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.