{"id":11016,"date":"2019-11-11T14:58:05","date_gmt":"2019-11-11T18:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/?p=11016"},"modified":"2019-11-11T20:51:16","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T00:51:16","slug":"11016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2019\/11\/11016\/","title":{"rendered":"About That New Idol in the Colosseum…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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I regard reading LifeSite News the same way I regard changing diapers: I don\u2019t like to do it and I avoid it when I can because it makes me feel unclean, but sometimes I have to because not doing so would have even worse results.<\/p>\n

Today was one of those days when I had to break down and read a LifeSite News article.<\/p>\n

I saw my friends sharing an article with a photo of a giant\u00a0 fruity overblown statue from a horror movie on it and the title \u201cStatue of Ancient God Put on Display in Rome Days Before Amazon Synod.<\/a>\u201d I just had to read that and get to the bottom of it.<\/p>\n

The article concerns an extremely frumpy and historically inaccurate-looking statue, which LifeSite calls a \u201creconstruction of a pagan idol,\u201d of the Mesopotamian god Moloch, which was placed outside the Colosseum nine days before the Vatican Synod. The whole article is slanted to suggest that the appearance of the Moloch statue and the fiasco with the small Amazonian icons that got thrown into the Tiber during the recent Amazon Synod are somehow related and part of a vast idolatrous conspiracy.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to go out on a limb and suggest they aren\u2019t, for a very good reason. But to do this, I\u2019ll be forced to give you a geography lesson.<\/p>\n

The last time I talked about the location of Rome<\/a>, I got people telling me I was full of it, and this topic is going to be a bit more complicated, so this time I\u2019m going to employ some maps.<\/p>\n

This is a map of Europe, upon which I have taken the liberty of circling the country of Italy:<\/p>\n

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Italy is one of the easiest European countries to find on a map, because it\u2019s the only one that\u2019s shaped like a boot. Spain is a bowl, France is an overstuffed sandwich, England is a jaggedy island, but Italy is a high-heeled boot. That area of the world was known as \u201cItalia\u201d as far back as the time of Christ, when Caesar Augustus referred to its peoples as \u201cItalians,\u201d but the country of Italy was united in 1861. Before that, it was not a unified country but a collection of city-states, all of which were physically located in a region of the world called Italy.<\/p>\n

Now, Italy is only one country with Rome in the middle. I\u2019ll show you a closer-up map of Italy wherein I\u2019ve circled Rome, for convenience\u2019s sake:<\/p>\n

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All of these maps are in the public domain courtesy of pixabay, for the record, and the cartographic circling is my own. Notice that there are two stars within that circle, one of which says \u201cRom\u201d and one of which says \u201cVatikan.\u201d This is where it gets complicated.<\/p>\n

You see, one of the city states in the region known as Italy never became a part of the official country of Italy. It remains its own city state, independently run, not the property of Italy, despite the fact that it exists, physically, inside Rome which is the capital of Italy. Here\u2019s a close-up map:<\/p>\n

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The blue circle represents Rome, the capital of the country of Italy, which is known as the Eternal City despite the fact that it\u2019s only about 2800 years old give or take. The red circle was my clumsy attempt to isolate the Vatican City. The Vatican City is actually not a city but a country, the smallest country in the world. If you\u2019re standing in the Vatican, you\u2019re physically surrounded by Italy but you\u2019re not standing in Italy, legally speaking. You\u2019re standing in a whole other country. Think of the Vatican as the hole in the middle of a giant boot-shaped doughnut and you\u2019ll have some idea.<\/p>\n

Now, the Vatican City is under the sway of the Pope. He\u2019s the official sovereign of the Vatican City. Things that go on in the Vatican are under the Pope\u2019s control. Currently, the Pope is a guy from Argentina named Francis, though a lot of traditionalist Catholics disagree with me on that. Pope Francis runs the Vatican. Italy, of which Rome is the capital,\u00a0 is run by President\u00a0Sergio Mattarella at the moment. They change presidents quite a bit more often than we do.<\/p>\n

The statuettes which may or may not have represented the South American goddess Pachamana or the Virgin Mary, which were all over the news a couple weeks ago, were brought to the Vatican City. The Pope not only let the statues in but approved of them and blessed them. None of this has anything to do with Rome.<\/p>\n

The statue of Moloch is just outside the Colosseum. The Colosseum is in the city of Rome, the capital of Italy. It\u2019s about 5.5 kilometers from the Vatican City, according to Google Maps. \u201cKilometers\u201d is the fancy pants method of measurement they use in Italy; for Americans, that\u2019s about 3.4 miles. You could walk it in an hour if you hurried, which none of us Americans is ever really willing to do on our Italian vacation, but fortunately there\u2019s a bus every four minutes or so. The point is, the Moloch statue and the Pachamana statue which Lifesite is trying to suggest are part of a vast conspiracy are in two separate countries, procured by two separate governments for two separate purposes. The Vatican held the Amazon Synod of which the wooden statues that got thrown into the Tiber were a part. The City of Rome, which is a completely different municipal government in a completely different country than the Vatican, is hosting the Moloch statue.<\/p>\n

And why is it hosting the Moloch statue? Is it an idol set up for worship by the tourists? Was it meant to have anything to do with the Amazon Synod scheduled to happen in a completely different country nine days later?<\/p>\n

Not in the least. It\u2019s just the first statue in a municipal art exhibit on the ancient city of Carthage. Carthagians were sometimes said to have worshiped Moloch and sacrificed children to him. If I recall correctly, that\u2019s one of the reasons why ancient Rome burned ancient Carthage to the ground and sowed salt. The city of Carthage was the ignominious sworn enemy of ancient Rome and Rome wanted its memory erased from the earth, but apparently that\u2019s water under the bridge now and the Romans are having an exhibit to help people remember Carthage. The eternal city indeed.<\/p>\n

This particular statue isn\u2019t even a replica of the kind of artwork you\u2019d find in Carthage. It\u2019s not, as LifeSite falsely reported, a reconstruction of a pagan idol. It\u2019s a reconstruction of a movie prop, which LifeSite itself goes on to admit in the same article with no sense of irony. The statue is a replica of a statue of Moloch from a 1920s silent movie called Cabiria<\/em>, which is partly based on a Flaubert novel called Salammbo<\/em>. Flaubert described a fanciful, not very historically accurate statue of Moloch and that description was the inspiration for the statue in the movie which had very little to do with real life. The REAL Moloch, insofar as there was one, was a boxy-looking clay idol with a cow head, and that thing outside the Colosseum looks like an opera-singing frog with fish gills and 1920s art nouveau patterns on its body, so it\u2019s kind of easy to tell them apart.<\/p>\n

Now, should there be a 1920s movie prop outside the Colosseum, a sacred site to commemorate the murder of so many early Christians? I don\u2019t know. It looks awfully tacky. I hope it\u2019s not a permanent exhibit.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not as though there aren\u2019t scads of pagan idols and replicas and reconstructions of pagan idols in Rome as it is. Yes, it\u2019s true. Traditionalist Catholics like the people who run LifeSite tend to act as if Rome is a perpetually Catholic city founded by Pope Romulus the Extremely Fussy hundreds of years before the birth of that weird Jewish social justice warrior Jesus Christ. But actually, Rome used to be pagan. So pagan, in fact, that they tortured the early Christians to death for not burning incense to idols. And if you are offended by pagan idols on your European vacation, I think you\u2019re better off going someplace you\u2019d find less offensive to your traditional Catholic sensibilities.<\/p>\n

Amsterdam, perhaps.<\/p>\n

I can get you a map of that as well.<\/p>\n

(images via Pixabay)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Steel Magnificat runs almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, visit our donate page<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 I regard reading LifeSite News the same way I regard changing diapers: I don\u2019t like to do it and I avoid it when I can because it makes me feel unclean, but sometimes I have to because not doing so would have even worse results. Today was one of those days when I had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2694,"featured_media":11040,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,2132,728,626,1988,5192,111,1739,43,550,1763,744,756,284,743,181,2039,484],"tags":[10062,10278,1042,10266,10272,169,1607,10275,10263,577,10260,847,3211,10269,38],"class_list":["post-11016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-art-review","category-christ","category-christian-idenitity","category-conspiracy-theory","category-culture","category-education","category-history","category-humor","category-icon","category-idol","category-jesus","category-mystery","category-news","category-nonsense","category-politics","category-public-face-of-catholicism","category-q-and-a","tag-amazon-synod","tag-carthage","tag-conspiracy-theory","tag-flaubert","tag-geography","tag-icon","tag-idol","tag-lifesite","tag-moloch","tag-movie","tag-pachamana","tag-pope-francis","tag-rome","tag-vatican-city","tag-virgin-mary"],"yoast_head":"\nAbout That New Idol in the Colosseum...<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This particular statue isn't even a replica of the kind of artwork you'd find in Carthage. 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