintain.

Because if Robert Prevost was personally participating in a rite explicitly identified as Pachamama in 1995, then the Vatican Gardens spectacle begins to look less like an anomaly and more like an eruption. The problem is no longer one pope’s carelessness in old age. The problem is a postconciliar religious culture that had already learned to flirt with syncretism, baptize ambiguity, and call it openness.

That is what so many people instinctively felt yesterday, even before they had fully digested the details. They were not just reacting to one old photograph. They were reacting to the possibility that the entire line from Assisi to the Amazon to today is straighter than the conservative gatekeepers have been willing to admit.

And once that possibility enters the room, the whole recognize-and-resist balancing act starts to wobble.


Taylor Marshall’s Courage Arrived Right on Schedule

One of the only two public reactions of Trad Inc. came from Taylor Marshall, and even that reaction told the whole story.

His post began with a conditional. “If these recently unearthed photos are truly” Leo XIV participating in the worship of Pachamama, then the cardinals elected “an idolater and a syncretist.” On paper, that sounds strong. It was certainly stronger than silence. But the problem with Marshall is no longer a single sentence. It is the pattern.

The statement lands badly because it comes from a man with a long public habit of arriving late, pivoting once the ground is safe, and then presenting himself as though he just discovered the crisis by force of principle. That is why so many readers rolled their eyes instead of applauding. He had months to treat Leo XIV as a problem, months to stop soft-pedaling him, months to stop lashing out at those who were already pointing to the daily scandals. Instead, the posture was caution, deference, and managed expectation until the evidence became too ugly to ignore.

That is market timing.

The audience notices this. They are not stupid. They know the difference between a man taking a risk and a man waiting for the crowd to move before climbing onto the platform and pretending he led the procession.

And the deeper irony is that Marshall himself had earlier warned that Prevost would be a worst-case scenario before the election, only to pivot into a more loyal, stabilizing posture after the election, only to pivot again once the Pachamama story detonated. That whiplash is not a minor communications issue. It is the problem. It tells you that the governing instinct is not truth at all costs, but branding at the right moment.


Kennedy Hall Offered the Standard Conciliar Excuse in a Different Accent

Kennedy Hall’s post was revealing for a different reason. Taylor Marshall at least tried to sound scandalized. Hall went straight to minimization. He told readers that Leo’s 1995 Pachamama involvement should be viewed in light of John Paul II’s example and that one cannot expect a priest to be “more Catholic than the Pope.”

That line was a convenient rewrite.

The real problem is that Hall had spent the early Leo period striking a much softer note. The line was that Leo was not Francis, that he seemed more reasonable, that Catholics should give him the benefit of the doubt, that perhaps he might even loosen the screws on the Latin Mass. But the moment genuinely bad news lands, the tone changes completely. Suddenly it becomes, what did you expect, he is a Vatican II guy, this is par for the course. In other words, when optimism was useful, Hall sold optimism. When the optimism blows up, he pivots to inevitability and acts as though the rest of us are naïve for noticing the explosion.

That is not analysis. It is gaslighting.

The effect is always the same. When Francis did these things, the rhetoric was alarm, outrage, civilizational stakes, betrayal, desecration. When Leo is attached to the scandal, the audience is told to calm down, adjust expectations, and remember that this is just the postconciliar pattern. But that only raises the obvious question: if you knew all along that this was the pattern, why were you encouraging people to expect something materially different from Leo in the first place?

Hall’s excuse about John Paul II actually makes the case worse, not better. Because once he says Leo was simply following the example set above him, he is admitting the continuity that conservative writers spend so much time trying to blur. He is conceding that the problem is not one bad pope here and there, but a whole line of formation, symbolism, and religious instinct that has run through the conciliar structure for decades. Yet instead of drawing the harder conclusion, he uses that continuity as a sedative. Do not be shocked. Do not react too strongly. Do not treat this as decisive. This is just how the system works.

But that is precisely why people are angry. Catholics were told Leo was a more measured alternative to Francis, a man worth watching with guarded hope. Then, when evidence surfaces that he may have been kneeling at a Pachamama rite in 1995, the same voices turn around and say, essentially, why are you surprised? That is an attempt to have it both ways, selling reassurance on the front end and resignation on the back end.

Hall likely meant to lower the temperature. What he really did was expose the game. Leo is presented as different when that helps stabilize the audience, then presented as unsurprising when scandal makes the earlier optimism look foolish. And that is why his post irritated so many people. It did not merely excuse Leo. It insulted the memory of everyone who remembers how loudly the same crowd screamed when Francis did less explicit versions of the same thing.


The Most Deafening Voice Was Silence

Still, the biggest story after the story was not Marshall’s hedge or Hall’s excuse. It was the void.

In the face of the most scandalous news since Leo was elected, what did Trad Inc. do?

Tim Flanders, One Peter Five, and the Kwas posted nothing on X the entire day. [...]

Article continues here.

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“Leo Didn’t Worship Pachamama, He Just Offered to Her”
Reinaldo Nann tried to rescue Leo XIV from the 1995 Pachamama photographs. Instead he admitted the facts, 

compared Mother Earth to the saints, and exposed the rot Trad Inc. would rather ignore.

Chris Jackson via Hiraeth in Exile [slightly adapted] | Mar 24, 2026

The defense that handed away the case

Reinaldo Nann’s March 22 defense of Leo was supposed to calm the scandal. It did the opposite. On Religion Digital, he flatly acknowledged that the young Robert Prevost participated in the 1995 ecology and theology symposium, that the event included a ceremony to Mother Earth, and that Prevost knelt in that setting. He then described the scene as an interreligious act involving an offering to the earth and a dialogue with the earth. Even en.news, in summarizing his argument, captured the absurdity of the whole thing with a headline that boiled the defense down to this: Leo did not worship Pachamama, he merely offered to her. Religion Digital’s own author page says Nann was appointed bishop in 2017, resigned in 2024, and married in 2025.

Read that again slowly. The “defense” does not deny the rite. It does not deny the kneeling. It does not deny the Mother Earth framework. It does not deny the offering. It does not deny the dialogue. It merely tries to place a soft pillow under the scandal and ask Catholics to call it inculturation.

That is how rotten the postconciliar reflex has become. A priest is found kneeling inside a ceremony explicitly tied to Pachamama, and the counterargument turns out to be that perhaps this was not idolatry in the strictest imaginable sense because the earth was being addressed as a creature with a soul rather than as a goddess. Far from a rescue, that is a confession written in therapeutic language.

The book caption already settles more than the defenders want to admit

The original problem is not built on internet rumor. LifeSite reported that the image appears in the published proceedings of the 1995 Augustinian symposium in São Paulo, later printed in the 1996 volume Ecoteología: Una Perspectiva desde San Agustín. The caption identifies the event as a celebration of the rite of Pachamama, described as an agricultural rite offered by South Andean cultures in Peru and Bolivia. A second group photograph in the same volume places Prevost among the symposium participants. Later reporting added that color footage from an OALA video appears to show the same rite continuing, including participants moving into prostration during the ceremony.

So the dodge about not seeing a statue in one frame is laughable. Since when did a Catholic need the camera angle to do the theology for him? The rite is named. The setting is identified. The participants are there. Nann himself admits the ceremony to Mother Earth and admits the kneeling. Once those admissions are made, pleading that the photo does not show enough wood carving in the foreground becomes the ecclesiastical equivalent of arguing over shadows while the house burns.


Once you say “offering” and “dialogue with the earth,” the line has already been crossed

Nann’s language is devastating precisely because it is so revealing. He says a representative of Andean culture makes an offering to the land and enters into dialogue with the land. That is a religious act directed toward a creature under a sacralized description.

Even the Conciliar Catechism teaches that the First Commandment forbids venerating other divinities, and that idolatry includes honoring or revering a creature in place of God. Catholic teaching goes further: the martyrs refused even to simulate such worship. The defenders keep trying to shrink the scandal down to a question of interior intention, as though the Church has always taught that outward participation in false rites is spiritually neutral so long as one privately means well. She has never taught that. She taught the opposite strongly enough that Christians died rather than perform the gesture.

And that is where the whole Nann defense becomes so grotesquely ironic. He thinks he is making room for nuance. He is actually abolishing the category of scandal. Under this logic, almost any syncretistic act can be laundered after the fact. Bowing, kneeling, offering, chanting, sacred objects, a named pagan rite, a circle of religious participants, all of it suddenly becomes harmless once a cleric assures you that the intention was noble and ecological.


The comparison to the saints is probably the stupidest part of all

Then comes the line that should have ended the discussion by sheer embarrassment: Pachamama can be treated the way Catholics treat the saints. Nann says Catholics can speak to her as they speak to the saints and kneel before her as before the saints, provided she is understood as a creature and not a goddess.

This is theological collapse in public.

The saints are not nature spirits. They are not metaphors for ecosystems. They are not the soul of a hill, a tree, or the earth. The saints are holy human persons in glory, alive in Christ, contemplating God, praising Him, and interceding for the faithful on earth. The Catechism says we ask their intercession for that reason. It also says that the honor given to a sacred image passes to the prototype, meaning the person represented, and that adoration belongs to God alone. Francis himself stated in a 2021 audience that the saints are not adored, but venerated, and that they lead us to Jesus Christ. None of that can be stretched into permission to kneel before “the soul of the earth.”

Notice the irony. Catholics have spent centuries explaining to Protestants why kneeling before a saint’s image is not idolatry. Why? Because the honor is relative, the saint is a glorified member of Christ’s Mystical Body, and the gesture terminates in God through His friends. Nann arrives, sweeps aside the distinctions, and says the same logic can be extended to Pachamama. In one stroke he manages to insult Catholic theology, vindicate the Protestant caricature, and baptize a pagan symbol.


“Intention matters” is true, but it does not work the way these people want

Of course intention matters. Intention always matters. But intention is not a sacramental bleach wipe. It does not neutralize the objective meaning of a religious act performed in a religious setting. It does not make it safe for a Catholic cleric to join an interreligious offering to Mother Earth. It does not convert scandal into catechesis. It does not erase the fact that people watching the act are being taught, by the act itself, that this sort of thing is spiritually permissible.

The Church has always known that external gestures teach. That is why liturgy matters. That is why the martyrs refused false rites. That is why Catholics do not casually join the sacred actions of pagan cults and then hide behind the privacy of their own intentions. Nann’s formula would make public religion impossible to judge at all. Once interior sincerity becomes the only real standard, every external abomination gets an alibi.

And notice how selective this becomes. Traditional Catholics are lectured day and night that gestures matter when it comes to liturgy, obedience, ecclesial communion, optics, posture, and tone. But once Leo is found kneeling in a Pachamama rite, suddenly gestures mean nothing. Then we are told to look away from the body and into the soul. That trick would have been laughed out of the room if Francis’s enemies had tried it in reverse.


Dragging St. Francis into this is another act of vandalism

Nann also tries to shelter the whole affair beneath Franciscan spirituality. Since Saint Francis spoke of Brother Sun and Sister Moon, he suggests, maybe speaking to the earth as a creature with a soul falls inside the same family of thought.

That move borders on theological illiteracy. Saint Francis praised God through creatures. He did not teach Catholics to enter rites of offering and dialogue directed toward Mother Earth. The direction of worship remains vertical. God is Creator. The creature gives occasion for praise. The creature is not treated as a personal recipient of ritual homage.

That distinction is elementary. Lose it and Christianity begins to dissolve into religious poetry without dogmatic fences. Which, of course, is exactly the postconciliar temptation: keep the Christian vocabulary, keep the soft affective tone, keep the Franciscan charm, then quietly rewire the act underneath.


The Francis precedent makes the whole thing even more damning

The deeper irony is historical. In 2019, the Vatican gardens ceremony became a global scandal because Catholics instinctively understood what they were seeing. Francis later referred to the retrieved figures as “statues of the pachamama” and said they had been displayed without idolatrous intentions. That was already a disastrous line. Nann’s defense of Leo now repeats the same pattern almost word for word: the object may be Pachamama, the rite may be Pachamama, the gestures may be reverential, but calm down, because interior idolatry has not been proven.

So the old Trad Inc. fantasy that Leo represented a clean break from Francis takes another hit. The problem was never merely one old Argentine pope with a talent for scandalous symbolism. The problem was the religious culture that made such symbolism normal, defensible, and eventually banal. If the 1995 photographs and footage are genuine, then the Vatican Gardens were not an isolated outburst. They were an eruption of something that had been incubating for decades.


And what about Trad Inc.?

Compare the reaction to the current scandalous story with the fury of 2019. Compare the repetition, the outrage, the moral clarity, the sense that the line had been crossed and could not be uncrossed. Compare that with the hedging, the minimization, the cautious throat-clearing, the studied reluctance to make this the defining scandal it obviously is. The asymmetry tells its own story. When Francis did it, Pachamama became the symbol of the whole conciliar implosion. When the evidence points to Leo, too many conservative and traditional gatekeepers suddenly discover anthropology degrees, contextual nuance, and a profound concern about “hatred.”

That silence is not accidental. It is the sound of a class protecting its investment. Too many people sold their audiences a restoration narrative. Too many promised a calmer, cleaner, less embarrassing pontificate. Too many told the faithful to be patient, prudent, open, respectful, restrained. Then the old religion reappeared in a 1995 photograph, kneeling in plain sight.


The hard truth they are trying not to say

Nann wanted to defend Leo from the charge of idolatry. What he actually defended was participation in a syncretistic rite, ritual reverence toward Mother Earth, language about the soul of the earth, comparison of Pachamama to the saints, and the principle that public religious gestures can be excused after the fact by private intention. That is not Catholicism. That is the postconciliar project speaking with unusual honesty.

And that is why this episode matters. Not because one defender wrote something stupid on a website. Catholics have grown used to stupid defenses. It matters because the stupid defense revealed the real operating theology. The rite may stay. The symbols may stay. The offering may stay. The kneeling may stay. The only thing that must disappear is the Catholic instinct to recoil.

Once that instinct is gone, everything else follows. The pagan symbol becomes a cultural bridge. The false rite becomes dialogue. The scandal becomes hatred. The priest becomes a missionary of inculturation. The Catholic who objects becomes the fanatic.

That inversion has done immense damage to the Church. Nann did not create it. He merely said it out loud.