The paper's Friday account stayed with the silence — the Vatican press office still had not authenticated or denied the 1995 photograph showing the missionary Robert Prevost kneeling at a Pachamama ceremony in São Paulo. The silence still holds at the press office. The defence has now arrived from a different desk.

Reinaldo Nann, bishop-prelate emeritus of Caravelí in Peru between 2017 and 2024, who married civilly last year and was not formally laicised, published a letter on March 22 conceding what the silence has not. [1] Nann writes that the missionary Robert Prevost "did indeed participate in this congress on ecology and theology in 1995 and, as part of a ceremony to Mother Earth, he knelt down." [2] Nann does not dispute the authenticity of the image. He disputes the inference. "We can kneel before her as we do before the saints," he writes, "as long as we see her as a creature and not as a goddess." [2]

This is the photograph's documentary side closing. The image is real, the kneeling is real, the ceremony happened. What is now contested is the meaning. The Catholic Herald carried Nann's letter on Friday alongside the broader corpus of Pachamama defences from Latin American clergy. [3] OnePeterFive's Friday account framed the same letter as the first liberationist-bishop concession that the photograph is real. [4] The Vatican press office still has not spoken. Nann is the named bishop now on the record. The Pope is not.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London