Have you ever noticed all the ‘pagan idols’ around our oldest Scottish chapels in the Highlands and Islands? Sure, the locals call them ‘Celtic Crosses’ but we all know that they are in actual fact heathen ‘sun-wheel’ symbols, probably once used for some kind of pre-Christian worship.
If the idea of our old Gaelic parishes worshipping a solar deity sounds ridiculous, then that’s because it is.
And it is no more fanciful than the suggestion that a Pachamama fertility deity was being ‘worshiped’ by Catholics during the Amazon Synod in Rome. (Pachamamas are actually associated with the Inca people of the Andes rather than the Amazon region.)
Yet it seems that some were happy to accept this claim as reality, despite the fact that both indigenous Synod participants and Vatican officials stated that the carvings on display inside the Santa Maria were neither fertility goddesses nor objects of worship.
The social media outrage from US conservatives hostile to Pope Francis has forced the Synod organisers to reiterate the fact that the carvings were merely symbolic of a place, a people, a culture and most importantly; a symbol of life. Indeed, some even refer to the images as Our Lady of the Amazon.
We have all seen that during the Synod, the carvings were taken from the Church and thrown in the Tiber by a young man from Vienna called Alexander Tschugguel.
I do not want to attack this gentleman but rather, try and understand what motivated this devout young Austrian to commit an act that has caused so much hurt to his own brothers and sisters in Christ.
The answer can perhaps be found in a recent interview in which Mr Tschugguel stated that he was simply upholding the First Commandment by removing a pagan idol.
Alexander Tschugguel, who wears traditional dress or ‘tracht’, went on to discuss a range of topics from the ‘globalist agenda’ to the Holy Roman Empire, to medieval castles with moats. He also considers Cardinal Brandmuller and Athanasius Schneider to be heroes, especially Archbishop Schneider whom he identifies as a 'Black Sea German'.
I sense that this is a man who deeply loves his German Catholic heritage. Yet, if the indigenous Amazonian carvings that he threw into the Tiber have nothing to do with Jesus, do any of his cultural traditions?
I say this as a fellow Catholic of German ancestry whose own parish was established by a German priest from Gelsenkirchen called Peter Hilgers who came here during Bismarck's Kulturkampf, or ‘culture struggle’ - a row between the Prussian government and the Catholic Church in the 1870s.
We can manage to create discord between ourselves without national symbols to bring even more division among us.
So next month, when you see Wotan’s Yule springing up near the altar in your parish, spare a thought for our much maligned, indigenous faithful and their own cultural traditions. – and don’t dump the Christmas tree in the nearest river!