The Australian director of The Passion of the Christ, an acclaimed 2004 movie about the Crucifixion starring Jim Caviezel, cited the so-called “Pachamama scandal” as an example of the Pope’s alleged religious pluralism.
In a podcast interview with US chat show host Joe Rogan, Mr Gibson explained his scepticism about reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s by saying: “We’ve got a pope that brought a South American idol into the church to worship.”
He said a religious ceremony was performed in the presence of the idol which, he said, “constitutes an apostasy”.
“It’s a falling away,” he explained at about half an hour into the two-hour interview. “The very nature of apostasy is that you have to be part of it to fall away from it. It’s an inside job. It isn’t good.”
When pressed by Mr Rogan for the reason for the honouring of a pagan deity, Mr Gibson said: “There is good and there is evil and they are slugging it out for the souls of mankind.
“There are bigger things at play here. Institutions that touch on the divine are going to be affected by that great slug-fest between good and evil.”
Mr Gibson, who was raised a sedevacantist traditionalist Catholic, said the Catholic Church “was instituted by Christ but that doesn’t mean it isn’t flawed”.
“There is a school of thought that says it isn’t what it purports to be any more, it’s moved away from what it’s intended to be.”
The Pachamama, a pagan fertility god in the form of a naked and pregnant woman, was brought into the Church of Santa Maria in Traspontina during the Amazonian synod of October 2019 for use in events, rituals and to honour expressions of native American spirituality.
The statue was thrown in the River Tiber, however, by Alexander Tschugguel, an Austrian who considered its presence in a Catholic church as a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments.
Mr Tschugguel later explained his actions in a Merely Catholic podcast for the Catholic Herald which can be heard here.
Pope Francis issued an apology asking forgiveness from those who were offended by the statues being thrown into the Tiber, and said that they had been displayed in the church “without idolatrous intentions”.
The Pontiff has repeated his controversial teaching that all religions are divinely inspired by God.
Most recently, in a message to an interreligious gathering in Paris for peace, Pope Francis wrote last September that the divine inspiration is present in every faith.
He told the Sant’Egidio Community that people must “be guided by the divine inspiration present in every faith, in order to join in ‘imagining peace’ among all peoples”.
He said “The urgent task of the religions is to foster visions of peace, as you are demonstrating these days in Paris. As men and women of different cultures and religious beliefs, you have experienced the power and beauty of universal fraternity. This is the vision our world needs today.”
The words of the Pope echoed his remarks in Singapore weeks earlier when he said: “There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sheik, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths.”
He said: “They are like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all … Since God is God for all, then we are all children of God.”
Such religious pluralism were controversial among Catholics who said it called into question Catholic doctrine on Christ as the only Saviour of the world and also undercuts missionary efforts to bring people to the faith.
When Francis used similar language at an interfaith meeting during a 2022 trip to Kazakhstan, Auxiliary Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Astana warned that it risked creating a “supermarket of religions”.
In spite of Pope Francis citing Pope St John Paul II to justify his position, in embracing religious pluralism he is parting company with his predecessor as well as with the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI.
The denunciation of religious pluralism by his predecessors was made perhaps most explicitly in their treatment of Fr Jacques Dupuis, a Belgian Jesuit theologian, because of his 1997 book, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed at the time by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, published a “notification”, with consent of Fr Dupuis to say that his book “contained notable ambiguities and difficulties on important doctrinal points, which could lead a reader to erroneous or harmful opinions”.
The notification said that although it was “legitimate to maintain that the Holy Spirit accomplishes salvation in non-Christians” there was no foundation in Catholic theology to consider other religions as “ways of salvation” … because “they contain omissions, insufficiencies and errors regarding fundamental truths about God, man and the world”.
Confirmed by St John Paul II in 2001 and ordered to be published with every edition of the book, the notification declared Jesus Christ as “the sole and universal mediator of salvation for all humanity”.