Six weeks after Religion Digital ran the interview that made Bishop Reinaldo Nann's not-disputing posture the baseline, the Holy See Press Office has issued no formal statement responding to the 1995 photographs of Cardinal Robert Prevost — now Pope Leo XIV — at the Pachamama ceremony in Caraz. [1] The Day Zero count, started on March 22 when the bishop first told the outlet he did not dispute the image, holds.

The silence is an artifact of method, not negligence. Press Office director Matteo Bruni has briefed daily on the May intention, on the Saturday Mass for workers, on the Regina Caeli liturgy. Each press file lands without a Pachamama line. The absence is patterned. The standing position, reported through OSV's interview cycle, is the bishop's: that one can speak to Mother Earth as one speaks to the saints, and that the photograph documents a moment of dialogue, not idolatry. [2]

That formulation does not satisfy the petitioners. Father James Altman has called Leo "Pachamama Leo" on X this week. Taylor Marshall's video brief from Holy Saturday treats the photographs as documentary. [3] Inside the Curia, the calculus appears to be that a Press Office response would convert a bishop's not-disputing into a Vatican concession the photographs require explanation — the kind of motion the standing line was designed to avoid making. The day count therefore runs not because nothing happened but because the position is the silence.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York