Austrian Catholic Alexander Tschugguel took Vatican police by surprise on October 24 afternoon as the “Pachamama slayer” unfurled a massive banner in St Peter’s Square asking Pope Francis for “clarity on same-sex unions.”
Tschugguel led a band of faithful Catholics from Castel Sant’Angelo — where the Catholic convert had dumped five Pachamama idols into the Tiber River during the Amazon Synod — to the Vatican in protest agai-nst the pontiff’s repudiation of Catholic teaching.
As over 50 Catholics knelt praying the Rosary in front of St Peter’s Basilica, hundreds of onlookers gathered to witness the demonstration.
A veteran Vaticanist who was at the scene told Church Militant he’d never seen anything like it before and commented how long police took to clear the protest.
“On a previous occasion when a much smaller banner was raised, police ordered it taken down in less than a minute,” he remarked. “Today, it took them over 15 minutes to bring the demonstration to a halt.”
In an interview at Castel Sant’Angelo, Church Militant asked Tschugguel why he was asking for clarity when the pontiff was on record declaring his support for gay civil unions on multiple occasions.
Daily Archives: November 3, 2020
Bottomline on pope movie mystery: ‘If you don’t fix it, you bought it’
When I was a child growing up in a small Western Kansas town, my mom from time to time would take me to Main Street to visit the shops. Most had some version of the following sign on display, meant as a warning to be careful with the merchandise: “You break it, you bought it.”
There’s a PR corollary that could be said to go like this: “No matter who breaks it, if you don’t fix it you bought it.” It means that no matter what a leader actually says or does, if he or she allows an impression to be created and doesn’t publicly disown it, then it belongs to them.
The thought comes to mind in light of the emerging mystery surrounding the new Pope documentary “Francesco” by Evgeny Afineevsky, which debuted and already is a candidate to contain the most-dissected 20 seconds of imagery about a major world leader since the Zapruder film.
In those twenty seconds, Pope Francis makes comments about civil unions for same-sex persons that created a global media frenzy, reported as the first time a Pope explicitly had endorsed civil unions. It also appeared to directly contradict a 2003 document from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, prepared by the future Pope Benedict XVI and approved by St John Paul II, warning that such laws are “gravely unjust” and insisting that Catholics may never support them.
Over 20 “caliphate builders” exposed in North Caucasus
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has uncovered two extremist cells in Russia’s internal republics of Karacha-yevo-Cherkessia and Dagestan comprising adherents of the Al-Takfir wal Hijra movement, banned in Russia, seeking to establish a caliphate in the North Caucasus, the FSB press centre told.
“The Federal Security Ser-vice of the Russian Federation dismantled the activities of two cells of the Al-Takfir wal Hijra international extremist religious movement, banned in Russia, in the Malokarachayevsk District of the Republic of Karachayevo-Cherkessia and in the cities of Makhachkala, Kaspiysk, and Izberbash of the Republic of Dagestan. In all, they had more than 20 members,” it said.
The cells’ members were actively involved in promoting the radical ideology, recruited new members to this extremist religious sect, called on adherents to renounce secular laws and civil society institutions, “and also sought to set up a theocratic Islamic state – a caliphate – in the territory of the North Caucasus,” it said. “The following items were found and seized at their places of residence and the places of their secret meetings: three grenades with live primers, three PM pistols, cartridges of different calibres, a sawed-off hunting rifle, bladed weapons…” the press centre said.