Angered at Pope Francis’ apparent worship of false gods and idols, a crack team of angry Catholics have slipped into a Roman church and made off with a collection of Amazonian statues, before dumping them in the River Tiber.

In a video apparently filmed in the early hours of the morning and posted by Catholic news site LifeSite News, a pair of worshippers rise from the pews of Rome’s Santa Maria in Traspontina Church near St. Peter’s Basilica, remove several carved wooden statues of a topless pregnant woman, proceed outside to the Castel Sant’Angelo, salute a statue of Archangel Michael, and chuck the figurines into the Tiber River below.

“This was done for only one reason: Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, his Blessed Mother, and everybody who follows Christ, are being attacked by members of our own Church,” one of the men said in a statement, before lapsing into Latin and concluding “Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat!”

The men’s bizarre heist was not without warning.

Earlier this month, Pope Francis received the statues as a gift from Amazonian indigenous leaders, who participated in a tree-planting ceremony in the Vatican Gardens. To the pontiff, it was an opportunity to deliver a sermon on climate change, with the tree planted in “soil from the Amazon...bathed in the blood of those who have died fighting its destruction.”

This morning in the Vatican Gardens, Indigenous leaders of the Amazon offered up prayers for the Earth, in a ceremony where Pope Francis consecrated the upcoming Pan-Amazon Synod to St. Francis of Assisi #SinodoAmazonicopic.twitter.com/v9Ljy3q3Bh — Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) October 4, 2019

As part of the ceremony, a woman in ritual dress bowed before the statues, which supposedly represent a fertility goddess named Pachamama, sometimes compared to the Virgin Mary. In pre-Hispanic times, however, Pachamama was a more menacing figure, demanding a steady flow of sacrifices.

The supposedly “inclusive” ceremony triggered an outpouring of fire and brimstone from more traditional Catholics. Canon lawyer Fr. Gerald Murray decried the “pagan religious ceremony” he witnessed, while another priest compared it to something “lifted from the Berkeley campus in the 60s,” when the earth-loving hippie movement had moralists the world over clutching their rosary beads.

A LifeSite petition calling for the removal of the indigenous gifts from the Vatican had gathered more than 16,000 signatures, before the pair of religious bandits took things into their own hands.

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Though the fertility idols now rest on the muddy bed of the Tiber, some Catholic commentators reckon the damage is already done. Pagan-turned-Catholic author Rexcrisanto Delson says that for those involved in the ceremony, “there’s no excuse from here on out to claim they didn’t know they were violating the First Commandment,” while quoting Psalm 95:5 in saying that “all the gods of the Gentiles are devils.”

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