Expert rejects alleged “syncretism” of the Arquebuceros Archangels and the Child God of Cuzco

José Gálvez Krüger, member of the Peruvian Society of History and director of the Catholic Encyclopedia of ACI Prensa, has published reports in which he rejects the alleged syncretism in important viceregal works of art in America: The “Archangel Archangels” and the “Child God of Cusco.”

In statements to ACI Prensa, Gálvez Krüger, who also has a degree in Philosophy from the Faculty of Pontifical and Civil Theology of Lima (Peru), regrets that these works for “almost half a century” have been “usurped, contaminated and paganized.”

In the case of the Arquebuceros Archangels, there are those who consider them a syncretic adaptation with pre-Hispanic beliefs, such as that the harquebus they carry is related to the Inca deity of lightning, beam.

The director of the Catholic Encyclopedia specifies in this regard that “the harquebus is a symbol unquestionably assigned to the Society of Jesus and its works,” such as its foundation and “the effectiveness of all its catechetical and spiritual methods, which as effective spiritual weapons and definitive ones they put and put again today in our hands for spiritual combat.”

Gálvez Krüger has prepared a special section in the Catholic Encyclopedia to facilitate “the exploration of Catholic researchers.” It is, he indicates, “a list that begins by pulverizing the major premise on which all the syncretist, pseudo-idolatric, identity, regionalist and ‘illapist’ theories were based. Once the major premise is destroyed, everything else falls as a consequence.”

For the Peruvian expert, recovering the authentic meaning of these works of Catholic art is a way of returning to the Virgin Mary, Queen of the Angels, “the army of artillery angels through which art, carols and folk songs sang and greeted with “Arquebus salvos the Birth of Christ and the Coronation of Mary.”

In other section of the Catholic Encyclopediaaims to refute the “intellectual fashions” that led to linking the works of the “Child God of Cuzco” with theories of religious syncretism.

Far from this, the article points out, “the Inca-Child is one more link in the long iconographic chain of catechesis. Just as there is a divine Infant with Andean habits, there are images of the Child of Nazareth, dressed as a Saxon king, a Bohemian king, a Japonic prince, a Sinic ruler, a Latin Caesar, a thundering Jupiter, or an Apollonian Alexander.”

Gálvez Krüger emphasizes the importance of Catholics knowing the true meaning of Christian art, understanding “emblems and symbols that have to be united because they point to Christ and eternal life.”